This study presents an overall review of the paradigms that contribute to the making and development of functional human linguistics and communication skills and the teaching of language.

GENERATIVE THEORY NOW DOMINATES MACHINE TRANSLATION AND HAS BEGUN TO TAKE OVER THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR IN THE SCHOOLS, AS ONE PUBLISHER AFTER ANOTHER COMES OUT WITH A TRANSFORMATIONALLY-ORIENTED SERIES OF TEXTBOOK FOR HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH. THE AUTHOR FEELS, HOWEVER, THAT THE EFFECTS OF THIS THEORY ON LANGUAGE TEACHING HAVE BEEN NEGLIGIBLE…

Transformational grammar offers the most adequate system by which to meet the goal of grammar instruction, which is to increase the student's understanding of the nature of language. This grammar attempts to explain the mental processes underlying the production and understanding of sentences, to describe linguistic competence, to construct…

These two units of the Minnesota Project English curriculum employ transformational grammar in an attempt to make eighth-grade students aware of fundamental facts about their language. Concepts taught in the first unit are (1) that an infinite number of English sentences exists, (2) that a few basic transformations are the basis for a large number…

The approaches of traditional grammar, descriptive linguistics, and generative grammar are largely complementary rather than exclusive. Traditional grammar defines eight parts of speech according to meaning or function and concerns itself almost wholely with the written language. Descriptive linguistics postulates that English has a set of unique…

For secondary English teachers concerned with the theoretical and practical problems of the traditional approaches to teaching grammar, this paper proposes that a realistic solution can be found in current linguistic investigation. This solution lies not in the product of linguistic inquiry, but in the process of inquiry itself. The paper first…

The relevance, the application, and the importance of linguistics to teaching English as a foreign language is discussed. The author's assumption is that linguistics is "irrelevant to the aims, and inapplicable to the tasks of such teaching," and agrees with linguists such as Rosenbaum that the goal of linguistic science is "to determine…

Expanded version of a lecture held at a Teacher Education Conference, Mainz, West Germany, June 7, 1972. (DD)

Revised form of a paper given December 2, 1970 at a meeting of the Dutch Teachers of German in Woudschoten/Amsterdam, Netherlands. (RS)

Paper presented at the TESOL convention, March 1970. (DS)

Individualized lessons, based upon inferred instructional goals of The Roberts English Series," were developed by Program for Learning in Accordance with Needs (PLAN). (RD)

Surveys current developments in linguistics and other disciplines which influence language teaching methodology. A brief bibliography is appended. (AM)

This article presents a non-technical discussion of the way in which modern transformational generative linguistics can help in understanding the reading process. (FB)