DEVEl.OPlNG LISTENING FLUENCY

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Any discrimination learning is much more difficult for an anxious person. Therefore, any receptive skill, such as listening and reading, which is primarily discrimination learning, is made more difficult through task overload and the corresponding anxiety which is created. There are numerous studies which indicate that forcing a student to respond orally--to speak before he has a good foundation, before he is ready--is a major cause of poor articulation, accent and grammatical control. This generally results from practicing speaking while task overloaded. Even imitation is a very complex task and can create task overload.
At a minimum, it can be shown that imitation requires perception, storage,
organization of output, and motor output. In addition, before the storage phase there
will be interaction if the material is interpretable.⁴²
In a study which reviewed a large number of experimental reports within the aerospace industry, Greer et al. point out that when a subject is task overloaded, errors increase and there is a tendency to revert to previously learned generalizations rather than make the specific distinctions required at that point.⁴³As Gaier has expressed it:
...it leads to an impairment in the ability to improvise in an unstructured and/or new
situation. This results in stereotyped, habitual and familiar approaches that may be
maladaptive in the situation.⁴⁴
In foreign language learning, this means that as a person becomes task overloaded by trying to speak and say more than he is able to, he will revert back to the habit formations he knows best, those of his native tongue. The results are speaking the words of the new language with sound habits and/or grammatical patterns of the old language. If done often enough in this state of task overload, they become habits transferred to the new language.

What is the new paradigm? The paradigm assumes that language performance, such as speaking, occurs after language competence has been acquired and is guided by that acquired competence. The new paradigm focuses attention on the acquisition of language by the central nervous system as distinguished from the learning of a language as a public communication tool. In other words, it is concerned with acquiring language competence rather than learning a language performance.

How did this change of focus come about? It derives from a paradigm shift in linguistics as well as a paradigm shift in psychology. At about the same time that money began pouring in to support the "A-L" paradigm, Chomsky launched an attack on it.⁴⁵His principle assumptive shift was in the nature of language itself. He did not view language as "talk" or "communication", but as "an internal representation of a system of rules that determine how sentences are to be formed, used and understood."⁴⁶Since the initial shift of focus, transformational grammar proponents have spent a great deal of time formulating new linguistic characterizations of sentence structure which would be compatible with a central nervous .system's capacity to handle information. This has interested cognitive psycholo- gists and some have gone beyond Chomsky's assumption. Bransford and Johnson remind us that language is more than a linguistic set of rules determined by the language community. It is also a symbolic system used by individuals.
Since 1957 (Chomsky, 19S7), the area of language has received increasing attention
from psychologists. Linguistic characterizations of sentence structure have played
important roles in formulating theories of sentence perception, comprehension and
memory. The emphasis on characterization of the linguistic system has tended to
overshadow another problem however, namely that a language is a symbol system
that is used by individuals. A consideration of the individual's contributions to the
processes