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CHAPTER 1 The fundamental issues in language teaching, then, lie not here, but where they have always lain. We constantly seek—and occasionally obtain—new light on three different but related areas: What is to be learned? What is the nature of learning? What makes learning happen?

WHAT IS TO BE LEARNED?

Our understanding of the nature of what in a language has to be learned has been furthered in recent years by two developments within linguistic science. One is the interest in the ways in which all natural human languages are alike, which has followed (and been made possible by) several decades of emphasis on the ways in which they differ. The second is the increased attention to what Gleason (1965, p. 202) has called 'agnation:' the relationships among sentences with constant semantic relations among the same major vocabulary items, but with different (surface) structures:

In all of these examples, it was the cook who used the cornmeal, and cornmeal was what he used, and what he did to the cornmeal was use it; but the configurations, or surface patterns in which these three concepts appear vary from complete simple sentence to relative clause to nominalizations of the whole idea.