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Applied Linguistics in the Classroom

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

William G. Moulton
William G. Moulton*
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Extract

When our Secretary, George Winchester Stone, asked me last July to address this meeting on the general topic of language teaching and linguistics, it was only with considerable hesitation that I finally agreed to accept. There has been far too much loose talk recently about the application of linguistics to language teaching, and I did not wish to add to it. In some circles linguistics has turned into a sort of fad. There are those who talk of the “linguistic method” of language teaching, as if to oppose it to some hypothetical “non-linguistic method” used in the benighted past. And at meetings of language teachers, bright young things walk up to me and ask, apparently in all seriousness: “Excuse me, professor, but would you please tell me how linguistics handles the subjunctive?” Needless to say, I have no answers to such questions; they merely embarrass me. Linguistics is not a teaching method, but a growing body of knowledge and theory; and though it may offer helpful answers to some of the problems of language teaching, it surely does not know all the answers.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 76 , Issue 2 , May 1961 , pp. 1 - 6
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1961

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Footnotes

*

One of four addresses given at the General Meeting on the Foreign Language Program in Philadelphia, 29 December 1960.

References

Note 1 in page 1 William R. Parker, The National Interest and Foreign Languages, preliminary edition (Washington, D. C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1954), p. 124. This rather sharp statement was omitted in the revised edition of 1957.

Note 2 in page 2 “FL Program Policy: On Foreign Language Teaching, ”PMLA, lxxi, No.4, Part2 (September 1956), p.xv.

Note 3 in page 5 The basic work on transformation grammar is Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures, The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1957. An important review of this work is that by Robert B. Lees, Language, xxxiii (1957), 375–408. A recent application of transformation grammar is Robert B. Lees, The Grammar of English Nominalizations, Publication 12 of the Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics = International Journal of American Linguistics, xxvi, No. 3, Part II, July 1960.

Note 4 in page 5 Kenneth L. Pike, “Grammemic Theory,” General Linguistics, ii (1957), 35–41. Because the term gram(m)-emic (spelled either way) caused confusion, Pike later replaced it by tagmemic. For the most recent discussion of tagmemic theory, with references to earlier works and applications, see Robert E. Longacre, “String Constituent Analysis,” Language, xxxvi (1960). 63–88.

Note 5 in page 5 On the theory of function words and content words, see Charles Carpenter Fries, The Structure of English (New York, 1952), especially chap, vi, “Function Words”; and Charles F. Hockett, A Course in Modern Linguistics (New York, 1958), index, s.v. “contentive,” “functor,” “Jabberwocky.” Hockett uses the terms contentive and functor so as to include both words and affixes in each of the two classes.

Note 6 in page 6 A basic work on contrastive linguistics is Uriel Weinreich, Languages in Contact, New York: Linguistic Circle of New York, 1953. See also William W. Gage, Contrastive Studies in Linguistics: A Working Bibliography, Washington, D. C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, March 1960, mimeographed. An example of a contrastive phonological analysis is Daniel N. Cárdenas, Introduction a una comparacion fonóldgica del español y del inglés, Washington, D. C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1960. A textbook which applies the theory of contrastive linguistics is Dwight L. Bolinger et al., Modern Spanish: A Project of the Modern Language Association, New York & Burlingame: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1960. The “substitution drills” in this text are based on the theory of tagmemics; the “response drills” are based in part on the theory of transformation grammar. For a description of them, see J. Donald Bowen, “The Modern Language Association College Language Manual Project,” PMLA, lxxiv, No. 4, Part 2 (September 1959), 20–26. A manual of pronunciation based on the theory of contrastive linguistics is J. Donald Bowen and Robert P. Stockwell, Patterns of Spanish Pronunciation: A Drillbook, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960.

Note 7 in page 6 The German Quarterly, xxxi (1958), 133–137.