Earl W. Stevick

“ What needs, and what opportunities does the student have to be aggressive in making sense out of nonsense--to acquire skills and insights actively rather than having them 'skillfully presented and sufficiently drilled' into him? Active inquiry, even when it is not conscious, may result in active learning (Kuno, 1969) . Here is the value, for some students at least, of the inductive presentation of grammar so dear to some A-L practitioners, and also of direct, monolingual teaching of meanings for words and sentences. ”

“ But if the learner is indeed to be at the center of deliberate language transfer, we must no longer look at him only as 'linguistic man'--man regarded only as a potential internalizer and producer of alien sounds, words and patterns. Any language student is an entire social being, who inhabits (or consists of) an entire physical organism. ”

“ WHAT SEEMS TO BE WHAT IN LANGUAGE TEACHING
Language teaching has shared neither the honesty nor the self-knowledge of the fine arts. Whereas artists are willing to seek inspiration from the past, teachers, being cursed with the assumption that their discoveries are necessarily an improvement on what went on before, are reluctant to learn from history. ”

“ The fundamental issues in language teaching, then, lie not here, but where they have always lain. We constantly seek--and occasionally obtain--new light on three different but related areas: What is to be learned? What is the nature of learning? What makes learning happen? ”

“ There are, in addition, non-linguistic 'behaviors' which are totally indispensable for linguistic success: willingness to phonate, feeling that one has something worth phonating about, expectation that the language can be useful--these and many others deserve conscious and systematic encouragement from the teacher at least as much as gender agreement or sequence of tenses do. ”

“ It is therefore not surprising that the practitioners of what came to be called 'applied linguistics' resolutely concentrated their attention and that of their students on what we now think of as the surface structure of the language. So A. A. Hill, a leading descriptive linguist, in a paper (1959) on the relationship between language analysis and language teaching, urged the advantages of 'work [ing] through the formal characteristics [of the language] to arrive at functions and meanings.' Politzer (1965) and others have emphasized that a language is in some sense made up of sounds. ”

“ Indeed, A-L writers have recognized its truth in many of their grammar notes, and give lip service to it whenever they repeat after Bloch and Trager that a language is a system (and not just a set) of oral symbols. T-C, of course, is characterized by greater emphasis on this undisputed fact, and A-L by less. What we mean to emphasize here is that the neuronal molecules are inaccessible to direct control from outsiders. Because they are inaccessible, any method of teaching must come to terms with the learner. ”

“ This question is related to the first two, for one 'does things right' primarily in the eyes of other people, and it is to other people that one 'transmits real messages.' But there is no reason why a language course should confine itself to helping the student 'get things right' and 'transmit real messages', either through talking about books, tables, pens and blackboards or through acting out imaginary episodes in the life of an American who is living with a Sarkhanese family. Built into the materials may be opportunities to become better acquainted with instructors and classmates. ”

“ Motivation is whatever makes the learner ready and willing to rearrange his own molecules, but what is that? Miller, a social psychologist, and Wardhaugh, a linguist, express current ideas on this topic in language that is strikingly harmonious and at times almost identical. Motivation of course encompasses the student's purposes (Wardhaugh, 1967, p. 23) , and we should make materials as relevant as possible to the live concerns of the student, so as to increase the chances of individual involvement (Miller, 1964, p. 40f.) ”

“ If the student is a physical organism, we cannot remain content with our present ignorance (Kandel, 1970, p. 70) of the neuronal mechanisms that are the microphysiological counterparts of observed language learning behavior.
Although Kandel very recently (op. cit.) and others (for example, Chomsky, 1965, p. 57) have affirmed our inability to explain in cellular terms what we know about behavior and learning in higher animals, writers and teachers continue to make assumptions about the neuro-mechanics of language acquisition. ”

“ A second type grows out of competition and cooperation in the common tasks of studying and living together. The second kind of relationship may grow along with the first, or it may thrive without it. This is another key feature of the first stage of Gattegno's Silent Way of language teaching, in which very intense interpersonal interplay is carried out in the context of discussing abstract relationships among small colored wooden blocks. ”

“ But we sometimes forget that the reverse is also true: what one has not put into practice (used in a larger context) he will soon forget, and what he has forgotten he no longer understands. Any method is weak that emphasizes memory without understanding, or that is satisfied with memory and understanding in a narrowly intraverbal context.
To put the same matter in another way, a team of materials developers must ask itself three questions:
1. What must the student see? The things he needs to see include meanings of words and sentences, and also relationships among them. ”

“ This assumption had three corollaries: that habits are strengthened by reinforcement; that foreign language habits are formed most efficiently by giving the right response rather than by making mistakes; and that since language is behavior, then that behavior can be taught only if the student is induced to 'behave.' The remaining assumptions were that students learn more efficiently when speaking is presented before reading and writing: that 'analogy' is a better foundation for producing new sentences than is 'analysis' ”

“ This is in fact only one rather gross instance of the language universals that enter into inferences about the 'base structure' that is common to all languages. It is in this sense that linguists now talk about the innateness of language.
5. Certain things about these (sub) molecular arrangements are not innate. With regard to the linguistic aspects of behavior, this is why nobody claims that anyone is born with the ability to speak a language, but only with the propensity to learn to speak one or more languages of an innately determined kind. ”

“ The beginning of the new decade brought with it what Lane (ibid.) called the behavioral model of language learning. Its distinctive emphasis, drawn from research on animal learning, was on the shaping of behavior through positive or negative reinforcement (i.e. rewarding) of the activities in which an organism might engage. This period saw an upsurge of interest in programmed instruction, teaching machines, and operant conditioning. The cardinal principles of this approach (adapted from Valdman 1966, p. 136) are:
1. ”

“ C. C. Fries, placed the heaviest emphasis not on memorization of texts, but on explicit, conscious practice of structural patterns. Politzer (1965, p. 8) sounded very different from Cornelius' statement when he told language students that 'even in your native language you have not learned by memory all of the sentences that you [need] . What you have learned is a system and how to use it.'
A number of textbooks have combined dialog memorization with pattern practice. Among the earliest and most conspicuous of these were the Audio-Lingual Materials. ”

“ The positive thrust of T-C thought is clearer than the negative, for the bad, old, outmoded, behavioristic audiolingualists seldom gave full allegiance to the dogmas which the cognitivists attribute to them. ”

“ Some of the non-innate arrangements become more permanent if actions that arise from them produce favorable results. Otherwise, these arrangements are dissipated. These correspond to what Skinner and others have called 'operants.' But note that the changes that we are talking about are not limited to the concatenation of 'behaviors:' learning to say fool after April, or le before monde, or a la esquina a tomar el autobus. ”