Transformational grammar and language teaching1

TLDR: This article used transformational grammarians' knowledge of transformational grainmar to formulate and verify their intuitions in the text itself, but they did not use any transformational rules to guide the reader.

Abstract: There are two major theories of language learning: one, based on behavioral psychology, emphasizes pattern-practice and memorization; the other, the rationalist approach, attempts to give students the reasons for grammatical phenomena, relating facts about the second language to facts about the student's native language. Of these, the first has been much used recently, both in structuralist texts and those that are supposedly “transformational”. While memorization and pattern-practice drills are sometimes useful, often they are not, because the choice between forms is based on the speaker's awareness of factors outside of the immediate syntactic environment: the definite or indefinite article, some or any, past or perfect tense are a few examples in English. To incorporate such insights in a text the writer must use his knowledge of transformational grainmar indirectly, to enable him to formulate and verify his intuitions; but he will not use any “transformational rules” in the text itself. The text will be rationalistically oriented-it will encourage students to ask themselves why sentences are good and bad-and in this sense will be truly transformational in accordance with the beliefs held by transformational grammarians about the nature and acquisition of language.