Oral language is considered to be more important than written language, so oral practice is more emphasized in the
whole course of teaching and learning. The natural order of foreign language study is listening goes before speaking.
Speaking goes before reading, reading goes before writing.
The teaching of culture is separated from the teaching of language. Audio-lingual language teaching method prefers
to regard language as a kind of habit. It also values the importance of culture and regards it as an inseparable part in the
life of the native speakers of the target language. However, it does not involve cultural teaching into the teaching of the
target language; teachers only introduce the cultural knowledge to the whole class.
To sum up, the final purpose of audio-lingual language teaching method is to train the students in the target language
and let them have the ability to use it to communicate with the native speakers. A teacher acts as the conductor of an
orchestra. Students follow the tapes or the model of the teacher to practice. The native language of the learners and the
target language are of compared by the teacher, and this kind of comparison is to find the differences between the two
languages. This is to reduce the disturbance that might come from their native language.
VI. DEVELOPMENT OF LINGUISTIC THEORIES IN THE LATER HALF OF THE 20TH CENTURY
A. Chomsky and Transformational-generative Grammar
Noam Chomsky has made distinguished achievements in many fields including linguistics, philosophy, intellectual
history and international politics, etc. He is a fellow in several societies including linguistics, politics, psychology, arts
and sciences in the United States and abroad. He has awarded honorary degrees from tens of universities from
Cambridge University to Harvard University. However, he is best known for his contribution in linguistics.
―During the years 1951 to 1955, Chomsky was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows. While
a Junior Fellow he completed his doctoral dissertation entitled, Transformational Analysis. The major theoretical
viewpoints of the dissertation appeared in the monograph Syntactic Structure, which was published in 1957. This
formed part of a more extensive work, The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, circulated in mimeograph in 1955
and published in 1975‖. The reason why Chomsky invented new theory for structuralism is that he found there are
many limitations in the classification of language structure according to distribution and arrangement. So he started to
punch the prevailing structuralist descriptive linguistics. Due to this academic practice, Chomsky established the
world-famous Transformational-generative (TG) grammar step by step. In 1957, he published his syntactic structures,
which marked the beginning of the Chomskyan Revolution.
By observing that some important facts had never been analyzed adequately, Chomsky gave an innateness hypothesis.
First, children acquire language competence very fast and with almost no effort. It has been universally acknowledged
that children become fluent speakers of their native language by the age of five. If we consider the fact that children
shall never be intellectually prepared for any other subjects of science, this is quite a shocking fact. A child never seems
to make conscious, intentional, painstaking efforts in acquiring his native language as in learning any other subject,
such as mathematics or physics. What’s more, one amazing phenomenon is that the first language acquisition
unconditionally takes place without any intentional or explicit teaching of it. And the language a child hears is often not
necessarily the most standard of the language he or she is acquiring. What is that which enables a child retain those
correct expressions and avoid what is not proper in the language? In terms of the stages of language acquisition, all
children usually follow the same stages: the babbling stage, nonsense word stage, holophrastic stage, two-word
utterance, developing grammar, near-adult grammar, and full competence. In terms of the correctness of grammar, a
child can not only produce and understand sentences he has heard, but also sentences he has never come across before.
The questions are the ones that the former linguists never thought about seriously. Through discussing these questions,
Chomsky insists that if children are not born with a predisposition to acquire a language in almost the same way as they
are born with the innate ability to walk, these phenomena shall never be possible.
Basing on the hypothesis, Chomsky believes that language competence is somewhat innate, and that our children are
born with a language acquisition device (LAD), or language competence, which fit children for language learning. LAD
is supposed to consist of three elements: a hypothesis-maker, linguistic universal, and an evaluation procedure.
Chomsky further put out a new theory, ―generative grammar‖. By this, he simply means ―a system of rules that in some
explicit and well-defined way assigns structural descriptions to sentences‖(Hu, 2002, p. 724). That is Chomsky believes
that every child of a language is proficient in and internalized a kind of generative grammar that proves his knowledge
of his first language. And the theory of generative grammar experience altogether five periods from the beginning until
the later theories, which has really brought life to structuralism in the later half of last century, helped it to go on. But
the theory itself has been very much controversial. Some scholars completely accept it. Some agree that it is a kind of
breakthrough of structuralism but do not agree with all of it. Some totally reject it. Among them, there are even his
students.
B. Hymes’s Communicative Competence – Shift from Structuralism to Functionalism
Dell Hymes, Commonwealth Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus professor of University of Virginia, teaching
classes in linguistic anthropology, Native American mythology, ethno poetics, and Native American poetry. He is one of
the persons who do not completely agree with Chomsky. Hymes uses his knowledge of anthropology, linguistics, and
ethnography in working with verbal traditions and languages of Oregon and Washington. In 1972, Hymes pointed out