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CHAPTER 6 of any other kind, it was felt that an appropriate microwave lesson could go far beyond most other formats, at least for young American adults who were about to go abroad.

These ideas took shape in 1964, and were first discussed publicly at a conference in Bloomington, Indiana, in the spring of the following year (Stevick, 1956). This was a period in which the Peace Corps need for new materials in new languages was at its peak, and so it happened that the micro-wave format was adopted for use in dozens of courses, written under extreme pressure for time, by materials developers with highly miscellaneous backgroundsfor the job. Results were sometimes surprisingly good, and in many cases were probably better than what the same writers would have produced in other formats, but the experience of the next five years also proved instructive in some negative ways:

1. Microwave is not a theory, nor a method, but only a format.

2. There are certain pitfalls in writing individual cycles.

3. A course that consists of nothing but cycles violates Assumption V ('Plura1ism,' p. 36), and is also unsatisfactory in other ways.

The remainder of this chapter will deal with the implications of these three statements.

MICROWAVES AND CUMMINGS DEVICES

First, on microwave as a format. A distressingly large number of people have talked and even occasionally written about microwave as a theory or as a method. This may be due