The Implications of Neurolinguistics for second language teaching: The APTA

Abstract

Neurolinguistics is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the inner structure of language and speech and the underlying cerebral mechanisms. Neurolinguistic findings have strongly supported the Innateness Hypothesis, and this alone has a host of implications for language teaching in general. Many unsolved problems of linguistics and psycholinguistics have been satisfactorily solved by the findings of neurolinguistics, such as the Innateness Hypothesis, babbling, the psychological reality of Competence/Performance/Transformations/Deep Structure/Shallow Structure/Surface Structure, the linguistic existence of phone as legitimate units, the nature of language ,the development of language, how language is acquired, the production and comprehension of language, and the acquisition of a second language. By all this, the implications of neurolinguistics have actually revealed themselves. It is proposed that we must differentiate between Innate Language (IeL), Inner Language (IL), and Outer Language (OL), and also between Innate Speech (IeS) Inner Speech (IS), and Outer Speech (OS), in order to avoid misunderstandings and confusion, This important proposal has bean based on the findings of neurolinguistics. With this differentiation a new definition of language is then proposed.