Another problem is that both teachers and students are, in general,
ignorant of the structure and functions of conversations: discourse has
simply not been studied in the educational system in the way that grammar
has been for hundreds of years. Roulet (1981) therefore argues that foreign
language teaching must be supported by mother tongue teaching, in which
conversational analysis based on authentic documents is taught. Such
suggestions are made within the more general context of suggested rapprochements
between foreign language and mother tongue teaching which
are currently (in the early 1980s) being debated.