able to master various sentence structures completely is that the operations needed to express or comprehend the sentences may overload the child's information processing resources. As the child develops strategies for reducing this load, these sentences become more and more manageable" (Carroll, 1986, p. 349). Lexical and syntactic structures are learned only as they serve the communication needs as perceived by the learner. Needs, of course, increase in sophistication with the accumulation of experience and increasing social involvement.
"As a result of current theory that proposes and empirical research that indicates the importance of prespeaking in language development, it has become increasingly commonplace for L2 teachers to deemphasize speaking and to emphasize listening in the early stages of L2 instruction" (Dunkel, 1933, p. 265).
"In the beginning was the Word..." (The Gospel According to St. John). All thoughts are constructed of words. But... to make up words, doesn't one need thoughts first? "In the beginning was the Thought..." (The Gospel According to Doubting Thomas). This argument sounds like the one about the chicken and the egg. Yet, its consideration is pertinent to language education. Should the student first learn vocabulary or first acquire communicative behaviors which by their very nature involve meanings from which words are inferred? (Or is it the opposite: "words from which meanings are inferred"? Or are both processes concurrent?) Should learning precede acquisition, or vice versa? Or, perhaps, should they be simultaneous? Traditional methodologies fill brain cells with cognitive input. Direct methods fill brain cells with parrot language. Communicative methodologies fill brain cells with sensory input. A brain filled with data is not operational if it has not developed application subsystems. A brain filled with sensations is hardly operational if it lacks data with which to construct communicative ...