Linguistics nowadays is not concerned with the organisation of language data so
much as the nature of the organising power that is capable of handling such data.
Linguistics can therefore provide an account of how a language is acquired. It seems as if many answers to the problems of.second language teaching are likely
to come from this source. At present applied linguists are engaged in the search
for a theory of second language acquisition (Gregg, 1984, p.95). I would briefly
like to illustrate how this search is continuing and try to establish what
contribution can be expected to come from linguistics.