Linguistic Universals, Deep Structure, and English As a Second Language

In English as a second language we are generally interested in helping people master English in two quite different ways. We would like them, first, to be able to hear standard spoken English with easy comprehension and to speak English intelligibly and comfortably. This is the kind of mastery of language that children achieve much better than adolescents and adults are likely to; as such men as Wallace E. Lambert have been telling us, children do not have to spoken language, they simply acquire it. All that children need is to hear languages used frequently and comfortably and well in circumstances that make them want to understand what is being said. It is a saddening fact, as Eric H. Lenneberg says in Biological Foundations of Language (1967), linguistic acquition has been stabilized by adolescence. Spoken languages do not have to be taught to adolescents and adults as well as to children; nevertheless if organizations of teachers of English as a second language concentrated on teaching spoken English to adolescents and adults and slighted the problems involved in teaching it to children, they would put themselves in the position organizations of dentists would put themselves in if they concentrated on filling cavities and ignored the preventive dentistry that sees to it that children grow up with teeth that do not have cavities. In second languages as in first languages the child's mastery is not enough. People should learn to read well, and even to write well. In their use of spoken English, mature people need mature vocabularies. And mature people should be able to put fairly complex grammatical structures to use. Kellogg W. Hunt's Grammatical Structures Written at Three Grade Levels (1965) shows even the interdependent proportionative construction of the more you think about it, the sillier it gets-which certainly cannot be described as absolescent or even literary-appearing fairly late in Englishspeaking children's writing. The real work of teachers of English as a second language whose students are past childhood ought to be concerned with the mastery of mature written English, not with the kind of linguistic mastery that children do not need to be taught. The work of teachers of English as a second language should differ from the work of other teachers of English primarily in a single very important respect: it should always be carried on with the perspective that comes from looking at the English language, and at what has been written in the language, from the point of view of the

Linguistic description · Linguistic universal · Linguistics · Problem of universals · Sociology · Theoretical linguistics · Lexicography and Language Studies · Philosophy · Psychology · Second Language Acquisition and Learning

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