Language learning methods have been bedevilled by pendulum swings and, sure enough, the grammar/translation method, patently unsuitable for the needs of servicemen in the Second World War, who needed to get out into the field and use the target language quickly, fell from favour. It gave way to a stimulus-response system, drawn from the theories of behavioural psychology, in which learners acquired a repertoire of responses to certain prompts that reflected the situations that they were likely to meet.
This approach was especially suitable for the language laboratory, which allowed students to practise their drills as often as they wished. Grammar as such was not analysed in the language classroom; it entered the consciousness, if at all, by some mysterious osmosis. Among the drawbacks of this method was that students were not equipped to produce original utterances of their own. I remember an Iranian boy I encountered who had learnt English by this method. Every time I asked him a question such as "can you drive?" or "do you take sugar in your coffee?" he would trot out the response he had learnt: "I do, but Jim doesn't". Needless to say, 'Jim' existed only in the drills he had used.
Clearly the method was not adequate for an in-depth acquisition of the target language and so, in a characteristic volte face, the language gurus gave us the cognitive approach and grammar was once more centre stage. It was, however, a much more interactive form of grammar than we had seen in earlier classrooms. Now students were given patterns so that they could deduce the rules from themselves. The element of discovery somehow made language learning much more exciting and the grammar easier to assimilate than anything simply learnt by heart.
But all was not well. We observed that our diligent students could devise time lines to demonstrate the subtle differences between the simple past and present perfect tenses and create original, well-formed sentences of their own based on the rules, yet they couldn't produce language that was idiomatically correct. For some arcane reason, the only sentence that was ever produced to illustrate this lacuna was "excuse me, have you got fire?" when everyone knows it should be "have you got a light?". Grammar it seemed was about to be doomed again, as the heavy artillery of the communicative approach rolled in with alarming battle cries about correctness being less important than the effectiveness of the message. In other words, no matter that your student is content to tell you that you are a "good cooker" and that she is "very interesting by British history". The main thing is that we know what she means.
