Abstract
The topic of the present paper is the relation between linguistics and language
education. Put as a question one could ask: 'what benefit can linguistics have
for language teaching?'. It will be claimed that as a precondition, language teachers
should have more than just marginal insight into theories of natural language.
I will try to support this postulate using sentences with modal verbs: based on
a certain linguistic theory, illustrations of sentences with modal verbs will
be given. These illustrations are thought to be a first step for a didactic preparation
(transformation) of explanations given by a linguistic theory for natural language
phenomena. As a consequence of the considerations it will be postulated that it
is obligatory for the education of teachers to include linguistic modules, since,
in line with the hypothesis of this paper, insight into linguistic theories can
help:
1) to understand phenomena of natural language and
2) to find a didactical preparation for the phenomena in question.