Page:Adapting and Writing Language Lessons.pdf/171

CHAPTER 4

THE PROBLEM

Thailand 33, a Peace Corps training program, was to prepare Volunteers to work in three medical specialties: malaria control, leprosy control, and laboratory technology. Training was to take place during the period November 9 - January 27. A number of sets of lessons for teaching elementary Thai were already available, but none of them covered the technical areas of this program. There was therefore a call for providing effective 'tech-specific' materials. The first question was:

How quickly and how cheaply could they be written?

This part of the problem had come up in many programs in dozens of languages, had been recognized, and had been dealt with in one way or another. Two other aspects of the problem, however, have usually received little or no attention. They were:

How readily will those in charge of later programs be able to change these materials without destroying them? Will the existence of these materials make it any easier to write tech-specific materials in other specialties, such as tuberculosis control or vocational agriculture?

In general, the more specialized a set of lessons, the higher their cost per student-hour. The goal of the project was to deal with all three of these aspects of the problem: to write usable materials on a relatively low budget; to write them in such a way