ago: 'Der Sprachunterricht muss umkehren!' As each linguistic or psychological principle is (re)discovered, new materials must be written to conform to it, and before us nothing was. Each generation sees in its predecessors the dead hand of the past, and each innovating coterie feels that in some sense it has finally devised a method that is 'as elastic and adaptable as life is restless and variable.' (Jespersen, 1904, p.4). This was in one way true of the Friesians, and in another way true of the same audiolingualists who are lately being repudiated for having espoused a 'sterile method based on parrotting and mechanical habit formation.' So let it be with Caesar.
The second chapter of this book will outline certain assumptions about materials for language learning. The present chapter is an attempt to state some ideas that relate to language learning as a whole. It begins with an interpretation of very recent history, particularly the competition between 'behavioristic' and 'cognitive' points of view. In this context, it then goes on to discuss three fundamental problems: What is learning? What is to be learned? What makes learning happen?
LANGUAGE TEACHING AS APPLIED LINGUISTICS
The next-most-recent orthodoxy stemmed from the work of linguistic scientists as language teachers during and after World War II. Overlapping variants of this tradition have been labelled, with some inevitable confusion, 'the oral approach,' 'the linguistic method,' and 'audiolingualism.' Rivers (1964), in a well-known and clear description of this school of thought, saw it as resting on four assumptions. The first assumption was that foreign language learning is basically a mechanical process of habit formation. 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
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