Page:Adapting and Writing Language Lessons.pdf/106

Rh : Strictly speaking, no social content at all, since they are intended only for practice in repetition.


 * Quite non-specific. Even the teacher and the student can hardly be said to be playing genuine social roles in a substitution drill of the type:




 * As stated above, introductions and morning greeting.


 * None. (see above)


 * Statements about locations, occupations, states, classification (see substitution frames on p.85). The content words in the grammatical sections are either common nouns, personal names, or adjectives. Except for the personal names, none of the content words that appear in one type of statement ever appears in another. Each list of nouns refers to several different real-life contexts, e.g. class, church, bed.

In summary, the linguistic content of this lesson is delineated with unusual clarity; the topical content is clear enough, but is unified only in terms of a grammatical criterion; the social content is almost entirely concentrated in the dialogs, which have no close relationship to the rest of the lesson.