The relevance, the application, and the importance of linguistics to teaching English as a foreign language is discussed. The author's assumption is that linguistics is "irrelevant to the aims, and inapplicable to the tasks of such teaching," and agrees with linguists such as Rosenbaum that the goal of linguistic science is "to determine inductively the laws governing the behavior of observable data." Developments in linguistics during the past 100 years can be grouped into three main movements: (1) Neogrammarianism, which introduced rigorous requirements of an exact science into historical linguistics by concentrating on the observation of phonetic phenomena; (2) Structuralism, which forcefully promoted the anthropological view that all human languages are equal in complexity of structure, and was responsible for the widely accepted view that linguistics is a panacea for all problems in every type of language-teaching activity; and (3) Transformationalism, which has not yet contributed anything new to an understanding of natural languages but has put linguistics in some theoretical perspective and freed it from the excessive preoccupation of the structuralists with taxonomic procedure. Some time ago, language teaching was freed from philology; quite recently language teaching was freed from literary studies; it should now be freed from linguistics. (AMM)