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Description

In the summer of 1970, the Center for Research and Education trained a group of agricultural volunteers for work with the Peace Corps in Brazil. The project had, in Hoge's Oral Brazilian Portuguese, an excellent general text, but that book of course had no direct reference to the work that these trainees were preparing to do. Yet one of the distinctive features of the program was its emphasis on trying to make the language program an integral part of the training design, rather than a separate enterprise concerned only with imparting basic language skills.

In this situation, the staff decided to use the cluster format (Chapter 4, p. 150 ff) as a tool for integrating language instruction with the rest of the program. During the phase of the training which took place in the United States, clusters made up approximately the last 25% of each day's language study beginning with the second week. They were also used in the Brazil phase, where their usefulness was even greater because it was there that the Volunteers received most of the cultural and technical part of their training.

Coarse-grained specification for the content of the clusters (Chapter 4, P.135) presented no problem, since most of the Portuguese instructors were in fact specialists not in language teaching but in the occupational specialties for which the Volunteers were being trained. Fine-grained specification in its linguistic dimension was taken from the basic textbook, and in its socio-topical dimensions from the experience of the staff as organized in a matrix similar to the one on p. 142. Actual