Linguistics and Language Teaching

The very title of my paper seems an odd juxtaposition these days, because my main subject—and
one of my chief regrets—is the extent to which Slavic linguistics has moved away from language
teaching—the teaching of Slavic languages—during the course of the last thirty or forty years.

This comment raises, in turn, the question of what is Slavic linguistics and what is it
supposed to do. That it is supposed to examine all areas of Slavic languages and their structures
seems indisputable. That it is supposed to bring the facts and patterns of these structures close to
persons uninformed about them—both those who know one or more Slavic languages and those
who do not—also seems reasonably beyond debate. But that it is supposed to play a role in
teaching Slavic languages to persons who don’t know them is much more debatable, because you
teach what you already know, so that activity in and of itself does not move back the frontiers of
knowledge.
But is this really true! For one thing, it flies in the face of the opinions of practically all
persons who have taught Russian and other Slavic languages: namely, that you never learn more
about a language than when you teach it. Outside of the classroom proper, at the writing level,
constructing a textbook of a Slavic language, similarly, isn’t supposed to reveal much about the
language: textbooks aren’t research, and they usually won’t get you tenure or, certainly, not as
readily a fine monograph might. But perhaps that depends on the textbook. Many textbooks of
modern languages today, as we know, focus mostly on communicative aspects, on developing
active skills and, hence, highlight the methodology needed to acquire these skills. But what about
reference grammars, to which older (or old-fashioned) textbooks were actually much closer than
most of today’s modern textbooks! These were books which purported to describe a language,
which is not the same as teaching it. Or are these activities and goals really that mutually
exclusive!
The application of the teachings of descriptions of a language in a pedagogical context is
called applied linguistics. This means you use linguistics for something, not just ponder it. You
try to make a language accessible to students by teaching them its lingustic structures. You
describe these structures as economically as possible, so that the learner can generate the correct
sounds, forms and sentences of a Slavic language as accurately—and as comfortably—as
possible. If you write a textbook, particularly one that leans toward being a reference grammar,
you do this by describing the language as efficiently as possible, using, of course, information
and research on the language already extant. This is not dissimilar to what linguistic monographs
do, albeit most focus in greater detail on a specific area of the grammar. I think that, in certain
important ways, there may not be—or doesn’t have to be—all that much difference between the
two procedures.
The difference would seem to be, of course, that monographs are driven by theory or they
propose and elaborate new theories, while textbooks use the results of theories. Theory, of
course, is pretty much unassailable these days. Yet it has the potential drawback: it often departs
from apodeictic assumptions (often not even the author’s but somebody else’s), and focuses on a
very narrow area, itself often not previously explored. This means that the monograph’s
assumptions haven’t been tested in any general crucible and, in most cases, probably won’t be.
The most that can happen is that two or three other persons—or one other person—who is in on
the author’s theory and often has developed the theory in concert with the author—are the sole
evaluators of the value of the new research. The theory then becomes circular, and its proponents........
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