The Influence of Linguistics: Plus and Minus

Though linguistics has always influenced FL teaching (a reciprocal influence, since teaching in part gave rise to it), the organized intervention of linguistics is a contemporary phenomenon. The influence has been realized in many ways, but two stand out: the descriptive and the pedagogical. Only the first is directly the linguist's business; his influence there has been about as good as the advances in his field have permitted. In the second he has himself been swayed by psychological assumptions and by his attempts to draw psychological inferences from his descriptive framework. Here it is better for FL teachers to appeal directly to psychologists. Except as a slogan there is no linguistic method. Language teaching is an autonomous art.