A Brief Bibliography on Linguistics, for Foreign Language Teachers

Extract

During recent years language teachers have heard a great many claims about the importance of linguistics in language teaching. It is true that, during the last thirty years or so, many useful and rather exact techniques have been developed for the analysis and description of languages, and along with them have come many new attitudes toward language in general. Some of this must obviously have a bearing on language teaching. Yet when the hard pressed language teacher tries to learn something about this new science of linguistics, he finds it exasperatingly hard to do so. If he asks a linguistics colleague for an opinion on the recent popular books on language (some of which have been real best sellers), he is told that they will give him no idea whatever of what has really been going on in the science. If he asks whether he should read one of the classic books by a linguist, such as Leonard Bloomfield's Language (New York, 1933), he is told that in parts it is excruciatingly hard to read, and that it is out of date anyhow. Having been rebuffed on both points, all but the most heroic language teachers will give the matter up then and there. Linguists will then go on muttering about people who don't want to learn about what they are teaching, and language teachers will go on muttering about people who have a science so extraordinary that it can't be explained to outsiders.