SOME CURRENT PROBLEMS IN SECOND‐LANGUAGE TEACHING

THAT EVERY language is systematic and that a second language should be learned as a habit system appear to have been two fundamental concepts acquired by language teachers trained in those schools which favor the so-called "linguistic method" of secondlanguage teaching. While there is no question that these two concepts have much to recommend them and that those teachers who have based their methodology on the concepts have achieved considerable success, yet neither concept is completely adequate nor do both together form a sufficient basis for a complete second-language pedagogy. A language is more than a system of habits, for a native speaker has abilities beyond those which can be accounted for under most existing definitions of habit, for example abilities to make judgments about such matters as grammaticality, foreign accent, deviancy, synonymy and paraphrase. This is not to say that habit formation drill has outlived its usefulness. Such dril l can indeed teach control of the necessary surface skills in a second language, but it is the acquisition of abilities such as those mentioned above which marks off a person thoroughly competent in a new language from a person with limited skills, and the development of such abilities requires more than the use of existing stimulus-response o r reinforcement drills in the classroom. Such drills are a necessary part of a good second-language teaching program; they a r e not, however, sufficient by themselves, No long search is necessary to find language defined as some kind of habit system, for an examination of almost any introductory linguistics text will produce a definition of language which relies on such terms as arbitrary and system, and any discussion of these terms is almost sure to make the point that a native speaker of any language uses the arbitrary system of that language unthinkingly and habitually. Texts on language teaching likewise include statements that the teacher of a second language is to consider his task to be one of building a new habit system on top of o r alongside an old system. Nelson Brooks, for example, points out: "The single paramount fact about language learning is that it concerns, not problem solving, but the formation and performance of habits."' In Language