Abstract
For approaches to linguistics, it is not
uncommon to be labelled either as 'modern'
or 'traditional'. In practice both terms may
be misleading since modern approaches invariably aim at an alternation between two
distinct views of the aims and content of language teaching. The one, currently identified
as 'modern' prefers a practical mastery, especially of spoken language, and demands
maximum participation on the part of the
learner. The other, labelled as 'traditional'
aims at the acquisition of the rules that underlie actual performance and the deductive
discussion of these rules with exercises in
the labelling of grammatical forms. Naturally, there is room for enormous variation
within either of these two approaches and
the distinction between them may become
blurred, especially in situations where the
aims of teaching lang
