When our Secretary, George Winchester Stone, asked me last July to address this meeting on the general topic of language teaching and linguistics, it was only with considerable hesitation that I finally agreed to accept. There has been far too much loose talk recently about the application of linguistics to language teaching, and I did not wish to add to it. In some circles linguistics has turned into a sort of fad. There are those who talk of the “linguistic method” of language teaching, as if to oppose it to some hypothetical “non-linguistic method” used in the benighted past. And at meetings of language teachers, bright young things walk up to me and ask, apparently in all seriousness: “Excuse me, professor, but would you please tell me how linguistics handles the subjunctive?” Needless to say, I have no answers to such questions; they merely embarrass me. Linguistics is not a teaching method, but a growing body of knowledge and theory; and though it may offer helpful answers to some of the problems of language teaching, it surely does not know all the answers.