Linguistic Principles

The last category of principles of language learning and teaching centers on language itself and on how learners deal with complex linguistic systems.

Principle 10: The native language effect

The native language of learners exerts a strong influece on the acquisition of the target language system. While that native system will exercise both facilitating and interfering effects on the production and comprehension of the new language, the interfering effects are likely to be the most salient.

Principle 11: Interlanguage

Second language learners tend to go through a systematic or quasi-systematic developmental process as they progress to full competence in the target langauge. Successful interlanguage development is partially a result of utilizing feedback from others.

Principle 12: Communicative competence

Given that communicative competence is the goal of a language classroom, instruction needs to point toward all its components: organizational, pragmatic, strategic, ad psychomotor. Communicatve goals are best achieved by giving due attention to language use and not just usage, to fluecy and not just accuracy, to authentic langauge and contexts, and to students' eventual need to apply classroom learning to previouly unrehearsed contexts in the real world.