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CHAPTER 1 WHAT IS THE NATURE OF LEARNING?

Recent study of the learning process is leading to increased appreciation of the importance of learning as opposed to teaching. Newmark and Reibel (1968, p. 149) comment that

"the excessive preoccupation with the contribution of the teacher has…distracted the theorists from considering the role of the learner as anything but a generator of interference; and preoccupation with linguistic structure has distracted them from considering that learning a language means learning to use it."

and Valdman (in Mueller, 1968, p. 58) implies that 'programmers and teachers [should] learn to observe rather than interfere with the student's acquisition of the foreign language.' Carroll (in Mueller, 1968, p. 64) suggests that 'we try to take more careful account than we have, previously, of the learner's concept of what it is that he is learning,' and (p. 66) that students 'using basic language acquisition capacities. . . . . .  develop towards language competence more or less in the sense explicated by Chomsky' [emphasis mine]. In educational circles generally, there is a revival of interest in student-centered and partially student-directed instructional strategies. But we will not attempt to review here the development in organization of language instruction around the student. For one point of view, see my 'Who's who in language transfer' (IRAL, forthcoming).

But if the learner is indeed to be at the center of deliberate language transfer, we must no longer look at him only as 'linguistic man'—man regarded only as a potential internalizer and producer of alien sounds, words and patterns. Any language student is an entire social being, who inhabits (or consists of) an entire physical organism. If he is a social being, then we cannot go on 'perfecting the routine means…yet [remaining] oblivious to 14