What are actually the issues at stake? Some writers give the impression that a central disagreement is over the importance of 'habit formation' (see for example Cooper, 1970). It would be a mistake, however, to attach too much importance to what is largely a terminological discrepancy between the two schools.
It is certainly true, and has been well documented by quotations appearing earlier in this chapter, that many language teachers of the past two decades have emphasized 'forming habits.' It may also be true, as Chomsky (1966, p. 4) has charged, that 'there is no sense of "habit" known to psychology' in which language use can be described as a matter of 'grammatical habit.' Even though linguists have undeniably been influenced by what has been going on in the field of psychology, their use of 'habit,' if 'unknown to psychology,' is at least well known to the lexicographers of everyday usage: 'a disposition or tendency, constantly shown, to act in a certain way' (ACD). To put the same common notion in slightly different terms, when A-L language teachers have spoken of 'forming language habits,' they have meant something like 'obtaining unhesitating accuracy in the control of something in the target language.' That 'something' might have been a sentence (Habe ich Ihnen schon erzählt, wo ich vorige Woche Donnerstag gewesen bin?) or a structural problem
described to the student. The first two volumes of Language Learning contained articles on an approach to reading (Nida), the dictionary (one by Hill and another by Marckwardt), and note-taking (Anthony, 1948). French (1949) counseled that 'a student should be saying something that has meaning for him personally, not only after he has learned the pattern but also while he is learning it,' and this idea was found also in Anthony (1949) and Reed (1948). Only the fifth point cannot be matched from the proponents of the oral approach, and this point depends on linguistic insights which were not available before the late 1950's.
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