Linguistics in Language Teaching: the Implications for Modern Hebrew

I. TODAY, AS MUCH AS EVER, language teaching theorists and course writers offer a rich array of wares. The audio lingual approach, concerned with the formation of habits, particularly grammatical ones, by inductive pattern drills, competes with cognitive approaches, which aim to develop the four language skills through conscious understanding of structure. Far less concerned with grammar are the newly emerged (or re-emerged)' 'communicative" or· 'functional" approaches; these organize language in terms of the functions it is felt most vitally to fulfil, e.g. such acts as suggestions or warnings, such situations or topics as annoyance, shopping, football. 1 Linguistics has a role to play in all these frameworks. Many teachers, having had their only taste of linguistics from a course in pure linguistics of the structuralist or generative variety, may well have decided to have nothing further to do with linguists. But I mean to show that linguistics brings benefits that can transcend differences in method, with special benefit for the teaching of Modem Hebrew.