Adapting and Writing Language Lessons/Chapter 2

by Earl W. Stevick

CHAPTER 2

WORKING ASSUMPTIONS, AND
THE MODULAR APPROACH
TO MATERIALS DEVELOPMENT

. . . one

One only, one thing that was firm, even no
Greater than a cricket's horn, no more than
A thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech
Of the self that must sustain itself on
Speech, one thing remaining, infallible,
Would be enough.

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

Wallace Stevens

The preceding chapter was concerned with the foundations of language teaching and language learning in general. One of the special problems within that area is the preparation of suitable written or recorded materials, and that is the subject to which we shall now turn. Continuous involvement in materials development for seldom-taught languages for 20 years in over a dozen languages, and consultation with writers in dozens of others, has frequently raised doubts whether those of us who sustain ourselves on the speech of others can find even one thing infallible to satisfy our minds. Instead, we shall present here five working assumptions which have stood the test of time, and then outline an approach which seems to be consistent with them. The assumptions concern respectively 'Usability,' 'Organization,' 'Responsiveness,' 'Responsibility,' and 'Pluralism.' The approach to writing materials is 'modular.' ASSUMPTION I ('USABILITY').

I know
The power of words.

It is nothing!
A fallen

Petal under
A dancer's heel.

But man
In his soul, his lips, in his bones…

Frederick Seidel

Man is by necessity a language-using animal, but as an adult he is only for convenience a language-learning one. The first assumption therefore is that people learn features of a language best if they use those features immediately for their own purposes, instead of just mimicking, memorizing and manipulating forms. ^[1],^[2] This assumption is inconsistent with the time-honored practice of delaying 'free conversation' until the student is 'ready' for it-usually sometime near the end of the second semester or second year.

In this respect, it is worthwhile to distinguish between 'real' and 'realistic' use of language. I really use the question 'What time is it?' only if (a) I don't know what time it is and (b) I want to know what time it is. I can use the same question realistically if I can foresee the time when I might really use it.

Pictures, role plays, foreign coins and the like are stimulants to sharpen the student's foresight in this sense, and in this way to increase the available range of realistic practice. Some completely grammatical sentences are susceptible of neither real nor realistic use: 'The child sees vegetables in the after-noon.' Others might possibly find real use, but in such restricted circumstances that realistic practice is impossible to arrange: 'I live in the eighth city.'

Even 'real' communication in a foreign language mayor may not be 'authentic.' If it is in the language that for the two interlocutors would be the natural one to use at that time, on that topic, then it is authentic; otherwise it is not. One of the peculiar skills, and a mark of dedication of a good language teacher (provided of course that he could be communicating with the student more easily in some other language) is his ability and willingness to carry on communication that is at the same time real and non-authentic. One of the mistakes of the unskilled teacher is to assume that because communication is not authentic, it can at best be realistic.^[3] The degree of tolerance for pretense (i.e. non-real and/or non-authentic use of words) may in fact be a major component of what looks like a difference in language aptitude between academically-oriented trainees (e.g. Peace Corps 'A.B. generalists') and other kinds of trainees (e.g. older Volunteers, skilled craftsmen).

One recent training program not only used materials (see Appendix L) which were drawn from the trainees' trade (diesel mechanics), but also brought in monolingual French-speaking apprentices for the trainees to teach their trade to. Results were encouraging, though a single experiment is necessarily inconclusive.

Corollary 1 to the assumption on usability. Each new word and each new grammatical feature should be used (not just practiced), either really or realistically, as early as possible. It should be used as often as necessary to integrate it into the student's repertoire and to improve his chances of retaining it.

Corollary 2 to the assumption on usability. other things being equal, spontaneous material is better than pre-existing printed material. This is because language is really used only as a part of life. Printed materials are at best a record of past life (or of a past guess as to what the present would be like); at worst, they bear very little relation to life past, present or future.

ASSUMPTION II ('ORGANIZATION')

On the elementary level, there must be order in the introduction of new phonological, grammatical and lexical problems, and systematic drill on alien mechanical features, and some way of organizing classroom procedures.^[4]

ASSUMPTION III ('RESPONSIVENESS').

Hawthorne and Emerson met on the wood paths of Concord, and passed on, Emerson with his head full of bright futuriti es and relevances, Hawthorne with his head full of the irrelevant past… We revere Emerson, the prophet whose prophecies came true…, but we find in [Hawthorne's] work a complex, tangled an revolutionary vision of the soul, which we recognize as our own.

Emerson spoke nobly about relevance.
Hawthorne was relevant.

The moral is that it is hard to tell at any given moment what is relevant.

Robert Penn Warren

Our third assumption is that individuals, but also groups, vary widely not only in general language aptitude, in their emotional involvement with the new language, and in the degree of pre-existing motivation, but also in the lexical content that they can make immediate use of, in the approaches that they will put up with, and in the methods that are appropriate for them. Some students, but only some, can profit from spending the first 15 hours of class on phonological drills; some students, but only some, want to start out with 'What's your name and where are you from? some but only some thrive on the memorization of dialogs one group plans to drill wells for two years, another group plans to teach English, and still another expects to monitor radio broadcasts. Tolerance for one or another approach depends partly on the coordinator or supervisor of the program, partly on the past experience of the students themselves.^[5]

The assumption about 'responsiveness' is close to the issue of 'relevance' that looms so large in the entire world of education today. We must not be too facile either in accepting a language text as 'relevant' merely because it is job-related, or in rejecting it as 'irrelevant' just because it spends most of the first lessons in talking about colored blocks of wood. As we have pointed out in chapter 1 (p.23f), the needs and interests that any student has, and to which a course may relate, are many and complex. Nevertheless, there are irrelevant courses, and almost any textbook may be made either more or less relevant to a given class.

ASSUMPTION IV ('RESPONSIBILITY')

…the students [of history] read what they pleased and compared their results. As pedagogy, nothing could have been more triumphant… No difficulty stopped them; unknown languages yielded before their attack, and customary law became as familiar as the police court.

Henry Adams

We assume that, other things being equal, the program will be more effective if the students and instructors feel that they have some control over both content and method. Materials ought therefore to provide for transferring to the users as much responsibility as they are prepared to handle. There are undoubtedly certain functions which will remain with the teacher and supervisor throughout the training period, but in general, growth in the skills and attitudes of increasing self-sufficiency in language study are an important part of the aims of any well-run language program^[6]

Note that this assumption is inconsistent with exclusive or nearly exclusive reliance on programmed self-instruction or other highly authoritarian systems of teaching.

ASSUMPTION V ('PLURALISM')

I do not think that we should assume that there is always one point of vantage from which we can equally see the front and the back, the inside and the outside, the left and the right.

Fred Householder

Householder's words about phonological theory apply also to language teaching. Our final assumption is that no one format, and no one system however ingenious, can be sufficient for even one student or group of students. What has been seen only once will not be perceived, and what has been perceived from only one point of view will not be assimilated.^[7] If a student uses the Swahili verb stem -kaza 'set, emphasize' with genuine understanding, or as a native speaker would, then he must have met it more than once. If he has met it five times, he has met it in five different contexts. He has not only met the word in varied contexts, he has also seen that -kaza is related to -kaa 'stay, sit,reside' as -jaza 'fill' is related to -ja 'become full.' Or again, the student who can really handle tag questions (isn't he, didn't they, etc.) in English has probably memorized them (intentionally or not) as parts of fixed phrases or whole dialogs, he has explored them systematically either through drills or in some more overtly 'cognitive' way, and he has used them in unstructured conversations. Procedures and systems and approaches supplement one another more than they supersede one another.

A MODULAR APPROACH TO MATERIALS DEVELOPMENT

Most language courses violate some or all of these five assumptions. One reason is that they attempt to be too massive and too permanent. Great quantities of curricular concrete and steel are assembled and formed into a mighty bridge across the chasm, in anticipation that the oncoming traffic (the students) will want to cross at just the point where the bridge is.

This anticipation is often disappointed. When it is, the Golden Gate-style course fails on responsiveness (Assumption III), it almost always fails to provide for user responsibility (Assumption IV), and often it is not directly usable (in the sense of Assumption I). Its one strength (unless it is poorly constructed even by its own standards) is in organization, and superior organization alone will not produce superior results.

Most of the textbooks that this writer has used or helped to produce have tried to be more or less massive bridges. The needs and the mood of the students have never been exactly those that the course was written for, but the discrepancies have often been small enough so that some kind of useful result could be achieved. In this, as in many other respects, experience with Peace Corps language training has provided stimulating, if discomforting, ventilation of old complacencies. Students' specialized interests are at the same time more specialized; trainees are more conscious of their own dissatisfaction with both content and method; instructors are mostly willing but inexperienced, brought up in an educational system that knows nothing of audio-lingual materials. Peace Corps programs have also demonstrated the value of giving to the users--both the students and the instructors--a certain amountof leeway for their own creativity. These observations point toward a new approach to materials development, one which has seemed more appropriate for Peace Corps needs, but which also seems promising for programs of a more conventional sort. The label that has been applied to this approach is 'modular.'^[8] The modular principle may be applied on at least two different scales.

On a large scale, it means that instead of a single volume, with drills, notes, dialogs and what-not all printed and bound in fixed order relative to one another, there are separate fascicles, or 'modules,' which can be used (or discarded!) individually, or in various combinations with one another. Instead of building a bridge, we supply a set of pontoons. Each major component of the course takes the form of one or more modules. One fascicle may consist of phonological drills; another may be a very brief reference grammar that covers only those matters that are of high text frequency; another may consist of dialogs, with cross references to the short grammar in lieu of separate grammatical notes. Some of the less common types of module are described in Appendices G,H,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,R,S,T,U.

Within a single 'lesson,' or 'unit,' the modular principle suggests that the several components (dialogs, drills, etc.) be designed so that they may be rearranged to suit the convictions of various kinds of user, and so that the individual components may be replaced with minimum disturbance to the rest of the lesson. For examples, see Chapter 4 and Appendices G,I,J,K.

One advantage of modular construction is that it allows for more user responsibility (Assumption IV): a class that wants to spend the first 15 hours on phonology can do so, but a class that finds that kind of activity unmotivating can wait until what is for them a more appropriate time. Dialog memorization, newspaper reading and study of grammar may proceed in any order, or simultaneously. A second advantage is that, for example, a set of readings or dialogs appropriate for well-diggers may be replaced by a set appropriate for TB control workers without tearing the whole course apart. (For examples, see Chapter 4 and Appendix G.)

In any case, modular construction may lead to greater responsiveness (Assumption III) and hence to greater usability (Assumption I). An incidental advantage for the overworked writer who is producing materials on marginal time is that one fascicle can be completed and put into use in a small fraction of the time it takes to write a complete course.

It may be objected that drawing on an array of modules and combining them into a successful course places heavy demands on the teacher's ingenuity and judgment. That is certainly true. But exactly the same is true if one is to teach successfully from a printed course, bound between covers, conceived and written by strangers who were removed by many months and many hundreds of miles from one's present students.

Modularity is a principle or an approach, and not a method. Specifically, as Allen Weinstein has pointed out (private communication)

If a student needs a certain amount of material, and the material exists in a corpus, then breaking that corpus up into a series of 'modules' which may be presented in any order at his choice does not represent a modular approach, since all paths eventually lead to the same spot.…If a student has to use all the available modules to reach his goal, his instruction has not been modular.

The modular. principle is of course not new. It is implied by the existence of alternate, parallel versions of some courses, and by series of optional readers that have been prepared for some of the more widely taught languages. Beyond that, however, it has seldom been followed either consciously or very far. To my knowledge, the earliest deliberate attempt to produce an array of modules was in Swift (1963), for Kituba. This was a set of one central and five optional fascicles which for reasons of economy were bound in a single volume.

According to Swift's introduction:

This course consists of a 'primer' in the language and five subject-oriented groups of lessons. The primer is intended to introduce the major grammatical structures of the language, to develop in the student an adequate pronunciation, and to present a certain amount of useful vocabulary for a variety of situations. The primer is prerequisite to the rest of the course, and the student is expected to go through it in order, as each unit presupposes the vocabulary and the grammar of the earlier ones.

The subject-oriented lesson groups all presuppose the vocabulary and grammar of the entire primer, and each group is intended to be studied from the beginning--the vocabulary within a given group being cumulative. However, no subjectoriented lesson group depends in any way on any other group so that the student is free to pursue his study of these lesson groups in any order after he has finished the primer.

This arrangement is intended to provide maximum flexibility. The class with only a few hours of time to devote to classroom drill with an instructor may find it possible to cover the primer only. Students with more time will wish to select such of the subject fields covered in the later lessons as are of most interest to them. Students in intensive courses with at least 300 hours of class and laboratory will be able to cover the entire content of the course. An additional element of flexibility is provided in that the primer may be used as an introduction to be followed by more specialized subject-oriented lessons which are not included in this course but which may be constructed by an instructor or a linguist to meet the specialized needs of particular students.

Similarly, in the introduction to Adams, Modular Vietnamese (1970, unpublished) we read:

This elementary course in Vietnamese is composed of several different 'modules.' Each module is a series of related lessons which will guide the student toward accurate conversation on a particular topic. It does not matter whether the student begins his study of Vietnamese conversing, say, about geography, street directions, or personal matters; each module begins at the beginning.

In 1968, MacDougall produced for the Peace Corps her deliberately modular Active Introduction to Sinhala. In this set of materials, one module introduces the writing system. A second is a grammatical sketch of Sinhala. The third consists mainly of a series of Cummings devices (p. 310-314). This series is broken into a subseries on classroom expressions, a subseries on matters of general conversation, and further subseries on specialized topics such as rice growing and the preparation of food.

A set of fourteen modules has been developed by Goodison and the staff of the Foreign Service Institute's Russian language section. These materials are designed especially to fit the scope and nature of Russian training at the Institute, and are therefore unpublished. They include an introduction to pronunciation and to printed and handwritten letters: a series of lessons based on using a simplified table-top model of Moscow; narratives and conversations suitable for use with the table-top model; introductory, intermediate and advanced readings taken from newspaper advertisements and announcements; general or specialized newspaper stories, charts and maps on the economic geography of the Soviet Union; selections from a sixth-grade geography book used in the soviet Union.

This book is itself written on the modular principle. Chapter 3, which explains much of the distinctive terminology, should not be omitted, but the chapters may otherwise be read in any order.

Most chapters are followed by one or more appendices, many of which are also largely self-contained.

1. In Chapter 1, quoted material usually formed a part of the argument, and so was included in the body of the text. In this chapter most of the quotations are corroborative, in order to make the assumptions seem less idiosyncratic. Accordingly, they have been relegated to footnotes.
2. Rivers (1964, p.128): 'If [the student's] work in a foreign language class has caused him to perceive the manipulation of linguistic structures and the repetition of foreign language phrases as "class exercises," unrelated to reallife concerns, then these are not likely to spring to his mind in a real-life situation… [In order to bring about good transfer of set and attitudes], the classroom must simulate [real life] as closely as possible.' 'Important as it is to make clear to the student what he is doing, it is equally important to relate the drills to his own interest.' (p.153)
   Rivers (1968) '…students must be trained from the first to apply what they have memorized, or practiced in drills, in communication situations…' (p.46) '[After drilling], the next, most important step is the opportunity for the student to demonstrate that he can use the structure…in…actual…communication.' (p.196)
   Carroll (1966): Among the facts which have accumulated in the study of verbal learning is: 'The more meaningful the material to be learned, the greater the facility in learning and retention.' (p.105)

   Halliday et ale (1964): '[One of the propitious circumstances that can favour language learning is] the amount of experienceof the language received by the learner, provided that this experience is meaningful.' (p.l8l) 'Human beings learn more rapidly and effectively if they have a reason for doing so.'(p.182)

   Prator (1964) puts the matter more bluntly:

   1. Communication; is always accompanied by understanding.
   2. Communication requires that the student himself supply the sounds, words, and structures needed to express his thought.
   1. This concept of communication may prove more important to the language teacher than either programed,learning or transformational analysis.

   Compare also 'Lambert's principle,' Chapter 1, p. 23.

3. This emphasis on real communication, although it receives strong support from many .authorities (footnote 2), is of course by no means universally accepted. So Benton(1970, p.), introducing a textbook which makes almost no provision for exploitation of the present realities of a training site, urges the student to 'be willing to cooperate in that "suspension of disbelief" which will enable him to become a real participant in an imaginary event.'
4. The professional consensus on the need for organization hardly needs documentation. As stated by Hutchinson (in Valdman, 1966, p. 225) 'Language is complex; language learning is complex. It takes a variety of organized activities to teach language successfully, for the art and science of teaching include the judicious selection, timing, measuring and blending of the many ingredients involved.' The level of agreement on this point is exceeded only by the level of disagreement on just what principles, procedures and formats should provide that organization. A good general treatment in terms of 'limitation,' 'grading,' 'presentation' and 'testing' is found in Halliday et al (1964) chapter 7; Mackey (1965), especially in Part 2 (Method Analysis), is encyclopedic on this subject. Kelly (1969) provides a readable diachronic view of the same matter.
5. To cite one of a number of possible sources, Carroll (in Valdman 1966, p.96) asserts that 'one of the best-established findings of educational research is that a major source of variation in pupil learning is the teacher's ability to promote that learning. Exactly what this ability consists of is not certain, but we have strong evidence that along with knowledge of subject matter there is involved the teacher's ability to organize this content and present it with due regard for the pupil's ability and readiness to acquire it.'
6. Thus Ruopp (1969, p. 6) 'Techniques, [for any kind of training] should involve the trainee in the learning process as actively as possible, and the process should itself equip him for adapting and improving his field performance. That is, the activities he engages in during training should be consistent with the problem-solving behavior expected of him [on the job].'
7. Valdman (in Mueller, 1968): '…a foreign language course [should not) be based on too narrow a model of language learning.'

   G. Miller (quoted in Rivers 1964, p. 12~): 'The process of organizing and reorganizing 1S a pervas1ve human trait,… motivated at least in part by an attempt to make the best possible use of our mnemonic capacity.'

   Rivers (1964, p.94): 'If [the teacher] wishes to induce each [student] to behave, he must see to it that the methods he employs are sufficiently varied…'

   In my discussion (stevick, 1963) of techniques, I have sometimes forgotten that what may be 'blind alleys' undersome circumstances may be useful 'technemes' (Stevick, 1959) under others. Anisfeld (in Valdman 1966, p.114) quotes William James: 'The secret of a good memory is …the secret of forming diverse and multiple associations with every fact we care to retain.' Anisfeld then goes to show how the experience that was behind James' statement can be interpreted better when seen from the point of view of information processing.

8. One of the first to apply this term was William F. Mackey.