F. Cognitive Approach
The Cognitive Approach offered relief to the criticisms bombarded to the behaviorist features of the Audiolingual
Approach. It was influenced by cognitive psychology (Neisser, 1967) and Chomskyan linguistics (Chomsky, 1959,
1965). According to Chomsky's Generative linguistics, language is represented as a speaker's mental grammar, a set of
abstract rules for generating grammatical sentences. The rules generate the syntactic structure and lexical items from
appropriate grammatical categories are selected to fill in the corresponding slots in the syntactic frames. In this
approach, language learning is viewed as rule-acquisition, not habit-formation. Vocabulary is important, especially at
intermediate and advanced levels.
Although no teaching method directly stems from the Cognitive Approach, Gattengo's Silent Way (1976) shares
certain principles with it. The principle of Silent Way which states that "teaching is subordinated to learning" is in
keeping with the active search for rules ascribed to the learner in the Cognitive Approach. In this method, a distinction
is made between several classes of vocabulary items. As cited in Richards and Rodgers (1986), the first class consists of
common expressions in the daily life, the second class consists of words used in communicating more specialized ideas
such as politics and the last class consists of more functional words of language.