Behaviorism is when everything is learned by doing. Students learn to produce a ‘correct’ response to something that is asked. When they attempt this, the response from the teacher is immediate and they are told if they are correct or not. The foundation of this is mimicking the teacher and memorizing what is the correct thing to say/do. This approach is good for online lessons when grammar, canned dialogues, vocabulary are taught, but when learning how to do something more dynamic like having a conversation or learning to read non-verbal clues, it is not as valuable. With any learning approach, it is better to use more than one to make sure all of the different skills are being taught. One of the main weaknesses is that it can be repetitive and boring. Students may get bored with the process and choose not to pay attention in class. Also, the skills are usually taught at a basic level and depth of knowledge may not be gained.
Socioculturalism is based on social interaction within a classroom. Interaction is key to learning any language. A student can study from a book and know the ins and outs of a language, but unless they are communicating and interacting with someone else, they may not have the ability that they think they have in a language. The main benefit of using this model in an language classroom is to give students real life experience using the target language. And depending on the type of class, students can interact in real-time and get feedback to be able to grow as a student. A weakness is that students do need to learn grammar in order to continue their growth and this learning style is based more on interaction, so they would need more drilling from other types of learning theories. Also, another weakness is that some students do not like to interact and may simply not want to participate in class.
