LINGUISTIC CLAIMS IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING

0
610

Historians of Linguistics have already started acknowledging the fact that the teaching of English äs a foreign language constitutes a most fertile soil in which seeds of Applied Linguistics have been planted. H. R. Robins, in his lucid account of the history of linguistics says that “… in America, äs in Britain, probably more effort is devoted to English teaching methods, courses, and projects, than to any other single application of linguistic science”. There is no doubt that linguistics applied to TEFL (to use a convenient abbreviation) ranks the highest on the list of productive applications of linguistics to the solution of communication problems of a social, political or educational nature. In the leaflet describing the goals and activities of the Center for Applied Linguistics (Washington, D. C.), for example, we are told that organization’s aims are (1) “to apply the results of linguistic research to practical problems in the area of the teaching of English to Speakers of other languages”. We can see then how official recognition is given of the prominent place assigned to linguistics applied to TEFL or to TESOL (to use a U. S. institutionalized acronym). In his encyclopaedic work Language Teaching Analysis, William Francis Mackey very aptly states that “language teaching is influenced by ideas on the nature of language, by ideas on the particular language being taught, and by ideas on how the language is learned”. The first kind of influence mentioned by the Canadian linguist has caused the phrase ‘linguistically oriented’ to become a fashionable descriptive label for many, if not most, contemporary language teaching materials, especially those produced for the teaching of English äs a foreign language. The following quotations