Het Belang Van Taalkunde Voor de Toegepaste Taalkunde

Applied Linguistics is generally regarded as a multidisciplinary field in which didactics, psychology and linguistics participate. It is remarkable that within the context of foreign language teaching the focus is mainly on the didactic experiment and on the construction of psycholinguistic hypotheses. Yet for a linguistic-didactic experiment to be relevant, insight in what is to be taught, viz. language,is necessary. Many variants of language teaching could have been avoided with a better linguistic insight. Moreover, a better linguistic understanding in applied linguis-tics leads to a better distinction between the views of linguists on language didactics and psycholinguistics and the descriptions of language they give.In this paper the relation between grammar and vocabulary is discussed. It is argued that this distinction is based more on definition than on reality. Stressing the importance of the role of vocabulary does not imply denying or minimising the importance of grammar. On the contrary, the traditional task division in linguistics between grammar and lexicology has led to a sterile grammatical description. Recent tendencies in linguistics now show a more integrated description of grammar and vocabu-lary.Finally, with regard to the didactically important problem of vocabu-lary selection, some remarks are made concerning the difference between selection on the basis of linguistic properties and selection on the basis of usually arbitrary non-linguistic idiosyncrasies of words and the influence of this on teaching material. This is illustrated with examples from language courses.