LINGUISTICS IN SECOND LANGUAGE TEACHING

This paper is to help students/teachers acquire the basic language skills: speaking (selection of appropriate sounds and their organization), understanding (identification of sounds; decoding sounds as meaning), writing (selection of appropriate graphological symbols and their organization) and reading (identification of symbols; decoding symbols as meaning). In every language teaching and language planning situation we set up certain objectives in terms of which we decide which of the skills (active/passive) are to be given the highest priority. Language teachers have begun to feel that linguistics has failed to provide them with the help they seek for improving both content and methodology in their chosen field. The real fact is that linguistics is a science. It seeks to study how language works. Linguistics per se has different aims from language teaching. It is surely not concerned with providing evidence about the most effective procedures for language teaching. It does not have any techniques of language teaching to offer; it has no ‘do-it-yourself’ kit of classroom procedures to display.