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Presentation and practice
Just as the processes of language teaching presuppose a
theory of the nature of language, they equally need to be
based upon a theory of language learning. The one is derived
from applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, the other from
educational psychology and psycholinguistics.
There is now a considerable body of research on the
acquisition of the first language, though much less on the
learning of a foreign or second language. The two competing
theories about how a language is acquired have had great
influence on teaching through methodology books and
courses and through textbooks themselves. Whether a teacher
has studied the theories, or not, his methods necessarily reflect
presuppositions about how language is learned.
The argument is between the behaviourists and the
mentalists, in psychological terms, or in linguistics terms,
between the structuralists and the generative grammarians.
The view on one hand is that language is learned by habit-
formation by imitating utterances and then producing new
ones by analogy. On the other hand, it is believed that people
learn language by utilising certain innate capacities. This view
is based on the idea that every human being possesses a sub-
conscious language acquisition device (the LAD) which takes
in the language encountered, works out the rules that govern
it, and then after some trial and error, manages to apply them.
The behaviourist view applied to foreign language
learning emphasises the importance of conditioning and
reinforcement through the repetition of correct (and only
correct) responses to a controlled stimulus. ‘Knowing the
meaning’ is equated with ‘giving the correct response’.
Learning a foreign language is said to be learning a skill, like
riding a bicycle or playing the piano, and these are held to be
best learned through automatic and frequent imitation, being
positively hindered by conscious awareness on the part of the
learner.
The mentalists, or rationalists, reply to this that when a
person produces an original sentence of a language he is not
repeating something he has learned through imitation—and
many of the sentences we produce are original. They may be
similar to other sentences in the language, but the actual
Basic Principles
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choice of words and their arrangement is new virtually every
time we produce an utterance. (Set phrases, ritual speech as in
greetings and farewells, idioms, etc., make a very small list of
exceptions.) When the behaviourists answer to this that we
make new sentences by analogy with those we’ve learned
already, they are, claim the rationalists, contradicting their
own stimulus-response theory. For the only way to explain the
process of making new sentences by analogy involves the
notion of observing the regularities (rules, patterns, structure)
underlying them and working out how to operate them to
generate new sentences. Language is, thus, rule-governed
behaviour. This does not mean that the language-learner
indulges in any conscious formulation of rules. The argument
is that rules are ‘internalised’ and their application is quite
unconscious. It is not a matter of deliberate problem solving.
But the split between the two schools of thought is not
really as fundamental as its proponents may imply. It is
extremely difficult to give a water-tight definition of ‘habit’
or ‘rule’, and for the practising teacher it seems quite
reasonable to say that the oral skill aspects of language
(articulation and discrimination of sounds) are acquired as
habits which are as hard to change after childhood as other
motor habits are hard to change or acquire (learning to play
the violin, to skate). But at the same time one can also say
that other aspects of language need a knowledge (conscious
or unconscious) of rules, but that these are eventually applied
habitually, i.e. without conscious attention.
Whether a particular methodology is stricly behaviourist
or mentalist, or eclectic, items of language still need to be
presented and practised. Presentation consists of introducing
each new item of language to the learners in such a way that
it can be absorbed efficiently into the corpus of language
already mastered.
Whether the new language is lexical or structural, its
central meaning must be clear from the context in which it is
introduced, but the presentation needs to take place in such a
way that the learners’ attention is focused upon it. Therefore
presentation calls for simple contexts which are at once
adequate to demonstrate meaning, but at the same time not
so interesting that they distract attention away from the
important item of the moment.
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