FOUR EXPERIMENTS ON THE RELATION BETWEEN FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING AND LEARNING*

Abstract

University level students studying English as a foreign language participated in four language learning experiments which were conducted within the framework of existing EFL courses. The experiments indicated (1) that language learning is not related to amount of formal language instruction for those students concurrently enrolled in academic classes, and (2) that sequential mastery of materials is not necessary for learning in an intensive foreign language program. Even the possibility that sentences of a foreign language can be mastered in any order in which they are presented is questioned. The findings were interpreted in support of the view that the most efficient foreign language learning is informal and occurs when the learner must make communicative use of the language variety to be learned, and that the internal structure underlying a set of sentences of a foreign language is not completely learned by presentation and practice of that set of sentences.

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