Page:Adapting and Writing Language Lessons.pdf/161

CHAPTER 4 tap the enthusiasm that comes when the users of a course feel that something of themselves is invested in its creation. This is one reason why some pedagogical monstrosities have produced good results, and why some well-constructed materials have fallen flat.

One way to go at coarse-grained presentation is the following:

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1. Make it short enough so that an interested layman can read it at one sitting, and clear enough so that he won't get up and leave it. Make it long enough so that a student can relate to it most of the grammatical features that he finds in ordinary written or spoken texts, but don't try to make it exhaustive. Write from the point of view of the student, not of the linguistic scientist. (That is why the sketch is part of 'coarse presentation' rather than 'fine specification'!) If the sketch is well-written, it will also give to the student a convenient bird's-eye view of the language, to which he will be able to refer his own detailed experiences as they accumulate.

This kind of sketch is the subject of Chapter 5 ('Learner's synopses'), and is illustrated in Appendices M (p. 235), N (p.258), and 0 (p. 284).

2. within a small, lively and non-committal vocabulary, and in as foolproof a way as you can manage,. These will be the same points that the linguistic scientist listed in his contribution to 'fine specification,' and that entered into the sketch in step 1 (above). Present them in at least two ways: