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CHAPTER 3 speaker, if only simply, almost from the very first day. (3) His strengths and weaknesses can be catered to as they become evident, on a day-to-day basis.

This course shares with most other PSI a concern to lead the student one step at a time, with relatively few errors, to a command of phonological and grammatical structures which will be superior to what he would get in a conventional class. It assumes (probably correctly) that premature attempts at fluency and lexical range are sure to reward and hence reinforce defective approximations to both pronunciation and grammar. It therefore adopts the strategy of building into the student the best set of structural habits it can, before tempting him with much vocabulary or with completely free conversation.

One conspicuous feature of SPC is in fact the smallness of its vocabulary. The first 100 hours contain only about 4.2 new words per hour, even if different forms of the same verb are counted as separate words. It is therefore necessarily almost devoid of cultural or topical content. This may from one point of view seem to be a shortcoming, but it probably makes the work of augmentation easier. In terms of the three checklists (Chapter 3),SPC concentrates almost entirely on the linguistic dimension. Its individual lines are generally light and transparent. The principal problem is lack of strength. (These terms are explained in Chapter 3, pp. 45-49.)

In the other case studies, we have spoken of 'adapting' an original textbook. The care with which a good PSI course has to be worked out, however, and the delicate balance of one part with another, make tampering by outsiders unadvisable or at least prohibitively expensive. In this appendix, therefore, we shall speak not of 'adaptation,' but of 'augmentation:' assuming that the student will complete a unit of the program exactly as it stands,