Chomskyan Linguistics

Within the Chomskyan theory, the principle of language is a mental fact seems to be the most revealing at theoretical level but seems not to yield a lot at the practical level. Theoretically, he seems to succeed in proving that the Bloomfieldian school was wrong. He rejects the Bloomfield’s mechanistic stimulus-response-reinforcement chain and proposes the mental process of language acquisition (Chomsky: 1965, 6). He is very convincing in theorizing with his Phrase Structure (PS) Rule that undergoes within the brain of human being. Therefore, it is abstract. Due to this abstractness, the direct application of Chomskyan linguistic theory in the field of TEFL seems not to give much benefit. In this context, Krashen’s (1982) Monitor Theory can be the best interpretation of the Chomskyan theory for the benefit of TESL/TEFL. Krashen believes that the language acquisition device (LAD) does the processing of comprehensible input into the acquired competence. His acquisition and learning terms in the Monitor Theory are different from each other; the former is the L2 competence resulting from the LAD being exposed to natural language use, whereas the latter is the result of formal teaching and learning. It is obvious that Krashen’s monitor theory is strongly mentalistic in nature, just as Chomsky’s linguistic theory which is also strongly mentalistic. Both theories try to account for the nature of mental grammar or linguistic competence, L2 competence and L1 competence. For example, the child of English-speaking country can say, “You can have this,” directly when her friend doesn’t have any doll with her as the result of acquisition. But, here, a university student of Indonesian will say, “He cans do it”; or “I am go to Surabaya” because of the result of poor learning. It means that the child of an English speaking country acquires the language so it makes her get the competence-she can produce novel unlimited numbers of sentences perfectly as the lateralization process completed. Whereas, an Indonesian have poor result because the process of lateralization (critical period) of her brain has already completed, so that it is difficult to have a native-like language. Therefore, in teaching EFL the teachers should be patient.