REPORT RESUMESED 020 513 AL 001 290THE CURRENT DISCREPANCY BETWEEN THEORETICAL AND APPLIEDLINGUISTICS.

BY DECAMP, DAVIDPUB DATE MAR 68

EDRS PRICE MF-$0.25 HC -$0.52 11P.

DESCRIPTORS- * LINGUISTICS, *LINGUISTIC THEORY, *APPLIED

LINGUISTICS, TEACHING METHODS, TRANSFORMATION GENERATIVEGRAMMAR, ENGLISH, TEXTBOOK PREPARATION, LANGUAGE TEACHERS,PHONOLOGY, SYNTAX, *GENERATIVE GRAMMAR,

GENERATIVE THEORY NOW DOMINATES MAC1,INE TRANSLATION ANDHAS BEGUN TO TAKE OVER THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR IN THESCHOOLS, AS ONE PUBLISHER AFTER ANOTHER COMES OUT WITH ATRANSFORMATIONALLY-ORIENTED SERIES OF TEXTBOOK FOR HIGHSCHOOL ENGLISH. THE AUTHOR FEELS, HOWEVER, THAT THE EFFECTSOF' THIS THEORY ON LANGUAGE TEACHING HAVE BEEN NEGLIGIBLE ANDTHAT THE INNOVATIONS AND ADVANCES IN LANGUAGE TEACHING DURINGTHE PAST DECADE HAVE BEEN PEDAGOGICAL RATHER THAN LINGUISTIC.THE CONTENT OF THE TEACHING IS STILL THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE ASSHAPED BY THE LINGUISTIC THEORY OF THE 1930'S AND 40'S. THEFEW APPEALS TO LANGUAGE TEACHERS HAVE HAD LITTLE EFFECT ONTHE PREPARATION OF TEACHING MATERIALS OR ON ACTUAL CLASSROOMPRACTICE. SEVERAL REASONS ARE SUGGESTED. (1) FEW OF THEGENERATIVE THEORETICIANS ARE ALSO LANGUAGE TEACHERS, AND AREPREOCCUPIED WITH THEORY. (2) UNTIL NOW, THE GENERATIVEGRAMMAR OF ENGLISH HAS BEEN RELATIVELY INACCESSIBLE TOLANGUAGE TEACHERS. (3) IT HASN'T BEEN TRIED BY LANGUAGETEACHERS SIMPLY OUT OF INERTIA. THE AUTHOR SUGGESTS VARIOUSTECHNIQUES FOR TEACHING SYNTAX AND PHONOLOGY GENERATIVELY ANDENDS WITH A PLEA FOR GRADUATE SEMINARS IN THE PREPARATION OFGENERATIVELY.-BASED TEACHING. MATERIALS. THIS ARTICLE APPEAREDIN "TESOL QUARTERLY,' VOLUME 1, NUMBER 2, MARCH 1968,PUBLISHED BY TESOL, INSTITUTE OF LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS,GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY, WASHINGTON, D.C. 20007. 0000

MISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS

06HTED MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED

JAMES A LATIS

IC AND ORGANIZATIONS OPERATING

t AGREEMENTS WITH THE U.S. OFFICE OF

ITION. FURTHER TNPRODUCTION OUTSIDE

NC SYSTEM REQUIRES PERMISSIOMOF

OPYRIGHT OWNER."

TESOL QUARTERLYVolume 2 March, 1968 Number 1

Table of Contents

e Current Discrepancy between Theoreticaland Applied Linguistics David DeCamp 3

The Reflexive in English and Spanish: A TransformationalApproach J. Donald Bowen and Terence Moore . 12

Criterion-Referenced Testing 1 Language Skills Francis A. Cartier 27

Predicting Pronunciation and Listening Skills of NativeSpeakers of Spanish: An Exploratory Study ....J Donald Ragsdale 33

Controlling Cultural Variations in thePreparation of TESOL Materials Maurice Imhoof 39

Adapting and Composing Reading Texts Andrew MacLeish 43

The Role of the Volunteer in Teaching English toEducated Foreign-Born Adults Joseph J. Brain 51

The Application of Audio-Lingual (Oral)Technology to Beginning Reading Paul and Eva King 57

Preparing Navajo Students to Read Hadley A. Thomas 62

Reviews

Weeks: Reading American History (M. Gordon)

Bigelow and Harris: The United States of America (M. Gordon)

Publications Received

Announcements

41. pot 2A0

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, EDUCATION & WELFARE

OFFICE OF EDUCATION

THIS DOCUMENT HAS BEEN REPRODUCED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED FROM THE

PERSON OR ORGANIZATION ORIGINATING IT. POINTS OF VIEW OR OPINIONS

STATED DO NOT NECESSARILY REPRESENT OFFICIAL OFFICE OF EDUCATION

POSITION OR POLICY.

66

66

67

68

10

TESOL QUARTERLYA Journal for Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages

OFFICERS 1968-69PresidentPaul W. Bell

Dade County SchoolsMiami, Florida

First Vice PresidentDavid P. Harris

Georgetown UniversityWashington, D.C.

Second !rice PresidentWilliam Norris

University of PittsburghPittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEEThe officers andEdward M. Anthony

University of PittsburghPittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Virginia French AllenMorristown, New Jersey

Julia M. BurksU.S. Information AgencyWashington, D.C.

Kenneth CroftSan Francisco State CollegeSan Francisco, California

Mary FinocchiaroHunter College of the City UniversityNew York, New York

Harry FreemanSan Francisco State CollegeSan Francisco, California

Tom R. HopkinsU.S. Bureau of Indian AffairsWashington, D.C.

Betty W. RobinettBall State UniversityMuncie, Indiana

Pauline RojasMiami, Florida

Rudolph C. TroikaUniversity of TexasAustin, Texas

EXECUTIVE. SECRETARYJames E. Alatis

Georgetown UniversityWashington, D.C.

II~IEDITOR

Betty Wallace RobinettBall State University

Muncie, Indiana

EDITORIAL ADVISORYBOARD

Virginia French AllenMorristown, New Jersey

Marie Esman BarkerEl Paso Public SchoolsEl Paso, Texas

Eugene (I, BriersUniversity of CaliforniaLos Angeles, California

J. C. Catford .

University of MichiganAnn Arbor, Michigan

Mary FinocchiaroHunter CollegeNew York, New York

Maurice ImhoofBall State UniversityMuncie, Indiana

A. Iris MulvaneyTucson Public SchoolsTucson, Arizona

Bernard SpolskyIndiana UniversityBloomington, Indiana

Hadley ThomasTuba City Public SchoolsTuba City, Arizona

......Membership in TESOL (K.00) Includes a subscription to the Journal,TESOL QUARTERLY is published In March, June, September, and December.Business correspondence should be addressed to James E. Alatis, Institute of Languages and Lingulsttss.Georgetown Unlvivisity, Washington, D.C.

Copyright 0 MS

Teachers of English to *oaken of Other Languages

1

.'"...""T=T".."."54.1749.1".711014.10.900.^...9

-

The Current Discrepancy between Theoretical

and Applied Linguistics*

Until about a decade ago, theore-tical and applied linguistics developedside by side, to ,their mutual benefit.Though relatively few language teach-ers were linguists, most linguists werealso language teachers, and they setout with missionary zeal to prove thatlinguistics had a place in the languageclassroom. Applied linguistics has along respectable history. It did notsuddenly burst into existence on PearlHarbor Day. Henry Sweet's ThePractical Study of Languages appearedin 1899, Otto Jespersen's How toTeach a Foreign Language in 1904.Leonard Bloomfield's An Introductionto the Study of Language was pub-lished in 1914, nineteen years beforehis major theoretical book Language,and thirty-eight years before his Out-line Guide for the Practical Study ofForeign Languages, a work that stillappears on all reading lists for lan-guage teachers. During the 1940's andearly 50's nearly every major linguistauthored at least one language text-book. Bloch, Hockett, Haas, Fries,Twaddellthe bibliography for thoseyears reads like a roster of the Lin-

_ guistic Society.But where are the language text-

books written by Chomsky, Halle,

This paper was presented at the TESOLConvention, March 1968.

Mr. DeCamp is Professor of English andLinguistics at the University of Texas. Hedirected the AID-sponsored English lan-guage advisory group in Taiwan (1962-64),lectured in the annual Anglo-American semi-nars in Poland (1966-67), and is TESOLconsultant for AID and the Peace Corps.

David DeCamp

Postal, Klima, Fillmore; Ross, or eventextbooks which seem to be very muchinfluenced by them?

Until about a decade ago, the lag be-tween theoretical discovery and class-room application was very short. Ken-neth Pike's The Intonation of Ameri-can English was published in 1946, butC. C. Fries was already using Pike'ssystem in his Intensive Course in En-glish for Latin American Studentswhich was published in 1945. TheTrager and Smith Outline of EnglishStructure, with its famous nine vowels,three semi-vowels, four stresses, fourpitches, and four junctures, appearedin 1951. The very following year, Mar-tin Joos and William Welmers gave usthe Structural Notes and Corpus forthe ACLS TEFL series, incorporatingthe Trager-Smith system, and the nextyear, in 1953, we saw the first textbookin that series, F. B. Agard's El InglisHablado.

Chomsky's Syntactic Structures ap-peared in 1957, and the Jakobscin andHalle Fundamentals of Language in1956. Now, more than a decade later,where are the language textbooks inwhich pronunciation is taught in termsof Jakobsonian distinctive features?

Until about a decade ago, relativelyfew language teachers had studiedany linguistic theory, but those fewtook what little they knew and put itinto immediate practice. Many of uswere English teachers before we werelinguists. Some of us blundered intoTESL without realizing that therewas such a thing. I, for example, was

-- 4,10. a- - A ...a...Z.:a...A ....A i......Laara.7. aft,

I' "

06y, ,-

TESOL QUARTERLY

teaching remedial "bonehead" Englishat the University of New Ilexico in1948 when I accidentally discoveredthat the problems were somehow alittle different in one class which wascomposed almost entirely of Spanishspeakers. But we read the linguistsas soon as we found out about themand we applied them. As soon as webeard about the phoneme, we startedusing minimal pair drills. When wediscovered the idea of immediate con-stituents, we added substitution and

pyramid drills. What little linguisticswe knew, we used.

after a decide' Of NDEA in-stitutes, The Center for Applied Lin-

in-servici retraining programs,and required linguistics in the curric-ulum of teacher training, very fewteachers are as ignorant of linguistictheory as we were then. As the study'of linguistics became popular and prof-

----itable, the films and popularized text-books on linguistics for school teach-ers have multiplied like oversexedhamsters. We even made Time Mag-azine! You have to look real hard to-day to find a language teacher wholull never heard of Noam. Chomsky.The generative-transformational the-ory has been fairly represented inthese recent attempts to linguisticallybrain-rinse the language teachers.Granted that many such courses have

_been short-term affairs, miserablytaught. Most teachers have been gen-eratively baptized by sprinkling rather

.Aban -total immersion. .Most of themhave received their transformationsthird hand and filtered through PaulRoberts or Owen Thomas. Yet theycan at least manage cocktail-partychatter about deep structures andtransformations, and that is more than

most language teachers knew aboutphonemes and morphemes in the1940's.

Now, after a decade of missionaryefforts to bring the alpha-beta-gammasof transformational theory to the hea-then language teachers, the questionis: What are they doing with it? Arethey using it? Where are the trans-formationally-based language classes?

So here stands linguistics in 1968,plagued not only with a credibilitygapfor far too many people nowexpect every linguist to be a . guruwith the keys to the universebutplagued with an unprecedented appli-cability gap. The dominant theoreticalapproach today is unquestionablygenerative-transformational. A fewlinguists are still working with thesame empirical structural approachwhich dominated the 1940's. A feware working with new and still rela-tively untested theories: dependencygrammar, stratificational grammar,resonance theory, etc. But the paperspresented at meetings of the LinguisticSociety and in the leading journals areoverwhelmingly transformational. Infact the major controversy today is notbetween generative and taxnomic-structural theories, as stated by Time(February 16, 1968), but between fac-tions within the generative school: aconservative wing led by Chomskyand a rebel group led by Postal, Ross,and Lakoff. Generative theory nowdominates machine translation andhas begun to take over the teachingof English grammar in the schools, asone publisher after another comes outwith a transformationally-oriented se-ries of textbooks for high schoolEnglish. Yet the effects of this the-

.40.....to. "

THEORETICAL AND APPLIED LINGUISTICS

ory on language teaching have beennegligible... .

The innovations and advances inlanguage teaching during the past dec-adeand there have been many ofthemhave been pedagogical ratherthan linguistic. We have seen EarlStevick's elaborate electronic meta-phors: UHF, microwaves, and modu-lar courses. We have seen programmedcourses, teaching machines, improvedlanguage labs, computer-assisted in-struction. Most important, we haveseen massive projects, supported withstate and federal funds, bringing tohundreds of learners the modem meth-ods previously available only to a fa-vored few in select institutes. But thecontent of these vastly improved andexpanded programs is still the Englishlanguage as shaped by the linguistictheory of the 1930's and 1940's.

Indeed there have been a few con-trastive analyses based on generativetheory, e.g. the Stockwell, Bowen, andMartin The Grammatical Structuresof English. and Spanish (1965), sev-eral articles explaining generativegrammar to language teachers and ex-hafting them to apply it, .g., WilliamC. Ritchie's articles in the last twoissues of Language Learning (July andDecember, 196?). But there is no evi-denbe that these appeals have hadmuch effect, either on the preparationof teaching materials or on actualclassroom-practice. In 1963 we devel-oped ..for use in-our program for re-training English teachers in Taiwana small set of transformational syn-tactic drills, which were later editedand published by Earl Rand. A fewsuch drills also appeared in the latervolumes of the English for Today(1964-6?) series, and a few other pub-

5

lishers have 'followed suit. But this isscarcely a beginning in the applicationeven of generative syntax, and gen-erative phonology and semantics haveyet to get even a foot in the door tothe language classroom. Why?

There are several reasons. First isthe attitude of the generative theo-reticians themselves, most of whomhave very little interest in promotingthe classroom use of their thories.Feiv of them are also language teach-ers. They are preoccupied with thefurther development of theory andhave little time to devote to applica-_tion._'.They fear preriature and im-proper application. A few of themeven deny the relevance of generativetheory to language teaching. JerryFodor is quoted by the article in Timeas saying that it would be as foolishto teach a man linguistic theory asit would be to teach him the theoryof the internal combustion engine so.that he could learn to drive a car. Onemight point out that although a driverdoesn't have to be an automotive en-gineer, he does have to know a certainamount about the mechanical opera-tion of his car in order to be a gooddriver. And of course the best refuta-tion of Fodor's quip is the fact that ifa theory says that a language is onething but a teacher is teaching it assomething else, then either the theoryor the teacher is probably wrong, andit's jolly well time we found out which.Nevertheless, the generative theoristshave hardly been the most enthusiasticsalesmen for generative grammar inthe language class.

A second reason is that until now,the generative grammar of English hasbeen relatively inaccessible to languageteachers. It has appeared in bits and

6 TESOL QUARTERLY

pieces in scholarly papers (many ofthem unpublished and only privatelydistributed) or in superficial introduc-tions like those of Paul Roberts andOwen Thomas. Furthermore these pa-pers bristle with unfamilar symbols,strange diagrams, and mathematicaljargon. Conversations with genera-tive theorists tend to be filled withsuch terms as "recursive function,""finite state," "Boolean condition,"and "Turing machine." But be ofgood cheer; help is on the way. A solidbut readable grammar of English byRosenbaum and Jacobs is now in thepage-proof stage, and another '..)3T PaulPostal is in preparation. Even thelong-awaited The Sound Pattern ofEnglish by Chomsky and Halle willsoon be available. The mathematicalbasis of generative theory is by nomeans pre-requisite to using a genera-tive grammarFodor's analogy doesindeed apply here. And the unfamiliarsymbols are usually only a formulaicshorthand for comfortably familiarstatements. A rule of the form S-+NP VP loses all Its terror when trans-lated into the statement: "Underlyingevery sentence is a basic constructionconsisting of a subject and a predi-cate." Certainly no one suggests thatthe student leard-g English be re-quired to read and write formulas, butthe pattern drills by which he is taughtthe language should indeed be basedon the truths which these formulasrepresent.

The main reason why generativetheory has not been more extensivelyapplied is simply.inertia. It just hasn'tbeen tried. Language teachers, likelinguistic theorists, have been busyand preoccupied with other things.Many have laboriously mastered one

linguistic theory and resent having tolearn a new theory. Anyway, theycomplain, generative theory keepschanging. .Teac'iers worked their waythrough Paul Roberts pr ,Robert Lees,with their kernel sentences and com-binatory transforthations, only to findthat Syntactic Structures is now outof date, and that they must learn thenew Aspects model with its deep andsurface structures. If the Postal-Ross-Lakoff heresy is successful, they mayhave to learn yet a third generativetheory. I indeed understand, thoughI cannot agree with, their reluctanceto revise their textbook until thetheoretical dust settles a bit. Theyfeel betrayed by those specialists whowill offer tantalizing but inadequate,vaguely programinatic suggestions forapplying generative theory but then,once the article is published, never fol-low through but only retreat into ac-ademically greener fields of pure the-ory. Generative grammar is a generaland unified theory of language and sodoes not lend itself very easily to ec-lectic applitation. The introductionof a few transformation drills. into acourse which is primarily based on theold concepts of phonemes, morphemes,and immediate constituents often re-sults in inconsistencies and frustratingconfusion. Furthermore, a generativegrammar begins with the abstract andworks towards the concrete. The coreof every generative grammar is thedeep structure, a set of abstract syn-tactic relationships. The surface struc-ture, the empirically observable factsof the languagethe sentences as theyare actually sp 'ken and heard, thethings which le language teachermust use every day in the class fromthe very beginning are presented in

THEORETICAL AND APPLIED LINGUISTICS

the theory as being only a superficialconsequence of the underlying abstrac-tions. We can understand the despairof the teacher who simply cannot seehow she can get such a theoreticalstructure inside the heads of her stu-dents with the tools available to her:her own voice, the blackboard, and thetape recorder.

What then can we teach transfor-mationally? The syntax is probablythe easiest. Long before Bloomfieldand Trager and Smith, language teach-ers were using transformation drillsfor the passive, making the studentsconvert "John killed the mongoose"into "The mongoose was killed byJohn." Within the past decade, sev-eral new textbooks have provided sim-ilar drills based on a few other sim-ple transformations: changing positivesentences into negatives, statementsinto questions, and adding tag ques-tions.to simple statements. Such tech-niques should be continued and ex-tended to many other importanttransformations. For example, thecleft-sentence transformation, whichcan change "The mongoose ate therooster" into either "It was the mon-goose that ate the rooster" or "It wasthe rooster that the mongoose ate."There is the pseudo-cleft transfmna-lion, resulting in either "What ate therooster was the mongoose," "What themongoose ate was the rooster," or"What the mongoose did was eat therooster." The there-transformation,which equates "A mongoose is in thehenhouse" with "'There is a mongoosein the henhouse." The indirect objectplaceinent transformation, which takes"John give the diplodocus to Sarah"and changes it to "John gave Sarahthe diplodocus." There are many others

7

of this type, all better taught as trans-formational processes than as separateand unrelated sentence patterns.

Perhaps most important are themany complementizing and other em-bedding transformations. Given a pairof sentences like "Susan had badbreath" and "Someone noticed it,"the student must learn how to combinethem to get "Someone noticed thatSusan had bad breath." Then he canpassivize this sentence to "That Susanhad bad breath was noticed," and thenfinally, by a transformation called "ex-traposition," he can wind up with"It was noticed that Susan had bad,breath." In a transformationally-bisedcourse, infinitives, gerunds, and participles would never be taught as wordsor phrases but as processes operatingon whole sentences. Given the sen-tence "We sat under an umbrella" Land"We ate the yoghurt," the studentmust learn to produce "we sat underan umbrella to eat the yoghurt" and"We sat under an umbrella eating theyoghurt." Incidentally, this approachto infinitives and participles was rec-ommended by Otto Jespersen, long be-fore Chomsky.

Within the deep structure, the gen-erative analysis of the English verbalauxiliary into three successive parts(tense, modal, and aspect) makes itpossible to teach English verb formsby means of a simple substitution drillinstead of working through long andcomplicated paradigms.

One of the most interesting of re-cent contributions W generative the-ory has been an unpublished paper bySandra Annear, in which she trans-formationally links embedded relativeclauses with conjoined coordinateclauses. A restrictive clause, she sug-

,

8 TESOL QUARTERLY

gests, is related to a preceding coor-dinate clause; a non-restrictive clauseis related to a following coordinateclause. If we accept her theory, itwould suggest a type of classrooni drillin which the student would take asentence like "Those women are wear-ing mink coats and they are Englishteachers" and change it zither to"Those women who are wearing minkcoats are English teachers" or to"Those women, who are English teach-ers, are wearing mink coats."

These are only a few of the thingsthat we could be doing, but generallyare not doing, wth generative syntax.What about pronunciation? Here thelanguage teacher is most likely to berepelled by the fact that most of thephonetic features in a generative pho-nology are stated in acoustic ratherthan physiological terms. Terms likegrave, acute, compact, and strident in-deed seem far removed from the lan-guage classroom. Each term, however,has a physiological correlate. It doesn'thelp the language learner to tell himthat the vowels /u, o, o/ contain a dis-tinctive feature of flatness, meaningthat certain acoustic frequencies aremusically flattend or lowered. For En-glish, however, the teacher will be justas accurate in describing this featureas lip-rounding, for in English it islip-rounding that produces the flattedtones. And lip-rounding is indeed arelevant classroom term.

The real difference between the oldstructural and the new generative pho-nology is whether the sounds are pre-sented as unit entities, e.g., the vowel/a/ or the consonant /t/, or as com-binations of pronunciation features,e.g., lip-rounding, voicing or nasality.In the old method, sounds are treated

as things, as little building blocks thatcan be moved about to different placesin the word or that can be substitutedfor one another. In generative pho.nology the stream of speech is treatedas if it were music played in harmonyon an organ. Each segment of this mu.sic is a complex chord produced by de.pressing several keys on the organ simultaneously. As the music moves onto the next segment, one or more ofthe notes making up the chord ischanged. When we speak the wordEnglish, we pass through six such seg.ments, each time changing one or morefeatures, but the feature of voicing wehold and do not change until the verylast segment, like a sustained pedalnote on an organ which is not releaseduntil the very last note.

In the language 'classroom this meanwe would not be teaching the vnwd/le/ as a unit entity. Rather we wouldteach the student to articulate "front,ness" of vowel ( /1, e, te/ as opposed is/a, o, o/) and "lowness" of vowekUse, a, o/) as opposed to /e, o/).When these three features coincide--vowel, front, and lowthe result is tlvowel /te/. This is not a new idesBoth Sapir and Bloomfield noted thsiit is easier to teach a student a wholerelated series of new and strangsounds than it is to teach him onesingle new sound from the series. Fathe Mandarin Chinese speaker studying English, it is easier to learn hosto voice all of his consonants than itto learn to pronounce the English /dsound as a separate task unrelated t(other sounds like /b/ and /g/.

It is in teaching assimilations, stresshifts, and other phonological processethat generative phonology can be moshelpful. The weak "schwa" vowf

---rlY.N.,

THEORETICAL AND APPLIED LINGUISTICS

[a] is not considered an independentvowel at all, but only a weakened orslurred variety of several other vowels.Thus in the word telegraph the secondvowel is weakened from [c] to [a] be-came' it is in a weak syllable. In theword telegraphy, it is the first vowelthat is weakened from [c] to [a]. Thisis really a very old-fashioned approachsuccessfully used both by linguists andby language teachers long beforeBloomfield.

Old-fashioned teachers of Germanstill teach their students to devoiceconsonants at the end of a word. Thusthe word spelled Weib is pronounced[vaip], not [vail)]. More recently,influenced by structural linguistics,many teachers have approached thisproblem as one of substituting unitphonemes, i.e., substitute a /p/ for a/b/, a /t/ for a /d/, and so on fora long list of such substitutions. Itstrikes me that the old method withits simple generalization, "devoice thefinal consonant," is a lot more effective,and it follows the new generative pho-nology exactly. Similarly the studentof English can be taught the processesof assimilation, often by a simple sub-stitution drill. You can give him theword (or a sentence containing theword) intolerable and then a series ofsubstitution cues like proper, compati-ble, legible, and reverent. As he prac-tices knaking the new combinations im-proper, incompatible, illegible, and ir-reverent, he develops a feel for makingthe basic negative prefix in- assimilateto the following sound. This is farbetter than teaching him all thesewords as separate unrelated vocabu-lary words or making him puzzlethrough a whole series or' substitutionsof one unit sound for another.

9

If you teach pronunciation is it isdescribed in a generative grammar,you can also stop apologizing for theEnglish spelling system. Too manyteachers precipitate spelling problemsby berating our poor old writing sys-tem, calling it irregular and difficult,inferior to that of Spanish or someother language. Actually the systemof English spelling is not bad, whenyou understand how it really works.If the French scribes and other well-

meaning but misguided scholarshadn't tinkered with it so much inattempts to reform it, it would be anexcellent system. Generative linguis-tics has she orn us that English spelling(or for that matter, Spanish or Ger-man spelling) is not comparable to aphonetic transcription, i.e., it never in-tended to represent each sound in theword, as we hear it, with a distinctalphabetic symbol. Rather it repre-sents, and quite accurately too, thepronunciation of the underlying formof each morpheme, a pronunciationwhich is then modified by several pro-cesses like assimilation and weakening.Thus the words telegraph and teleg-raphy are both spelled with an e inthe first two syllables, indicating thatthese syllables are pronounced [e]when they are accented. When thesyllable is weakened by loss of stress,the vowel is weakened, but it is notnecessary to represent this weakeningin the spelling, because every nativespeaker automatically and uncon-sciously performs this process of weak-ening. Your students may not knowwhether to spell the words professorand manager with an er or an or, butif you then teach them the words pro-fessorial and managerial, in which theproblem syllable is accented and there-

01.

10 TESOL QUARTERLY

fore has its full e or o value, the dif-- ficulty disappears.

Generative semantics, like generativephonology, factors the meaning into aset of semantic features. Thus thewords pen and pencil have all the samesemantic features in common exceptone. Both are small inanimate objectsused for writing or drawing, but oneuses ink, the other lead. Because thisanalysis into semantic features pin-points both the similarities and thedifferences in meaning between nearsynonyms, it makes the teaching ofvocabulary much easier than if themeaning of each word is approachedas a separate unique problem. Itshould even be possible, though no onehas yet done so, to construct semanticminimal pair drills, analogous to pho-nological minimal pair drills.

I have suggested a few of the manyaspects of generative theory which canand should be applied to classroomteaching. But such suggestions havevery limited value if no one follows-them up and turns them into actualclassroom materials available to theteacher. How can we get this jobt-done? We've been saying this sort ofthing ever since 1962, when LeonardNewmark assembled a gaggle of lin-guists (0 is it a pride of linguists?)at the NAFSA meeting in Columbusto talk about getting generative gram-inar into the classroom. Like the

- .previous speakers on this subject, I

close. in the best pep-rally manner by exhorting all of youto get out there and write! It happens,however, that I have one more specificsuggestion. Like several others of-youhere today, I teach a graduate seminarin applied linguistics. This year I gottired of following the same old general

.

methods approach and set as the sem-inar topic this semester the prepara-tion of transformationally-based teach-ing materials. Nineteen students en-rolled, plus three auditors who agreedto share in the work. Four studentsdropped out when they discovered thatI expected an understanding of Chom-sky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax(1965) as a minimal prerequisite forthe course. That left us with eighteen,Each student chose the language withwhich he wished to work. Sevenselected English; the other languageschosen include Spanish, Korean, Geor-gian, Arabic, French, Persian, Japa-nese, JavaiiiseT Wad-Bahasa -Indones-ian. Each student was assigned onecomponent of the generative theory.His task for the semester: to prepare aset of transformationally-based materi-als for teaching the assigned aspectof his language. Assignments includethe consonants of English, the wordstress of Persian, the determiners ofFrench, the pronouns of Spanish, thesemantics of Chinese, etc. It is tooearly to say how many of these pro-jects will be successful, but, as I havetold the students, they will be 'makinga real contribution even if they thor-oughly explore one avenue only to dis-cover that it is a blind alley. At leastsomeone will have tried it: I will en-courage each student to publish hisresults, and some already have plansto expand their projects later Into fullslength textbooks,. And I promise thatI will publish a general summary re-port of the successes and failures ofthe experiment, : :

Now I repeat: Some .of you alsoteach 'courses in materials preparation.Why not try the same experiment?If on ten university campuses we could

..04..... 4 Airal.11

THEORETICAL AND APPLIED LINGUISTICS

have annual seminars in which stu-dents are actively working on suchproblems, we could systematicallycover every aspect of the language anddetermine, once and- for all, which

1111111111111-:

11

features of generative theory are reallyapplicable to language teaching. Wewould finally be getting generativegrammar into the classroom, instead ofjust talking about it.