Page:Adapting and Writing Language Lessons.pdf/43

CHAPTER 1 the gaining of insights about structure, and the generating of sentences for the sake of generating them. To be sure, one can hardly build a wall without picking up the stones, but if the stones are not placed into the wall--if the activity does not immediately produce rewards of several different kinds (points 1-5 on pp. 23-25, above)--then the student simply sets one stone down as fast as he picks another up. One cannot remember what he has not in some sense understood, and he cannot put into practice (i.e. use in a larger context) what he cannot remember. This is the usual justification for many teaching practices today. But we sometimes forget that the reverse is also true: what one has not put into practice (used in a larger context) he will soon forget, and what he has forgotten he no longer understands. Any method is weak that emphasizes memory without understanding,.

To put the same matter in another way, a team of materials developers must ask itself three questions:

1. What must the student ? The things he needs to see include meanings of words and sentences, and also relationships among them. The materials should make it easy for him to see these things. It may very well be that the principal value of the commoner types of drill is not, as we once thought, in sheer repetition but in guiding the student as he explores the relationships between indicative and subjunctive, or affirmative and negative.

2. What must the student ? In contemporary practice, these things are mostly words and examples of constructions. Some materials try to make the student remember by requiring him to memorize. Others emphasize multiple reintroduction of items to be remembered. Some materials seem to ignore the matter altogether.