Abstract
IT IS A TRUISM TO SAY that successful teaching strategies begin with, and build upon, the skills and competencies that students bring with them to class. But it is a useful truism, for it highlights the distance between our methods of teaching arrangement and what our students already know about it-know intuitively, simply as part of their language equipment, part of their being human. Consider, for example, the experiment devised by David G. Hays, a computational linguist: