Page:Adapting and Writing Language Lessons.pdf/110

Rh original lesson for lacking them. What will be most live and real in the night schools of Arlington County Virginia, will necessarily fall flat everywhere else. On the other hand, expertly chosen vocabulary and technically excellent pictures would have been specific for nowhere, and would only have added to the cost of publication.

Having (as we hope) livened the lesson up topically by bringing in new words and color slides to illustrate we would liketo do the same in the social dimension. The simplest way to do so is to convert at least three of the substitution frames (p.85) to Cummings devices. (Chapter 3, p.59 and Chapter 6) We can do so by teaching the questions 'What is this? Where are (we)? What are (you)?' Where formerly we had only repetition and substitution drills, we now have some two-line embryonic conversations.

There is of course a price to be paid for the Cummings devices, because they introduce wh-questions. The authors of the original, who introduced yes-no questions only in Lesson 4 and wh-questions in Lesson 6, might object that this price is in fact prohibitive, since it disrupts their carefully planned sequence of structures. But each of the new question patterns is closely related to one of the statement patterns that are already in the lesson, and the mechanical aspect of changing from an interrogative sentence to its corresponding statement is the same throughout. This is then a much less serious change in the structural sequence than, say, the introduction of present tense of content verbs. The question is whether the extra weight of the new engine is more than compensated for by the gain in power. My guess is that it is.

Another slight addition in the linguistic dimension would open up further opportunities for interesting conversation. The construction with 'this' plus a noun would enable the students to handle a Cummings device like: