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The goals of teaching the mother tongue or the first language are different from those of
teaching
a foreign language or a second language. In a sense, the first language is not taught,
but À
p

‘ er iew: p

In simple terms, the aim in teaching a language is to open up its resources to the learner so that
he or she may find the right words and sentences to con ey the meaning intended. The
teaching of languages is by no means a recent or no el acti ity and there has always been a
constant search for effecti e ways of optimizing learning in arious parts of the world. Howe er,
in spite of the seminal work of scholars like Henry Sweet, ‘tto Jespersen, Harold Palmer,
Michael West and others, no accepted and well articulated theory of language teaching has
emerged because a number of complex factors such as the goals of teaching aptitude, ability
and moti ation of learners, teachers' competence, effecti e methods and materials, policy
matters, and language planning are in ol ed in language teaching.

‘bjecti es and Goals: The goals of teaching language must be defined within the social-cultural
contexts in which teaching and learning are carried out.

(a) The goals of teaching the mother tongue or the first language are different from those of
teaching a foreign language or a second language. In a sense, the first language is not taught,
but caught. This means that the first language is learnt by the child naturally; he picks it up from
the speakers around him. Any normal child must learn how to listen understand and speak the
language used in his or her social en ironment. Learning the first language is like one of the
basic instincts which cannot be suppressed; learning the first language depends on the growth
and maturity of the child and exposure to the linguistic en ironment. Linguists say that the
innate language learning ability of the human mind, when it comes into contact with the socio-
linguistic en ironment, enables the child to learn the language by constructing his own grammar
of the language in a natural way. Listening and speaking the first language are natural
processes but not reading and writing. When the child goes to school, he or she must be taught
how to read and write. The goals of teaching the first language may be:

(i) teaching how to read and write;

(ii) teaching the standard language (the child may ha e learnt a dialect used in his/her social
en ironment), and its registral arieties;
(iii) teaching the literature of the first language and through it the culture and literary heritage of
the language community.p

(b) If, for example, French or German is being taught to a Bengali-speaking learner, the goal is
limited; the learner is not going to use French or German for day-to-day communication in India;
if he goes to France or Germany he has to use French or German in its own cultural context. So
the literary, cultural and integrati e purposes predominate in learning a foreign language and
the instrumental or communicati e function is rather limited and minimized.
(c) In teaching a second language, for example English, to a Tamil speaker, the goal is
instrumental or communicati e and the cultural and literary goals are minimized. In the social
set up in India, the learner may ha e to use English or Hindi for purposes of communication
(oral or written), in his day-to-day life in the office, in the market place, in the bank, in social
functions, etc.

The difference between teaching English as a second language and Hindi as a second
language to a Tamil learner will be the degree to which the languages are related. Hindi and
Tamil, though they belong to Indo-Aryan and Dra idian respecti ely, share some aspects of the
culture of the sub-continent; English, on the other hand, though and Indo-European language,
does not share the culture of the sub-continent. That makes the learning of English more
instrumental and more a tool for modernization than the learning of Hindi as a second language.
Thus, the goal is more instrumental in learning a second language whereas it is more integrati e
in the case of a foreign language though the two may be present in arying degrees in all
language teaching/learning situations.

The Basic Assumptions in the Cogniti e Approach:

(a) Language is not just beha ior; it is rule-go erned creati ity. The use of language resembles
writing a play more than performing in one.
(b) Any beha ior is controlled by cogniti e processes in ol ing understanding; skills are actions
that are originally oluntary and which later become automatic.
(c) Practice without understanding the underlying principles will be meaningless and mere
repetition tends to weaken under-standing.
(d) To teach is to select and to create appropriate conditions for learning; teaching is not
conditioning.

To learn is to understand alid generalizations, discriminations, and relationships. Learning of

any sort is largely a matter of drawing out what is innate in the mind; it is a matter of growth and
maturation of relati ely fixed capacities, under appropriate external conditions.

(e) Sentence types and parts of sentences must be taught in a related way.
(f) Languages do differ, but they also ha e a great deal in common. Learning a second
language is always, in some measure, repeating an old experience though some people like
Krashen [3] feel that nati e language is acquired and the second language is learnt.

Contrasti e Linguistics and Error Analysis: In learning the first language the learner's mind tries
to understand only one linguistic system and he is exposed to the first language all the time.
When he starts learning a second language, there is a clash between the system of the first
language and that of the second. When one language system becomes more or less a habit,
the learning of a second language becomes rather difficult. The mistakes made in the second
language are often due to:

(i) the gra itational pull of the first language/mother tongue;

(ii) internal analogy and o ergeneralization (e. g., childrens, furnitures, teached, bringed, a milk,
etc., are created on the basis of other items like boys, tables, walked, worked, a man, etc.);
(iii) pronunciation according to spelling;
(i ) bad teaching;
( ) exposure to the non-standard ariety used outside the classroom;
( i) the attitudes of community, those in power, the policy of the go ernment and such other
factors;
( ii) failure to understand the nature of the second language;
( iii) lack of adequate ocabulary; and
(ix) the cultural gap between the two systems. p

The comparison of two or more linguistic systems as they exist today (i. e., a synchronic
comparison) is known as contrasti e linguistics. The diachronic comparison of two or more
linguistic systems with a iew to classifying languages into families and finding out or
reconstructing a parent language from which related languages ha e de eloped, is known as
comparati e or historical linguistics. Contrasti e linguistics is only a predicti e technique. This
means that by looking at the structure of two or more linguistic systems we can predict the
difficulties the learner is likely to encounter; it does not mean that for all the mistakes a learner
makes in the second language, the first language habits alone are responsible. Contrasti e
linguistics explores both the dissimilarities and similarities of the linguistic systems compared.
The similarities can be properly exploited.

Contrasti e studies are undertaken not necessarily for language teaching purposes alone;
contrasti e studies may be useful in disco ering language uni ersals, studying problems in
translation, studying language types, etc. The synchronic comparison of languages may be
undertaken at any or all le els phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, cultural, etc. If
the languages are compared, it is called inter-lingual (i. e., contrasti e) comparison; if two
arieties of the same language are compared, it is intra-lingual comparison. Any linguistic
model-traditional, structural, transformational, etc.-can be used for comparing languages.

For example, if we use the transformational framework, we may compare the Ps rules and the
transformational processes in the two linguistic systems compared. The ad ances in linguistics
and the new insights ha e made it possible for us to be more methodical in our comparison on
languages.

Contrasti e linguistics is not a teaching technique. It can only help the teacher or the materials
writer to plan and grade teaching materials. E en nati e speakers make mistakes; they may be
just slips; The mistakes in the case of a nati e speaker do not become part of his linguistic
habit. There may be lapses, slips, stylistic oddities in his speech or writing.

Conclusion: Second language learners commit errors; mistakes that get fossilized are errors. As
Pit Corder points out in Introducing Applied Linguistics(1973),

learning a second language [1]

can be so regarded in exactly the same way that an infant learning his mother tongue can be
counted to posses a language of his own at each successi e stage of his learning career. A
learner's so-called errors are systematic, and it is precisely this regularity which shows that the
learner is following a set of rules. These rules are not those of the target language but a
transitional form of language similar in many respects to the target language, but also similar to
his mother tongue, or indeed any other language he may already command
(p. 149).

Some applied linguists like Selinker call the transitional form inter-language and some call it the
intermediary language. Some linguists say that the first language is caught and a second
language is taught; the first language is acquired and a second language is learnt. There are
others who argue that the processes of learning the first or the second language are the same.
Syllabus makers can make use of the descriptions of languages and contrasti e studies in
grading the items to be taught from known to unknown, similar to dissimilar, general rules to
exceptions, and from uni ersals to language-specific items. Not all the rules or habits of the first
language will result in errors and it is the job of contrasti e analysis to determine how far this is
the case and how much of the first language that is considered transferable facilitates the
learning of the second; Error analysis too has both practical and theoretical uses.

The learner, through his errors, pro ides examples of negati e learning. The applied linguist can
understand through the negati e instances (i. e., errors) what is going on when people learn
languages. Errors pro ide feedback and tell the teachers about the effecti eness of the teaching
materials and the teaching techniques.

Notes & References:

1. Corder, Pit. S. (1973), Introducing Applied Linguistics, Penguin
2. Widdowson, Henry, G. (1979), Explorations in Linguistics, ‘xford.
3. Krashen, S. D. (1981), Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning,
Pergamon
4. Mackey, W. F. (1965), Language Teaching Analysis, Longmans.
5. S. K. Verma& N. Krishnaswamy, (1989,2000),Modern Linguistics- An Introduction, ‘xford
Uni ersity Press
6. Bright, J. A. and McGregor, G. P. (1970), Teaching English as a Second Language, ELBS
and Longmanp