Page:Adapting and Writing Language Lessons.pdf/155

CHAPTER 4 leaves the team vulnerable to 'materials-writer's malaise,' the symptoms of which are evident in the quotation on p. 132. As we have said, it is the prospective materials developer who asks the questions: the answers come from outside the language teaching community. This, then, is the first of a series of interfaces.

Fine-grained specification is the domain -- and the only domain -- over which the outside specialists hold unchallenged hegemony. Given that a trainee will be operating within some general setting, an anthropologist or other cross-cultural specialist is needed to preside over the drawing up of a 'role model' (Wight and Hammons, 1970), which lists the kinds of people with whom the trainee will interact, and also shows how the culture preconditions his relationships with each of them. Given that a trainee will be expected to help others learn to drill wells or raise chickens, or that he will have to arrange for getting his laundry done, someone with authoritative knowledge must provide details of each of these matters. Given that the trainee should have a particular level of competence in a particular socio-cultural setting, the professional linguistic scientist can provide lists of verb tenses, noun cases, stylistic levels, clause types, and grammatical relationships that are indispensable. The items in each list (sociocultural, topical, linguistic) may be marked to show relative frequency, importance and/or difficulty.

Here is the reason for separating coarse from fine specification. To have let the poultry raiser, anthropologist, and linguistic scientist into the picture too soon would have led to disproportionate influence of their theoretical preoccupations and past experiences, and a disastrous loss in validity relative to the interests of the future audience. To allow them to remain in the picture after fine specification has been completed is