Behaviorism is a worldview that assumes a learner is essentially passive, responding to environmental stimuli. The learner starts off as a clean slate (i.e. tabula rasa) and behavior is shaped through positive reinforcement or negative reinforcement[2]. Both positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement increase the probability that the antecedent behavior will happen again. In contrast, punishment (both positive and negative) decreases the likelihood that the antecedent behavior will happen again. Positive indicates the application of a stimulus; Negative indicates the withholding of a stimulus. Learning is therefore defined as a change in behavior in the learner. Lots of (early) behaviorist work was done with animals (e.g. Pavlov’s dogs) and generalized to humans[3].

Principles

 

Principles are language-general. They are things that rightly belong to capital-L Language, and as such the principle would cease to be one if a language in which the principle did not hold was found. An example of this is that any sentence must have a subject. In English this subject will nearly always be spelled out "I met the man yesterday", but in diary format you might leave out the subject for "met the man yesterday". Other languages such as Croatian would generally leave out the subject as in the sentence "Volim sok" which simply means "I like juice" Unlike in English where we would prefer having an actual subject, Croatian doesn't like having pronominal subjects unless they're non-obvious. First person pronouns are entirely obvious because the verb is conjugated to match. However, even though it might look like there is no actual subject in the Croatian sentence, we say that there IS one, because the verb behaves like there is a subject (and  the subject is first person singular), and if the subject wasn't readily derivable from the verb, we'd also expect for the subject to be spelled out. So that's an example of something all languages (seem to) have. All sentences have subjects. That's a principle.

 

Parameters

So a principle is language-general. Where does that leave parameters? Well, they're language specific, so they're technically irrelevant to the overall question. If we remember the principle used as an example in the prior section, I used as an example that all sentences must have subjects, and that that includes languages such as Croatian in which the subject generally doesn't want to show up if it's a pronoun. And it turns out that languages generally have those two choices. Either we can drop pronominal subjects, or we can't drop any subjects. Some languages can drop a heck of a lot more than that (looking at you Japanese), but there's definitely a clear split between "We drop pronominal subjects" and "we don't drop anything at all". That's a parameters. Do we do one thing or the other?

Example
Practising question forms by asking learners to find out personal information about their colleagues is an example of the communicative approach, as it involves meaningful communication.

In the classroom
Classroom activities guided by the communicative approach are characterised by trying to produce meaningful and real communication, at all levels. As a result there may be more emphasis on skills than systems, lessons are more learner-centred, and there may be use of authentic materials