EXPLODING THE THEORY OF UNIVERSALS IN ADULT 2ND-LANGUAGE TEACHING

Drawing on insights made available by the teaching of English in a con text where there already exists an institutionalized New Variety of En glish, and calculatedly adopting a somewhat conservative generative li nguistic model, the paper discusses a bilingual teaching strategy that , it argues, will permit the Universalist Hypothesis (UH) to be purpos ively exploited in L2 classroom in a way that would dispel teachers' s cepticism about the relevance of such linguistic abstractios to their tasks. The strategy attempts to reconcile the best insights of the Con trastive Hypothesis and the Identity Hypothesis, by looking at the mat ching process (MP) learners naturally carry out across L1 and L2 in ne ither the merely negative terms of the former nor the merely positive terms of the latter, Where the languages share universal features, it will assist the MP to go through. Where there are variations in the wa y in which they draw on and realize the universals, resulting in learn ing problems, it will help awaken learners to an intuitive awareness o f universal possibilities which are used by L2 but which, owing to the ir nonuse or different use by L1, lie dormant in their own L1 influenc ed language faculty. Formalizing the MP as it is sophisticatedly carri ed out in contact situations by competent bilinguals (who, after atl, are what successful teaching courses would produce) by means of a cons truct called Interlinguistic Transderivations (ITD), the paper will in dicate how the strategy will carry out both these tasks along the line s suggested by these ITD.