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Beyond Applied Linguistics
CHAPTER 1

(English tag questions, Spanish ser vs. estar, French partitive constructions), or vocabulary. The trouble is that T-C writers frequently seem to believe that their A-L colleagues thought only of the first of these: 'great importance is placed upon mimicry, memorization of prepared dialogs, and repetitive substitution and transformation drills' (Cooper, 1970, p. 304; cf. also Valdman, 1966, p. 146). To this, T-C objects that in first-language learning 'we do not go around collecting sentences to hold in memory for future use in speaking and understanding. Nor do we have to search through our personal linguistic archives and carry out the steps of solving a proportion whenever we want to say something' (Langacker, 22).

But T-C is right in decrying habit formation only if the phrase means nothing except 'memorizing sentences and solving proportions with them,' or if 'habits' are only behaviors which are 'acquired through the forging of stimulus-response bonds' (Cooper, p. 309). If 'habit formation' means (or also means) 'attainment of unhesitating accuracy,' then it is a goal at which adherents of T-C themselves aim — or surely ought to.

T-C and A-L therefore have much in common. Both recognize that languages are partly like and partly unlike each other, although one school emphasizes the similarities and the other the differences. Both schools agree that 'the behavior of the speaker, listener, and learner of language constitutes . . . the actual data for any study of language' (Chomsky, 1959, p. 56). Both schools (and not just T-C) have always tried to produce students who could understand all and produce only grammatical utterances of the target language (Cooper, op. cit. p. 306), regardless of whether the grammar of the language was described structurally or transformationally. Both schools (and not just A-L) aim at unhesitating accuracy in that behavior.

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