lopaedia Britannica 1974, p. 2/346). Educators, unfortunately, are not in a position to embrace an atomistic view, because they do not have the tools to identify, analyze, and modify all the overt behaviors which lead to learning or not learning--all the more the covert ones. It makes sense, therefore, that they hew closely to holistic theories which explain the parts (known and unknown) in terms of the whole. The learner is a whole organism, not an aggregate of parts, and the whole may or may not be greater than the sum of its parts.
Functionally, the learner is little concerned with surface structures (unless his goal is exclusively to pass a traditional State examination, or he is studying linguistics). Rather, he is eager to negotiate meanings, that is, to interface meaningfully with deep structures. Structural linguistics' prime concern is the production of "a catalogue of the linguistic elements of a language, and a statement of the positions in which they occur" (McArthur 1992, p.
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