Page:Adapting and Writing Language Lessons.pdf/108

Rh As we have seen, the dominant dimension in this course and the one according to which the lessons are sequenced, is the linguistic. The goal of an adaptation will therefore be to enable the students, in relation to the existing linguistic framework as much as possible, to use the language in. a connected and communicative way in one or more contexts that are meaningful to them. We shall aim at non-linguistic occasions for use that have the students getting acquainted with each other and with the immediate area in which they live. The most obvious and also the simplest first step is to change 'good morning' in the second dialog to 'good evening,' since our students go to night school.

A much larger step, also in the lexical realm, is to introduce the names of local destinations: 'grade school, high school, gas station, restaurant, parking lot' etc., alongside or instead of the non-specific 'work, class, bed' etc. There are four advantages in doing so: (1) The destinations may be readily and cheaply brought into the classroom by means of locally produced color slides. (p. 92) At the same time, the slides themselves are 'stronger' in our sense because they portray places that the students have actually seen and will be seeing in real life. (2) The same list of nouns can now appear in two different substitution frames: This is a____ and We're at a ____ (p. 85). This helps to unify the lesson in the topical dimension. (3) These words and slides will be useful in later lessons, and thus strengthen the continuity of the whole book. (4) They will help clarify the grammatical facts in Lesson 1. We have noted that as the lesson now stands, nouns that follow a preposition do not have an indefinite article, while all the other nouns do. In talking about local destinations, nouns have the article both without a preposition (This is a ____.) and with it (we're at a ____.)

The suggestion that an adaptation should introduce pictures and new vocabulary should not be taken as a criticism of the