LINGUISTICS, as the science of language, should be of fundamental importance for teachers of language. Yet there is no unified school of linguistics; rather, language teachers face a variety of approaches. The situation is made worse by the conflicts among the various schools of linguistics, with successive schools disavowing their predecessors.
In the last fifty years' the so-called structuralists triumphed over the philologists, only to be overwhelmed in turn by the generarive transformationalists, who can scarcely maintain themselves without extensive change as they shuffle off their distinctive feature, the transformation. In addition to distinguishing among these general schools, language teachers must sort their way through sects, such as the generarive semanticists, the generative syntacticians, and still other offshoots of the transformationalists, as well as through broader approaches to the study of language, such as psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, textlinguistics, semiotics, and even specialties like artificial intelligence. If a language teacher gathers the courage to seek guidance from a linguist, the linguist may disavow, with some intensity, general competence in the field, claiming instead to be a phonologist or a syntactician — and so on. Even brief contemplation of such a bewildering array of approaches may leave the language teacher with scarcely enough energy to voice more than a curse on all the houses of linguistics.
Yet language teachers must teach language, whether they are involved with Racine, Goethe, Dante, Joyce, Shakespeare, or the beginning course. Attempts to teach any of these without a moderate understanding of language must undermine not only the psyche of teachers but also the confidence of their students. No one can be much more abject than the teacher of literature who does not understand something about language.
But if the linguist is no longer a linguist, but rather is a phonologist or a syntactician or a Montague grammarian, where is this understanding to be had? Can it even be found if the linguist does claim to be a linguist but directs study at “an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly … ”? 1 Language teachers must present the actual language and the entire language, not merely its phonology or a form with no deviations. To discover the real language and to obtain some understanding of it, language teachers may well turn to the history of linguistics, especially the recent period with its sharply contrasting views. For these views suggest that successive schools of linguists may have arisen in part from dissatisfaction with the particular concentrations of earlier scholars, hence, that language has a complex structure.
Language teaching in this country took its start from the teaching of Latin and Greek. The Modern Language Association originated in the American Philological Association. Teachers of Greek and Latin had to teach Greek and Roman culture, literature, philosophy, religion, even the construction of Greek and Roman ships and bridges. But communication of the ancient cultures was through their writing. Starting with an emphasis on written materials, modern language teachers naturally continued the concentration on literary texts and the written language. Concentration on the written language was exacerbated by America's isolation. Since contact with Europe was largely through writing, students tended to be trained in only the written form of the language. Yet some language teachers, such as Leonard Bloomfield, began to study the native languages of America. For most of these languages no written texts were available, and, in any event, linguists needed to master the spoken language before any progress in understanding the native languages could be made. This requirement resulted in tremendous concentration on the initial component of the spoken language, its sound system. New terminology and new symbols were devised to master the phonology. Linguists dismayed their colleagues with terms like “phone,” “phoneme,” “allophone,” “plus juncture” and with arguments on the meanings of these. Moreover, there was unbounded confidence in positivism, in structuralism, and even in the possibility of a unique scientific analysis of a language. Linguists who dealt with the languages of various cultures analyzed the languages rigorously to determine the simplest possible analysis of their phonological systems that took total account of the data.
These procedures were dominating linguistics when military and other government agencies suddenly needed to train their personnel in a large number of languages that were untaught in modern language departments and that even today are scarcely recognized by the MLA — Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, to name the most widely spoken — as well as in French, German, and Spanish. No language teaching was excluded, since equal efforts were made to teach English abroad. The domination of these procedures continued until the success of the Soviet space effort shook America's confidence in its educational practices, including its inadequate foreign language teaching. Linguists were hired to teach the least popular course at the language institutes established to instruct language teachers. Language teachers came to know that one of the segments of language is its phonology, but many also came to have an aversion for linguistics.
The transformationalist, or Chomskyan, revolution ran a course similar to that of its predecessor, structuralism. Objecting to the mechanism of the dominant school and to structuralism's concentration on phonology, the transformationalists proclaimed mentalism and the primacy of syntax. Initially the reception was highly favorable. The media reported that language could be encompassed in the new approach by a half-dozen rules. Literary scholars felt kinship with linguists who were probing patterns in the mind. The new linguistic tools were applied to metrics, to style, to literature, and even to culture by the high priests among the French intellectuals. But the glow wore off. Transformations came to be more and more complex and inadequate. Rigorous stylistic rules were reduced to trivia. The metrics of the new movement could scarcely identify, let alone elucidate, verse. Some handbooks, including high school texts, included transformational grammar, but teachers didn't use it. Through their exposure to linguistics they knew that language has a syntactic component that includes a deeper level, but their distaste for linguistics grew.
The transformational grammar is yielding to Montague grammar, an approach that attempts to deal with the semantic component of language as rigorously, simply, and comprehensively as preceding approaches dealt with phonology and syntax. In this effort Montague grammar employs all the machinery of symbolic logic, using notations that make those of its predecessors seem like the simple scrawls of infants. It is almost inconceivable that language teachers will ever have Montague grammar imposed on them, even if Albania or Afghanistan should suddenly thrust upon us a space vehicle that could travel to another galaxy and back.
Yet the three revolutions — the structuralist, the transformational, and the Montague — have pointed up the three segments, or components, of language that linguists have recognized since the time of Whitney — phonology, syntax, and semantics. It is clear that language teachers must know these components and the way to deal with them in teaching. They must also know the aims of the linguists who have lateral pursuits — those who deal with language in its function for the individual, the psycholinguists; those who deal with language in its use, the sociolinguists; and so on. Language teachers must have such competence, if only to avoid the excesses of many linguistics. Language teachers must also avoid the excesses of those who compensate for their lack of familiarity with linguistics by overusing it and ignoring pedagogically significant matters. Readers may find their own examples of misplaced emphasis in texts that drill the student on the grammatical constructions rather than on the normal patterns of language.
To illustrate how linguists may become infatuated with their own interests, one may as well start at the top. Leonard Bloomfield, in preparing a Russian text for the army, became intrigued with the complexities of inflection in relation to numerals. He was particularly interested in the use of genitive singular nouns and genitive plural adjectives after the numerals two, three, and four and of genitive plural nouns and adjectives after five and subsequent numerals. In the book's early lessons he introduced sentences such as the following:
They live in eight thousand big houses.
We met thirty-three girls.
We met twenty-five little boys. 2
Rather than cite further examples, scarcely a difficult undertaking, we might note a superb text in the same series, Einar Haugen's Spoken Norwegian. After completing it, students knew not only the sound system, the sentence system, and much of the basic lexical system of the language but also the principal settled parts of Norway. A Norwegian official touring in the United States was once surprised to have an American high school student who had never been out of the country ask him details about the chief department store in Bergen. Linguists then may be excellent language teachers, and they may produce excellent texts. But language teaching should draw on linguists' achievements rather than install linguists in every language classroom. How can it do so, and which achievements should it select?
Essential for every language teacher is a basic knowledge of phonetics. Without knowing the system of sounds, any language teacher is inadequate, whether teaching basic French or interpreting poetry. Much of the poetry of Shakespeare, Milton, Hughes, Dylan Thomas, and many others is lost to anyone unable to recognize the sound pattern. All foreign language teachers should know both the sound pattern of the language they are teaching and the habits of their students. Arab speakers, for example, cannot pronounce more than two consonants in a row. Their typical pronunciation of the English word “asked” is Yet only an unskillful language teacher pronounces the English word with three consonants; the normal pronunciation is [aæst], which any Arab could pronounce.
Knowing that sentences, not words or sounds, are the basic units of language, teachers must concentrate on these. Far too much time has been devoted to studying inflections, to mastering paradigms, as if anyone ever communicated in them. The typical utterances of a language must be mastered, and the optimal pedagogical means for this achievement must be sought.
Language teachers must also understand the variety of styles in language — informal, formal, colloquial, substandard, vulgar, and so on — and which styles to teach. Anyone who encountered war brides who had learned only GI English understands well the ludicrous effect of vulgar language spoken with an accent; vulgarisms and tabooed elements are abundantly used by native speakers, but with a foreign accent such speech is unbelievable. People everywhere expect nonnatives to use a formal, even slightly stilted form of speech, and language teachers must design their courses accordingly.
Obviously language teachers should learn as much as possible from linguists; but since language teachers have many additional requirements, they cannot be expected to become linguists. As noted above, an important reason for some knowledge of linguistics is self-protection. Linguists with a capital L are scientists, always working on the edge of knowledge. Scientists also commonly teach in the borders of their own ignorance. When a theory proves to be over-extended, the scientist cheerfully amends or even abandons it; but the unfortunate language teacher who has been taught the truth in an institute does not have the opportunity to learn about the increasing skepticism toward that truth — or about its abandonment in favor of a new gospel.
Still more unfortunate is the discarding of gains of the past. Even before the flourishing of the structuralists, French language teachers knew and applied phonetics, as a result no doubt of the French orthographic system. Today, sadly, one finds students of French who are taught nothing about sounds and their production.
The aversion to phonology has also had a disadvantageous effect on the language laboratory. Thirty years of widespread use have obliterated the memory of the wretched pronunciation of students and teachers who learned languages through their orthography. Yet unimaginative use of language laboratories has led to skepticism about their effectiveness. Teachers must not abandon devices that can prevent a return to the poor pronunciation of the past.
Another readily forgotten lesson from the past is that foreign languages are difficult to learn. To make this point clear to language instructors, some institutions used to require them to study a new language for a week at the start of the semester as part of their orientation program. Such an exercise might be universally introduced. It would lead to realism in assignments and in general presentation.
Such realism was once practiced in the introduction of vocabulary, a method based, at least in part, on studies carried out in designing the “Army texts.” These studies led to a rule of thumb allowing no more than twenty-five to thirty new vocabulary items in any unit. Yet texts and courses are now introducing twice this number or more. The instructors concerned ought to set out to acquire sixty or more vocabulary items in Burmese (or another language unknown to them) for fifteen consecutive weeks. Assignments requiring memorization of long lists of words seem to derive from. the discredited notion that words rather than sentences are the basic units of language.
Though sentences should be the prime entities taught, the sentences, like all materials, should represent the culture of the area involved. Sociolinguistic study has made clear the close relationships between utterance patterns and the cultures in which they are produced. Most textbook writers now give lip service to culture. But when externals like place names are stripped away, many of these texts might as well be concerned with Peking as with Paris, with Bombay as readily as with Berlin, and so on. The lessons to be drawn from sociolinguistics may be the most significant ones that still need to be applied to language teaching.
Handbooks have noted some patterns in which languages vary by social groups, particularly in forms of address. Yet these practices are now undergoing rapid change, so rapid that language teachers must visit virtually every year the countries in which their languages are spoken if they hope to be knowledgeable. The shift to informal patterns of address in Sweden, for example, would not have been expected by anyone familiar with the Sweden of a generation ago. The current status of pronominal forms in other European countries, the use of first names and the combinations of first names with informal and formal pronouns, is difficult to know and to incorporate in teaching programs, even on the basis of annual visits; handbooks are quite inadequate on the problem. The feminist influence has brought about a further set of changes. German, for example, has the complex practice of using the word man for “one,” a form corresponding to der Mann ‘the male,’ ‘the man.’ Patterns like “one cannot …”—which are very frequent in German—are now being modified, with the word frau ‘woman,’ ‘Mrs.’ or man/frau used instead of man. These problems are fairly obvious and simple ones, since much of Western civilization is undergoing the same changes. Sociolinguistic attention is particularly important for the languages of countries with non-Western social attitudes and practices. For example, students in Middle Eastern countries assume that they can translate their well-engrained bargaining techniques into the European languages' vocabulary for purchasing. Textbooks have dealt poorly with such matters; they have been written virtually as if there were only one culture in the world. Some sensitive and experienced teachers have to some extent compensated for these inadequacies in our teaching programs, but much more needs to be done.
In one sense, linguistics has been of little use to language teachers because the attention of linguists has been directed at describing exhaustively the least understood segments of language, with the goal of proposing a general theory. Language teachers, by contrast, have devoted attention to mastering the newest intricacies of linguistics rather than to understanding the findings of greatest pertinence to language teaching, such as articulatory phonetics, which were thoroughly known at the end of the nineteenth century. As a field with a long and distinguished past, language teaching does not need to modify its views in accordance with every novel exploration in the theoretical disciplines on which it is based. But it must draw on these disciplines, modifying and constantly updating its theoretical bases as more comes to be known about the other fields.
NOTES
1 Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Boston: MIT Press, 1965), p. 3.
2 The book was published with the following credits: I. M. Lesnin and Luba Petrova, Spoken Russian (New York: Holt, 1945).
© 1979 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 11, no. 1 (September 1979): 27-30.
The author is Ashbel Smith Professor of Germanic Languages and of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin.
In the last fifty years' the so-called structuralists triumphed over the philologists, only to be overwhelmed in turn by the generarive transformationalists, who can scarcely maintain themselves without extensive change as they shuffle off their distinctive feature, the transformation. In addition to distinguishing among these general schools, language teachers must sort their way through sects, such as the generarive semanticists, the generative syntacticians, and still other offshoots of the transformationalists, as well as through broader approaches to the study of language, such as psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, textlinguistics, semiotics, and even specialties like artificial intelligence. If a language teacher gathers the courage to seek guidance from a linguist, the linguist may disavow, with some intensity, general competence in the field, claiming instead to be a phonologist or a syntactician — and so on. Even brief contemplation of such a bewildering array of approaches may leave the language teacher with scarcely enough energy to voice more than a curse on all the houses of linguistics.
Yet language teachers must teach language, whether they are involved with Racine, Goethe, Dante, Joyce, Shakespeare, or the beginning course. Attempts to teach any of these without a moderate understanding of language must undermine not only the psyche of teachers but also the confidence of their students. No one can be much more abject than the teacher of literature who does not understand something about language.
But if the linguist is no longer a linguist, but rather is a phonologist or a syntactician or a Montague grammarian, where is this understanding to be had? Can it even be found if the linguist does claim to be a linguist but directs study at “an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly … ”? 1 Language teachers must present the actual language and the entire language, not merely its phonology or a form with no deviations. To discover the real language and to obtain some understanding of it, language teachers may well turn to the history of linguistics, especially the recent period with its sharply contrasting views. For these views suggest that successive schools of linguists may have arisen in part from dissatisfaction with the particular concentrations of earlier scholars, hence, that language has a complex structure.
Language teaching in this country took its start from the teaching of Latin and Greek. The Modern Language Association originated in the American Philological Association. Teachers of Greek and Latin had to teach Greek and Roman culture, literature, philosophy, religion, even the construction of Greek and Roman ships and bridges. But communication of the ancient cultures was through their writing. Starting with an emphasis on written materials, modern language teachers naturally continued the concentration on literary texts and the written language. Concentration on the written language was exacerbated by America's isolation. Since contact with Europe was largely through writing, students tended to be trained in only the written form of the language. Yet some language teachers, such as Leonard Bloomfield, began to study the native languages of America. For most of these languages no written texts were available, and, in any event, linguists needed to master the spoken language before any progress in understanding the native languages could be made. This requirement resulted in tremendous concentration on the initial component of the spoken language, its sound system. New terminology and new symbols were devised to master the phonology. Linguists dismayed their colleagues with terms like “phone,” “phoneme,” “allophone,” “plus juncture” and with arguments on the meanings of these. Moreover, there was unbounded confidence in positivism, in structuralism, and even in the possibility of a unique scientific analysis of a language. Linguists who dealt with the languages of various cultures analyzed the languages rigorously to determine the simplest possible analysis of their phonological systems that took total account of the data.
These procedures were dominating linguistics when military and other government agencies suddenly needed to train their personnel in a large number of languages that were untaught in modern language departments and that even today are scarcely recognized by the MLA — Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, to name the most widely spoken — as well as in French, German, and Spanish. No language teaching was excluded, since equal efforts were made to teach English abroad. The domination of these procedures continued until the success of the Soviet space effort shook America's confidence in its educational practices, including its inadequate foreign language teaching. Linguists were hired to teach the least popular course at the language institutes established to instruct language teachers. Language teachers came to know that one of the segments of language is its phonology, but many also came to have an aversion for linguistics.
The transformationalist, or Chomskyan, revolution ran a course similar to that of its predecessor, structuralism. Objecting to the mechanism of the dominant school and to structuralism's concentration on phonology, the transformationalists proclaimed mentalism and the primacy of syntax. Initially the reception was highly favorable. The media reported that language could be encompassed in the new approach by a half-dozen rules. Literary scholars felt kinship with linguists who were probing patterns in the mind. The new linguistic tools were applied to metrics, to style, to literature, and even to culture by the high priests among the French intellectuals. But the glow wore off. Transformations came to be more and more complex and inadequate. Rigorous stylistic rules were reduced to trivia. The metrics of the new movement could scarcely identify, let alone elucidate, verse. Some handbooks, including high school texts, included transformational grammar, but teachers didn't use it. Through their exposure to linguistics they knew that language has a syntactic component that includes a deeper level, but their distaste for linguistics grew.
The transformational grammar is yielding to Montague grammar, an approach that attempts to deal with the semantic component of language as rigorously, simply, and comprehensively as preceding approaches dealt with phonology and syntax. In this effort Montague grammar employs all the machinery of symbolic logic, using notations that make those of its predecessors seem like the simple scrawls of infants. It is almost inconceivable that language teachers will ever have Montague grammar imposed on them, even if Albania or Afghanistan should suddenly thrust upon us a space vehicle that could travel to another galaxy and back.
Yet the three revolutions — the structuralist, the transformational, and the Montague — have pointed up the three segments, or components, of language that linguists have recognized since the time of Whitney — phonology, syntax, and semantics. It is clear that language teachers must know these components and the way to deal with them in teaching. They must also know the aims of the linguists who have lateral pursuits — those who deal with language in its function for the individual, the psycholinguists; those who deal with language in its use, the sociolinguists; and so on. Language teachers must have such competence, if only to avoid the excesses of many linguistics. Language teachers must also avoid the excesses of those who compensate for their lack of familiarity with linguistics by overusing it and ignoring pedagogically significant matters. Readers may find their own examples of misplaced emphasis in texts that drill the student on the grammatical constructions rather than on the normal patterns of language.
To illustrate how linguists may become infatuated with their own interests, one may as well start at the top. Leonard Bloomfield, in preparing a Russian text for the army, became intrigued with the complexities of inflection in relation to numerals. He was particularly interested in the use of genitive singular nouns and genitive plural adjectives after the numerals two, three, and four and of genitive plural nouns and adjectives after five and subsequent numerals. In the book's early lessons he introduced sentences such as the following:
They live in eight thousand big houses.
We met thirty-three girls.
We met twenty-five little boys. 2
Rather than cite further examples, scarcely a difficult undertaking, we might note a superb text in the same series, Einar Haugen's Spoken Norwegian. After completing it, students knew not only the sound system, the sentence system, and much of the basic lexical system of the language but also the principal settled parts of Norway. A Norwegian official touring in the United States was once surprised to have an American high school student who had never been out of the country ask him details about the chief department store in Bergen. Linguists then may be excellent language teachers, and they may produce excellent texts. But language teaching should draw on linguists' achievements rather than install linguists in every language classroom. How can it do so, and which achievements should it select?
Essential for every language teacher is a basic knowledge of phonetics. Without knowing the system of sounds, any language teacher is inadequate, whether teaching basic French or interpreting poetry. Much of the poetry of Shakespeare, Milton, Hughes, Dylan Thomas, and many others is lost to anyone unable to recognize the sound pattern. All foreign language teachers should know both the sound pattern of the language they are teaching and the habits of their students. Arab speakers, for example, cannot pronounce more than two consonants in a row. Their typical pronunciation of the English word “asked” is Yet only an unskillful language teacher pronounces the English word with three consonants; the normal pronunciation is [aæst], which any Arab could pronounce.
Knowing that sentences, not words or sounds, are the basic units of language, teachers must concentrate on these. Far too much time has been devoted to studying inflections, to mastering paradigms, as if anyone ever communicated in them. The typical utterances of a language must be mastered, and the optimal pedagogical means for this achievement must be sought.
Language teachers must also understand the variety of styles in language — informal, formal, colloquial, substandard, vulgar, and so on — and which styles to teach. Anyone who encountered war brides who had learned only GI English understands well the ludicrous effect of vulgar language spoken with an accent; vulgarisms and tabooed elements are abundantly used by native speakers, but with a foreign accent such speech is unbelievable. People everywhere expect nonnatives to use a formal, even slightly stilted form of speech, and language teachers must design their courses accordingly.
Obviously language teachers should learn as much as possible from linguists; but since language teachers have many additional requirements, they cannot be expected to become linguists. As noted above, an important reason for some knowledge of linguistics is self-protection. Linguists with a capital L are scientists, always working on the edge of knowledge. Scientists also commonly teach in the borders of their own ignorance. When a theory proves to be over-extended, the scientist cheerfully amends or even abandons it; but the unfortunate language teacher who has been taught the truth in an institute does not have the opportunity to learn about the increasing skepticism toward that truth — or about its abandonment in favor of a new gospel.
Still more unfortunate is the discarding of gains of the past. Even before the flourishing of the structuralists, French language teachers knew and applied phonetics, as a result no doubt of the French orthographic system. Today, sadly, one finds students of French who are taught nothing about sounds and their production.
The aversion to phonology has also had a disadvantageous effect on the language laboratory. Thirty years of widespread use have obliterated the memory of the wretched pronunciation of students and teachers who learned languages through their orthography. Yet unimaginative use of language laboratories has led to skepticism about their effectiveness. Teachers must not abandon devices that can prevent a return to the poor pronunciation of the past.
Another readily forgotten lesson from the past is that foreign languages are difficult to learn. To make this point clear to language instructors, some institutions used to require them to study a new language for a week at the start of the semester as part of their orientation program. Such an exercise might be universally introduced. It would lead to realism in assignments and in general presentation.
Such realism was once practiced in the introduction of vocabulary, a method based, at least in part, on studies carried out in designing the “Army texts.” These studies led to a rule of thumb allowing no more than twenty-five to thirty new vocabulary items in any unit. Yet texts and courses are now introducing twice this number or more. The instructors concerned ought to set out to acquire sixty or more vocabulary items in Burmese (or another language unknown to them) for fifteen consecutive weeks. Assignments requiring memorization of long lists of words seem to derive from. the discredited notion that words rather than sentences are the basic units of language.
Though sentences should be the prime entities taught, the sentences, like all materials, should represent the culture of the area involved. Sociolinguistic study has made clear the close relationships between utterance patterns and the cultures in which they are produced. Most textbook writers now give lip service to culture. But when externals like place names are stripped away, many of these texts might as well be concerned with Peking as with Paris, with Bombay as readily as with Berlin, and so on. The lessons to be drawn from sociolinguistics may be the most significant ones that still need to be applied to language teaching.
Handbooks have noted some patterns in which languages vary by social groups, particularly in forms of address. Yet these practices are now undergoing rapid change, so rapid that language teachers must visit virtually every year the countries in which their languages are spoken if they hope to be knowledgeable. The shift to informal patterns of address in Sweden, for example, would not have been expected by anyone familiar with the Sweden of a generation ago. The current status of pronominal forms in other European countries, the use of first names and the combinations of first names with informal and formal pronouns, is difficult to know and to incorporate in teaching programs, even on the basis of annual visits; handbooks are quite inadequate on the problem. The feminist influence has brought about a further set of changes. German, for example, has the complex practice of using the word man for “one,” a form corresponding to der Mann ‘the male,’ ‘the man.’ Patterns like “one cannot …”—which are very frequent in German—are now being modified, with the word frau ‘woman,’ ‘Mrs.’ or man/frau used instead of man. These problems are fairly obvious and simple ones, since much of Western civilization is undergoing the same changes. Sociolinguistic attention is particularly important for the languages of countries with non-Western social attitudes and practices. For example, students in Middle Eastern countries assume that they can translate their well-engrained bargaining techniques into the European languages' vocabulary for purchasing. Textbooks have dealt poorly with such matters; they have been written virtually as if there were only one culture in the world. Some sensitive and experienced teachers have to some extent compensated for these inadequacies in our teaching programs, but much more needs to be done.
In one sense, linguistics has been of little use to language teachers because the attention of linguists has been directed at describing exhaustively the least understood segments of language, with the goal of proposing a general theory. Language teachers, by contrast, have devoted attention to mastering the newest intricacies of linguistics rather than to understanding the findings of greatest pertinence to language teaching, such as articulatory phonetics, which were thoroughly known at the end of the nineteenth century. As a field with a long and distinguished past, language teaching does not need to modify its views in accordance with every novel exploration in the theoretical disciplines on which it is based. But it must draw on these disciplines, modifying and constantly updating its theoretical bases as more comes to be known about the other fields.
NOTES
1 Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Boston: MIT Press, 1965), p. 3.
2 The book was published with the following credits: I. M. Lesnin and Luba Petrova, Spoken Russian (New York: Holt, 1945).
© 1979 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 11, no. 1 (September 1979): 27-30.
The author is Ashbel Smith Professor of Germanic Languages and of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment