Expectancy for Successive Elements: Key Ingredient to Language Use

Language is viewed as an abbreviatory system whereby human processing of information is facilitated through sequential coding. The key ingredient to successful use of language is the ability to anticipate elements in sequence. This is true for encoding operations as well as for decoding. It is argued that the element of expectancy is the underlying factor which accounts for the overlap in variance on language tests requiring various modes of verbal processing. The notion of expectancy applies to theories of language learning and methods of language teaching. If the native speaker's knowledge of his language is characterized as a grammar of expectancy that incorporates pragmatic knowledge of the world, the problem of teaching a second language can be defined as providing the student with a corpus of language in meaningful communicative settings. A major objective is to allow the student to take full advantage of previously acquired expectations about situations and events in the world while he is learning a new grammar of expectancy for the coding of information.