Noam Chomsky and his Influence on Language Learning

Noam Chomsky is the most influential linguist of the twentieth century — and, paradoxically, one of the most influential figures in language teaching who never proposed a teaching method. His impact on how foreign languages are taught is real but almost entirely indirect, and it rests on three events: his 1959 review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, which demolished the theoretical foundation of behaviorist language teaching; his distinction between competence and performance, which redefined what it means to “know” a language; and his nativist theory of language acquisition, which opened the door to the acquisition-based approaches of the 1970s and 1980s. Chomsky himself, meanwhile, repeatedly warned teachers not to expect recipes from theoretical linguistics.

Born in 1928 and associated with MIT for virtually his entire career, Chomsky introduced transformational-generative grammar, formulated the Chomsky hierarchy of formal grammars, and developed the theory of universal grammar. To the general public he is at least as well known for his political writing, but within the language sciences his program triggered what is now called the cognitive revolution: the shift from studying observable behavior to studying the mental systems behind it. Language teaching felt that shift within a decade.

The 1959 review and the end of behaviorism in language teaching

In 1957 the psychologist B. F. Skinner published Verbal Behavior, the most ambitious attempt ever made to explain language as learned behavior: utterances as responses to stimuli, shaped by reinforcement — the culmination of the behaviorist view of language. Chomsky’s 1959 review of the book in the journal Language is probably the most consequential book review in the history of the language sciences. He argued that Skinner’s core concepts — stimulus, response, reinforcement — either lose all precision when transferred from the laboratory to ordinary speech or turn into empty metaphors; that speakers routinely produce and understand sentences they have never encountered, which no inventory of conditioned habits can explain; and that children converge on the grammar of their language far beyond what the input alone would justify.

For language classrooms the blast radius was enormous, because the dominant method of the era — the audio-lingual method — was built explicitly on behaviorist foundations: learning as habit formation through mimicry, memorization and pattern drills. The review knocked the theory out from under the method. The practice took longer to fall: it was the accumulating empirical disappointments — Wilga Rivers’ critique in 1964, and the large-scale Pennsylvania Project (1970), which found no advantage for audiolingual classrooms — that finished the job. But after 1959 the method’s claim to be “scientific” was gone, and by the early 1970s language pedagogy was openly searching for a new theoretical basis.

Competence and performance: what teaching took from it

In Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) Chomsky drew the distinction that language teaching absorbed most deeply: competence — the implicit, internalized system of rules that lets a speaker produce and judge an unlimited number of new sentences — versus performance, the actual use of language in concrete situations, with all its slips, hesitations and memory limits. Knowing a language, in this view, is not owning a stock of sentences; it is owning the system that generates them.

Didactics took three lasting things from this. First, a new goal: if the endpoint of learning is an internal generative system, then a learner who has drilled a thousand patterns but cannot form a new sentence has not learned the language — “rule-governed creativity” replaced habit as the definition of success. Second, a new attitude to errors: in S. Pit Corder’s famous 1967 reframing, learner errors are not failed habits to be stamped out but evidence that the learner is actively constructing and testing an internal grammar — the research program that became the study of interlanguage. Third, a productive opposition: the sociolinguist Dell Hymes objected that Chomsky’s competence was too narrow, because knowing a language also means knowing when, to whom and how to say things — and coined communicative competence.

Chomsky’s own reservations

The most honest thing that can be said about “Chomsky’s influence on language teaching” is that Chomsky himself never claimed any. Invited to address the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in 1966, he opened with a warning that has been quoted ever since: “I am, frankly, rather skeptical about the significance, for the teaching of languages, of such insights and understanding as have been attained in linguistics and psychology.”

This was not false modesty. Theoretical linguistics, he argued, studies the nature of the human language faculty; it is in a state of flux, its results are tentative, and it offers no classroom techniques. Teachers should judge any proposal critically on its merits rather than adopt it because it carries the authority of science — the mistake, he implied, that had just been made with behaviorism and audiolingualism. Everything in language pedagogy that is called “Chomskyan” is therefore an extrapolation — made by applied linguists, not by Chomsky.

The indirect legacy: Krashen and communicative language teaching

The most visible extrapolation is Stephen Krashen’s. His Monitor Model — above all the comprehensible input hypothesis — transplants Chomskyan innatism into second language teaching: adults, Krashen argued, still have access to the same innate acquisition capacity as children, so languages are acquired not by studying rules but by understanding messages slightly beyond the current level (his “i+1”). The acquisition/learning distinction echoes competence/performance. None of it is Chomsky’s own work — he never endorsed it — but without him it is unthinkable.

The second line runs through opposition. Communicative language teaching, today’s dominant approach worldwide, was built on Hymes’ communicative competence — a concept formulated as a corrective to Chomsky’s. The genealogy is dialectical but real: Chomsky supplied the very frame (“what does a speaker know?”) that others filled with social and interactional content. Between Krashen’s input-driven acquisition and CLT’s meaning-driven communication, the two most influential currents of the past half-century both trace back, by different routes, to the same 1959 review.

What this means for language learning

Three of Chomsky’s lessons survive every change of pedagogical fashion. The target of learning is an internalized system, not a rulebook: you have learned a structure when you can produce new sentences with it, not when you can recite its description — the difference between generative and normative grammar. That system is built by an active mind from rich input — as the nativist account of acquisition suggests and as Krashen turned into pedagogy — which is why processing and producing large numbers of whole sentences beats pure rule study. And errors along the way are information about a developing grammar, not damage to be prevented at all costs — which is why drilling designed to prevent errors failed as a general method. Learning systems built on whole-sentence input, active recall and systematic repetition, such as the Taalhammer method, are practical descendants of exactly these lessons.

Frequently asked questions

Did Noam Chomsky create a language teaching method?

No. Chomsky never proposed a teaching method and explicitly denied that his linguistics implies one. His influence on teaching is indirect: he removed the scientific justification of behaviorist drilling, redefined what “knowing a language” means, and inspired researchers — Krashen most visibly — who did build pedagogical theories.

Why did a book review change how languages are taught?

Because the dominant method of the 1950s and 1960s, audiolingualism, justified itself by behaviorist psychology. Chomsky’s 1959 review argued that behaviorism cannot explain ordinary language use at all. Once the theory fell, the method lost its mandate; classroom studies soon confirmed that drilling did not deliver, and the field moved on.

Is Chomsky still relevant to language learners today?

The technical machinery of his grammar theories matters little to learners, and parts of his acquisition theory remain contested — usage-based linguists explain acquisition without an innate grammar. But the three practical insights that entered teaching through him — competence as the goal, learners as active grammar-builders, errors as evidence of progress — are common ground in modern language pedagogy.

Sources

Noam Chomsky, “A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior”, Language 35(1), 1959.
Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, MIT Press, 1965.
Noam Chomsky, “Linguistic Theory”, in R. G. Mead, Jr. (ed.), Language Teaching: Broader Contexts, Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, 1966.
S. Pit Corder, “The Significance of Learners’ Errors”, IRAL 5(4), 1967.
Dell Hymes, “On Communicative Competence”, in J. B. Pride, J. Holmes (eds.), Sociolinguistics, Penguin, 1972.
Stephen D. Krashen, Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition, Pergamon Press, 1982.
Jack C. Richards, Theodore S. Rodgers, Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching, 3rd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2014.