Chapter 1 Trends in Linguistics, pp. 8-17

Before doing so, it must be clear that in teaching a foreign language, teachers begin the quest for an understanding of the principles of foreign language learning and teaching by asking some very specific questions.

1. Who? Who does the learning and teaching?

2. What? What is it that the learner must learn and the teacher teaches?

3. How? How does learning take place?

4. When? When does second language learning take place?

5. Where? Are the learners attempting to acquire the second language within the cultural and linguistic milieu of the second language- that is, in a "second language situation in the technical sense of the term?

6. Why? Why are learners attempting to acquire the second language?

In language, learning and teaching, there are two Linguistic-Psychological Parallels:

1. Behavioristic (structural and descriptive disciplines)

2. Cognitive ((generative and transformational disciplines)

- each one has specific characteristics

In the study of language there are two disciplines not far apart:

1. What is Linguistics? The study of human speech including the units, nature, structure, and modifications of language.

2. What is Applied Linguistics? Organizing knowledge in order to get things had done in the real world. So then, linguistics means more than merely translation/or merely language teaching.