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.