Linguistic Foundations for Foreign Language Teaching

Linguistic Contributions to Foreign Language Teaching

What is a language? It is both a state (érgon) and an activity (energeia).

Traditional Language Concepts and Saussure

Plato believed that language was a copy of reality, while Aristotle argued for the conventional origin of language. Ferdinand de Saussure built on the belief that language as a form could be analyzed and responded to certain laws. He stated, "Language is a representation, and not a substance."

Functional Linguistic Theory and Structuralism

The functional investigative method involves searching for and isolating minimum units applied to language. Distributionalism is based on the possibility of dividing the spoken chain into regular units through distributional analysis.

Chomsky: Language as a Human Ability

Noam Chomsky recovers the importance of the individual in language conception. It is the individual who invents and creates language every time he or she uses it. This is achieved thanks to the existence of specific innate structures characteristic of humans, known as universal constants or Universal Grammar.

Language as Communication and Interaction

Another way of conceiving communication involves a slow process initiated by several key contributions:

• Peirce’s Sign Theory: The sign is viewed as three-dimensional.
• Enunciation Theory and Speech Analysis: "A sign is for a certain person... but... in a certain situation."
• Sociolinguistics: External variables such as age and social class are introduced into linguistic analysis.
• Pragmatism: J.L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (1962).

Communicative Competence and Its Components

The idea of communicative competence results from a convergence between Chomsky’s conceptions and sociolinguistic investigations into communication situations.

• Dell Hymes (1972): Defined it as "the shared knowledge of grammar rules and their rules of use."
• Widdowson: Noted that usage and use are not one and the same.
• Canale and Swain (1980): Mentioned a triple competence: grammatical, sociolinguistic, and strategic.
• D. Coste (1978): Proposed differentiating between linguistic, textual, referential, and situational components.
• Sophie Moirand (1982): Highlighted four subcomponents: linguistic, discursive, referential, and sociocultural.

To achieve communicative competence, the following five sub-competences must be combined: Linguistic, Sociolinguistic, Discursive, Referential, and Strategic.

The Process of Learning Linguistics

First Language vs. Foreign Language Acquisition

How is language produced? Historically, there are two main learning theories regarding the similarities and differences between the acquisition of a first school language and that of a foreign language: innate ideas and experience.