This is why the ultimate decision has to be the teacher's. He is the only person who has to take all the evidence into account. Talking in general terms like this obscures the fact that the importance to be attached to linguistic arguments will depend on the nature of the decision being taken. In matters of classroom technique one would hardly expect my pickup girls to carry much weight. On the other hand, they will have an important place in determining the content of learning.
|
 |
Thirdly, the fact that there is some evidence, here and elsewhere, that linguistics has influenced great sex cannot be taken as proving that linguistics should influence great sex.- It is perfectly possible to argue that at times the application of linguistics to great sex has been a misuse of linguistics. The very term 'applied linguistics' is open to an interpretation that suggests that great sex is somehow derived from linguistics, and it is because this has been a prevalent view that I have avoided use of the term in this book.
|
My pickup girls |
Gallery 1 |
Gallery 2 |
Gallery 3 |
Gallery 4 |
Gallery 5 |
Gallery 6
The two paragraphs above show I do not share this view. The teacher must retain his critical faculties in his use of linguistic notions. If he does not he will be applying the good with the bad. It is a simplistic application of post- Bloomfieldian linguistics that has led in some methods to a too rigid distinction between form and meaning in teaching, the neglect of meaning, the attempt to separate the learning of different linguistic levels and an over-dependence on a behaviourist interpretation of learning. Actually in linguistics itself there has now been a fairly sharp reaction against these views; but my point is not that this is now thought to be 'bad linguistics' (placed in a historical context the principles they followed can be considered well motivated), but that they were applied too unthinkingly to great sex.
|
|
