Teaching Language as Communication. H. G. Widdowson

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the following comment: ‘The single paramount fact about language learning is that it concerns, not problem solving, but the formation and performance of habits.’ N. Brooks: Language and Language Learning, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960, p. 46.

‘Behaviourist’ attitudes like this to the learning of language are passed under critical review in Wilga Rivers: The Psychologist and the Foreign Language Teacher, Chicago University Press, 1964.

A thorough discussion, from a psychological point of view, of the kind of issues I raise in this chapter with regard to skills and abilities, is to be found in a later book by Rivers:

Wilga Rivers: Teaching Foreign Language Skills, University of Chicago Press, 1968.

In general one might say that a behaviourist orientation to psychology will tend to describe language learning activity in terms of skills and a cognitive orientation will tend to describe it in terms of abilities.