produced incidentally or through institutional learning through teaching. Includes concepts such as conditioning and includes theories by people like Skinner, Thorndike, and Tolman. It is important to realize that learning need not be correct, deliberate, or overt.
In the United Nations, Heckscher (1972:1) defines learning in terse behavioral terms: "Basically, learning is the modification of a response, following upon and resulting from experience of results."
At the Max Plank Institut f(r Psycholinguistik, Klein (1986:20) prefers "to use the term 'acquisition' (and 'acquisition process'), reserving the term 'learning' as a purely stylistic variant. What is important is that both terms refer to the perspective of the learner, not the teacher or the social environment."
Krashen (1987:35), whose influence in the matter is currently predominant, sees learning as a conscious "or explicit knowledge about language."
When it comes to acquisition, the Random House Dictionary of the English Language (1983:18) defines the term, in its linguistic acceptation, as "the act or process of achieving mastery of a language or a linguistic rule or element: child language acquisition, second language acquisition."
The truth of the matter is that most linguists and educationists use acquisition in its linguistic generic dictionary connotation of gaining competency (not necessarily mastery, by the way) in a language other than one's own (first, or native, or mother). SLA (Second Language Acquisition) is the most commonly used term in this area. Krashen (1987:35) defines acquisition as the process children use to acquire first language. It is subconscious, and so is the knowledge thus gained. For Krashen, "In everyday language, acquisition is 'picking up' a language, while learning is 'grammar' or 'rules'." There is, of course, nothing wrong with such use as long as we agree on the terminology--if not on the hypotheses from which it derives. ...