I think it is true to saying that, in general, language teachers (1) have paid little attention to the way sentences are used in combination to form stretches of disconnected discourse. They have tended to take (2) their cue from the grammarian and have concentrated to the teaching (3) of sentences as self-contained units. It is true that these are often represented in "contexts" and strung together in dialogues and reading passages, but these are essentially setting to make the (4) formal properties of the sentences stand out more clearly, properties which are then established in the learner’s brain by means of practice (5) drill and exercises. Basically, the language teaching unit is the (6) sentence as a formal linguistic object. The language teachers’ view of what that constitutes knowledge of a language is essentially the same (7) as Chomsky’s knowledge of a syntactic structure of sentences, (8) and of the transformational relations which hold them. Sentences are seen as paradigmatically rather than syntagmatically related. Such a knowledge "provides the basis for the actual use of language by the speaker-hearer". The assumption that the language appears to (9) make is that once this basis is provided, then the learner will have no difficulty in the dealing with the actual use of language. (10)