R EPOR T RE SUMESED 018 152 FL 000 140INTENSIVE TRAINING FOR AN ORAL APPROACH IN LANGUAGE TEACHING.BY- O'CONNOR, PATRICIA TWADDELL, W.F.NATIONAL FED. OF MODERN LANGUAGE TEACHERS ASSN.

PUB DATE FEB 60ERRS PRICE MF.-$0.25 HC-$1.92 46P.

DESCRIPTORS- *TEACHER EDUCATION, *ENGLISH (SECOND LANGUAGE),*LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION, *CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS,*AUDIOLINGUAL METHODS, INSERVICE TEACHER EDUCATION, TEACHINGMETHODS, LANGUAGE SKILLS, TEACHER IMPROVEMENT, TEACHINGTECHNIQUES, INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS, JAPANESE, LESSON PLANS,INTENSIVE LANGUAGE COURSES, JAPAN,

THE 1958 ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION COUNCIL SEMINAR FORENGLISH TEACHERS IN JAPANESE JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOLS WAS DESIGNEDTO PROVIDE, IN A VERY LIMITED TIME, BOTH INTENSIVE TRAININGIN AUDIO- LINGUAL CLASSROOM METHODS, AND A MINIMUM DEGREE OFLINGUISTIC COMPETENCE NECESSARY TO FULFILL THE TEACHER'S ROLEAS MODEL, JUDGE, AND DIRECTOR OF PRACTICE. THE TRAINEES WEREYOUNG TEACHERS WITH AT LEAST TWO YEARS OF EXPERIENCE WHO WEREREGARDED AS "PROMISING," YET WHOSE ORAL COMMAND OF ENGLISHWAS INSUFFICIENT. THIS BOOKLET DESCRIBES THE CONTENT AND USEOF THE PROJECT'S "SEMINAR SCRIPT," A SET OF LESSON PLANSBASED ON EXPERIMENTAL AUDIO - LINGUAL MATERIALS COVERING THEESSENTIAL SENTENCES AND CONSTRUCTIONS FOR A FIRST-YEARENGLISH COURSE. THE FIFTEEN' "CHAPTERS" OF THE SCRIPT WEREEACH DIVIDED IN HALF, ALLOWING THREE HOURS EACH FOR."CONTENTS" AND "METHODS," IN THE FOLLOWING SEQUENCE--(1)PRESENTATION OF THE SENTENCES AND INTENSIVE PRACTICE BYGUIDED IMITATION, (2) DISCUSSION IN JAPANESE CONDUCTED BYLINGUISTS, HIGHLIGHTING STRUCTURAL AND PHONOLOGIC DIFFERENCESBETWEEN THE IWO LANGUAGES, (3) INDIVIDUAL PRACTICE ANDCORRECTION, (4) A DEMONSTRATION LESSON WITH TRAINEES ACTINGOUT THE ROLE OF PUPILS, (5) EXPOSITION OF A CLASSROOMPROCEDURE FOLLOWED BY PRACTICE EXERCISES APPLYING IT, AND (6)

PRACTICE TEACHING. IN CONCLUSION, A DISCUSSION OF THEPREPARATION OF A 'SCRIPT," AND POSSIBLE APPLICATIONS OF THE"SCRIPT PATTERN" IS OFFERED. THIS DOCUMENT APPEARED AS ASPECIAL ISSUE OF "THE MODERN LANGUAGE JOURNAL," VOLUME 44,NUMBER 2, PART 2, FEBRUARY 1960. (RW)

r-IOOr-iOC:21

THE MODERN LANGUAGE JOURNALFebruary 1960, Volume XLIV, Number 2 Part 2

INTENSIVE TRAININGFOR AN

ORAL APPROACHIN

LANGUAGE TEACHING

BY

PATRICIA O'CONNOR AND W. F. TWADDELL

.

Published in cooperation with the MLA Center

for Applied Linguistics, Washington, D. C.

fEDER4

a,U. .

"PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THISCOPYRIGHTED MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED

BY

The Modern Language Journal MO7144 Washington Avenue TO ERIC AND ORGANIZATIONS OPERATING

St. Louis 30, Mo. UNDER AGREEMENTS WITH THE U.S. OFFICE OF

EDUCATION. FURTHER REPRODUCTION OUTSIDE

Copyright 1960 THE ERIC SYSTEM REQUIRES PERMISSION OF

THE COPYRIGHT OWNER."

National Federation of Modern Language Teachers Associations

$1.00

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, EDUCATION i WELFARE

OFFICE OF EDUCATION

THIS DOCUMENT HAS BEEN REPRODUCED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED FROM THE

PERSON OR ORGANIZATION ORIGINATING IT, POINTS OF VIEW OR OPINIONS

STATED DO NOT NECESSARILY REPRESENT OFFICIAL OFFICE Of EDUCATION

POSITION OR POLICY.

INTENSIVE TRAININGFOR AN

ORAL APPROACH

LANGUAGE TEACHING

PATRICIA O'CONNORAssistant Professor of

Linguistics and Education

W. F. TWADDELLProfessor of Linguistics

and German

BROWN UNIVERSITY

Table of Contents1. Backgrounds

General: Foreign-language teaching today 1

Particular: The "Teachers' Seminar" of the ELEC project 2

Personal: Professional biographical sketches of the authors 3

2. Assumptions

An oral-aural focus in beginning language study 4The contribution of comparative linguistic analysis and classroom experience 6"The average teacher," and "The oral approach" 6The requirements for language teaching with an oral -aural approach 7

3. The 1958 "Seminar Script" in the ELEC Project

A "profile" of the trainees 9The need for a Training Script 9Scope and detail of the Script 10Essential competences to be supplied by the Script 11

Basic structure of the 1958 Script 12

4. Description of the 1958 Seminar Script

Sub-section I: First presentation and practice 13Sub-section II: Linguistic analysis and teaching problems 15Sub-section III: Further presentation, and reading practice 18

Sub-section IV: Demonstration class 20Sub-section V: Classroom procedures and devices 22Sub-section VI: Practice teaching 24

5. Administrative Details of the 1958 Seminar, and Comments

Class sizes in the six sub-sections 27

Schedule 28Workshops 28The demonstration classes 28Use of English outside the classroom 29

6. Adaptations of the "Script Pattern" to Other Types of Programs

A six or eight weeks Language and Area program 30A special program in a new FL for senior FL personnel 31

The Script pattern in a regular academic curriculum 32Modifications for in-service training 32

7. Further Developments of the Script Pattern

Retraining for intermediate FL teaching 32Revision of a script: needs and aims 33Repairs, revisions, and the beginning of taping 33A second edition 34A third edition 34

The massive retraining network 35The script pattern in professional preparation 35Accommodations to new textbooks 36

APPENDIXReports and Comments on the Construction of a Script

The Script-writing team 37Sources and content of the Script 38

[A BLUEPRINT P01 SCRL?T- WRITING]

Preliminary steps: the Corpus 39The analysis of the Corpus , 39Sub-section I and part of Sub - section Yom: Presentation and practice (the "Basic Sub-sections") 39Sub-section IV: Demonstration teaching 40Sub-section II: Linguistic analysis and teaching problems 40Sub-section V: Classroom procedures and devices 40Sub-section VI: Practice teaching 41Recurrence check and Reading practice (in Sub-section III) 41Transcription 42Stenography 42

r. Backgrounds

[General: foreign-language teaching todayParticular: the "Teachers' Seminar" of theELEC projectPersonal: professional biographical sketches of the authors]

General background: foreign-languageteaching today

MHE picture of foreign-language teaching,-I in 1959, is a large and complex one. Prob-

ably there are few teachers or even administra-tors who know directly of more than a fractionof the total global situation. But we all knowthat the efforts of trained personnel and finan-cial support from governments and foundationsin the USA and in many other lands are beingdevoted to planning and implementing theteaching of foreign languages to hundreds ofmillions of school children around the world.

The current excitement about the backward-ness of the USA in the FL [foreign-language]field is thoroughly justified, as all of us in theprofession know and have known. But it is im-portant to acknowledge that the backwardnessis only general; it is not total. There have beensmall group) of well-informed and foresightedplanners who have been working against thegeneral backwardness and have prevented itfrom being total. Certain federal and stateagencies have been desperately aware of a needand have made admirable use of limited fundsand the limited available personnel. Founda-tions, councils, and private philanthropies havedone their best to stick fingers into leakingdikes, by training a few experts here and thereand by cooperating with this and that foreigngovernment and foreign organization in pro-grams of FL research and teaching. Somedozens of American universities have initiatedtheir own programs and are cooperating withother programs.

As a result, many of our colleagues in allparts of the world have been at work preparingnew and better teaching materials to meet theneeds of school children whose active lives willbe spent in the last third of the twentiethcentury. One of the dilemmas of our time and

1

those children's time is set by the emergence tonational dignity of much of the human race.Every informed observer recognizes the moralnecessity of an "own" language, at this stage oftheir social evolution, of each of the newly in-dependent nations. Yet as each new cherished"own" language becomes established, a newbarrier to world-wide communication is erected.And communication is a necessity, just as muchas the .satisfaction of a linguistic symbol ofnational dignity.

The only practicable solution in the face ofthe social and political and technological real-ities of our time is a FL education which con-serves the values of national pride and yetopens the doors to inter-national sharing of theachievements of other peoples.

One aspect is the development of a corps ofcompetent miters and teachers in the field ofEnglish-as-FL. In this way we are helping ourcolleagues overseas to open doors to the Anglo-Saxon world and its storehouse of culture andtechnology. But there is no linguistic one-waytraffic in the world of today and tomorrow:Ameemns must enter the doors to otherpeoples, and we language teachers have ourresponsibilities right here at home. It would bea lazya most disastrously and immorallylazypolicy to say that the Others can learnEnglish to talk to us. The interpreters whosebackgrounds are on the Others' side, the bilin-guals whose loyalties are other-side, cannot doentire justice to our interests or our responsibil-ities.

Although the need for Americans to enter theFL door may be most spectacular in the case ofGhana or Ceylon or Kenya or Laos or Hok-kaido, it is just as real and numerically stillmore urgent in the case of Rouen or Barcelonaor Hamburg or Palermoor Kiev. A decisivelarge-scale upgrading of the "familiar FLs" is

just as crucial a challenge as the development ofmaterials for teaching the "exotic, unfamiliar,not commonly taught" languages.

Particular background: the "Teachers'Seminar" of the ELEC project

This paper describes and discusses a rathernew kind of document in the field of foreign-language teaching. Its authors were fortuitouslyassigned to cope jointly with a specific practicalemergency: converting a body of experimentallanguage-teaching material into the basis for ateacher-training "Seminar." We have spent sixmonths of full-time work, in two stages, on thetask; in addition we have corresponded and consulted for over a year on the underlying as-sumptions and their practical applications.

Our work was a part of an extensive projectunder the English Language Exploratory Com-mittee,* a private organization of leaders ofeducation, industry, and public affairs inJapan, aided by the Council on Economic andCultural Affairs of New York and the JapanSociety. Our portion of the project has beenchiefly in connection with two "Teachers'Seminars," planned originally as trial runs ofsome modern teaching materials. Another ob-jective of the Teachers' Seminarsat firstsecondary, but increasingly importantwasthe preparation of teachers to use such newmaterials effectively. It was realized, both bythe Japanese experts and by USA consultantsand sponsors, that along with the constructionof modern materials there must be a program ofteacher preparation. The participants in thetwo Seminars held so far have been actualEnglish teachers in Japanese junior highschools. They were relatively young (25-30years of age) and had had at least two years ofEnglish-teaching experience. They were com-petent in terms of their training, but that com-petence did not in general include eitherfluency or accuracy in oral English; their con-trol of English grammar was excellent as theorybut many of the common sentence-types ofEnglish were still only "understood as rules"and not yet under comfortable habitual controlin actual use.

In the summer of 1957, it was our assignmentto work from a "corpus" of illustrative sen-tences, selected by Professor C. C. Fries to pro-

2

vide the basis for practice in the pronunciationof English and some of the most importantsentence-types. We converted the corpus into afirst stage of materials for classroom use, in theform of a draft of a "Teacher's Guide." Fromthis draft, in a three-weeks Seminar in August1957, we improvised the day-to-day practicematerials; our Japanese colleagues commentedon specific linguistic and pedagogical problemsand proper procedures to meet them, using theday's practice material as a basis.

During the period September 1957June1958, our draft of the Teacher's Guide was re-vised by a committee of Japanese linguists andteachers, with Mrs. Mary Jane Norris as con-sultant. This revision, though still in only atentative state in June 1958, was taken as thebasis for our 1958 work of preparing for asecond, larger teacher-training Seminar to beheld in August 1958.

Despite the still tentative nature of the Re-vised Guide of June 1958, it was a body of ma-terial which could be taken as representing atextbook for first-year English. We treated it assuch for purposes of preparing a "Script"specifically designed for intensive preparationof teachers to use that "textbook" or one basi-cally like it in their own future teaching. Thecontents of the Revised Guide were firstthoroughly analyzed as to vocabulary (placeand rate of introduction, recurrence throughoutthe Guide), sentence-patterns, and teaching de-vices.

On the basis of the analysis of the Guide, weprepared a Script to be used as the material forthe August 1958 Seminar, which was to be un-der the direction of Professor Einar Haugenand a staff of junior trainers (all of whom werenative speakers of American English). Pro-fessor Mary Lu Jaynes worked regularly withus on this task from mid-June through August1958, in Tokyo.

Our principle was to bring all parts of theScript to bear upon the objective of preparingteachers to present efficiently the material ofthe Revised Guide. The actual content of theGuide was our focus; this was to be practicedto assure the teacher-trainees' mastery of thesentences and phrases which they would theo-retically be teaching to their pupils in a class

* Now the English Language Education Council, Inc.

using the Guide. The discussion of linguisticproblems was based on the contents of theGuide; the exercises in classroom proceduresused those contents; the demonstration andpractice teaching sections were at once an ex-pansion and a review of the basic materials: Theinner organization of the Script was to be suchthat practice on the materials should illustrateteaching procedures, and practice on proceduresshould review the materials.

The severe limitation of available time (84class hours in all) dictated a careful intertwiningin the Script of substance and method, to securea maximum mutual reinforcement and to re-duce the "newness" in any one hour to a singlephaseusing familiar procedures to practicenew material, using familiar material to prac-tice new procedures, and all the while increasingthe trainees' practical mastery of the sentencesand phrases they would be using in their ownlater actual teaching.

We believe that our assignment in thesummer of 1958 was only one special case ofwhat we have come to regard as a major gen-eral problem. Hence we ale here presenting areport, description, and discussion of our ex-perience and our thinking, for whatever value itmay have for our colleagues who are or will beconfronted by comparable assignments.

Personal backgrounds: professionalbiographical sketches of the authors*

The first co-author's training was in RomanceLanguage and Literature, with supplementarywork in linguistics made possible through twoACLS grants for summer study. Her teachingexperience has been chiefly in Spanish and inapplied linguistics, and she has collaboratedwith Ernest F. Haden in preparing a manualfor oral Spanish practice. Teaching in twosummer seminars for the preparation of pro-spective teachers of Spanish in the elementaryschool provided a first experience with FLESand with the problems of teacher training on

3

the elementary level. Further experience withthe training of foreign-language teachers wasgained during a year's work in Japan as a Ful-bright lecturer in linguistics and the teaching ofEnglish as a foreign language (1956-57). Dur-ing the spring and summer of 1957, as well asduring a second visit to Japan AprilSeptem-ber 1958 she worked with the English languageproject sponsored by the English LanguageExploratory Committee (ELEC) of Japan.From time to time during 1958-59 she was aconsultant for Foreign Languages to the U. S.Office of Education.

The second co-author has experience inGermanics. His training was in the conven-tional literary-philological curriculum of the1920s. His teaching experience has been simi-larly conventional, largely under a successionof reading-objective grammar-centered text-books. However, he was involved in an earlyASTP language-and-area operation (Wisconsin,1943-44), and has worked with Helmut Rehderto produce some orally - focussed textbooks. Aliterary enterprise has been a comprehensivethree-volume Student's Edition of Goethe'sFaust, during a decade of the 40s and 50s, incollaboration with Rehder and R-M. S. Heff-ner. His teaching in German and linguisticshas been supplemented by a Fulbright year inEgypt 1954-55 continued by association withgroups of Egyptian teachers of English cur-rently working for doctorates at Michigan,Texas, and Cornell, and by four visits to Japan(1956-58) in connection with the ELEC project.

* Mrs. W. F. Twaddell has read earlier drafts of thispaper and has made many suggestions which are incorpo-rated in this version. She has bad contact with the develop-ment of the Script as a non-professional interested observer,following the correspondence and being present in Japanduring most of the planning and execution there in thesummers of 1957 and 1958. In both Seminars she observedand reported on the progress and difficulties of the trainees,as a regular participant in the mealtime conversation ac-tivities.

2,

[An oral-aural focus in beginning language studyThe contribution of comparativelinguistic analysis and classroom experienceThe "average teacher" and "the oral ap-proach"The requirements for language teaching with an oral-aural approach]

An oral-aural focus in beginninglanguage study

AMONG the colleagues now at work, pre-paring materials to meet various FL needs

here and abroad, there is substantial agreementon one important point: the initial stages ofschool learning of a foreign language must havea focus on oral-aural practice.

This agreement is in harmony with theo-retical arguments based on the nature of lan-guage. It also recognizes a practical fact ofAmerican life: in the late 1950s hundreds ofthousands of Americans each year were takingtheir first trips to countries where English is

not the national language. When that statisticis projected over a half-century of life ex-pectancy for present school children, even with-out any assumption of a rising rate of travel, weconclude that a sizable fraction of the popula-tion will have a use for a foreign language. Andcommon sense suggests that the fraction will in-clude the more influential and useful Americansof the next decades.

But quite apart from any possible futurepractical use of an oral-aural command of aFL, the pedagogical realities are convincing tothe experienced language teacher. We knowthat a language is a set of habits. The rules of

grammar are descriptions of the habits of thepeople who use a language. Its phonetics is adescription of muscular habits of its speakers.The vocabulary is a list of their habits of as-sociating certain sequences of sounds (orletters) with certain kinds of experiences.

The ability to understand or use a language issimply the possession of the habits which makeup that language. Effective understanding anduse of a language means instant and accuratehabitual comprehension and production ofsounds and letters, sentence patterns, and ap-propriate vocabulary.

There is no time for puzzle-solving or appli-4

cations of rules in the real comprehension anduse of a language. In real use, the spoken wordsfollow one another at the rate of several hun-dred a minute in speech; and as competentreaders our pupils must be able to move alongat least as rapidly. The childhood native-lan-guage (NL) habits have been deeply embeddedby long practice, correction, and renewed prac-tice under correction. If a FL is to be usable, itmust consist of a set of habits which are as deepas the opportunities for practice and correctionallow.

Everyone knows that habits are formed byperforming rather than being told about per-formance. What modern linguistics and FL-teaching experience have shown is the extentto which our language behavior is habitual: notmerely the obvious physical habits of movingour vocal organs to produce sounds and sound-sequences, but also the habits of signallinggrammatical meanings by words or endings orsequence-features, or certain melodies or tim-ing-factors or stresses, of which the user is en-tirely unaware on any intellectual level.

We all recognize that the learning of a FL inschool cannot follow the slow natural processesby which a NL is learned in childhood. Thereisn't time, and the school learner is no longerthe plastic unprejudiced infant who once ac-quired his NL. But the essential steps are andmust be the same, although guided by an in-formed teacher and performed by a somewhatmore conscious learner with the aid of intelli-gently designed materials.

The formation of language habits is the samefor FL as for NL: practice, correction, practice.It is through stages of recognition, imitation,repetition, variation, and selection.

First 'the learner hears (or sees) an utterance,whether a sentence or phrase or word. This actof perception is followed by a recognition of itsmeaning, either from memory or from contextor from overt explanation. Then the learner can

identify parts of the utterance as being recur-rences of patterns or words previously experi-enced; these parts are recognized as meaningfuland familiar. The unfamiliar residue is identi-fied on one or another level: It consists of puchand such familiar phonemes but is itself an un-familiar morpheme. Or it consists of such andsuch familiar morphemes but is itself an un-familiar idiom or syntactic unit. Whatever isunfamiliar (morpheme, idiom, syntax) needs tobe associated with meaning. Once this associa-tion is established, the learner imitates what hehas now recognized on all functional linguisticlevels; and he imitates meaningfully. Throughimitation of a model the learner produces whathe has adequately recognized with semantic as-surance. To begin the formation of a habit, herepeats; this repetition of a meaningful utter-ance is now guided by his own memory ratherthan as an echo of an outside model. Wheneverhis repetition (i.e. his memory) is imperfect, hemust revert to direct imitation of the outsidemodel before he resumes confirming the habitby repetition. After repetition has begun toestablish the habit, the learner is led to varythis or that component of the model utteranceto produce other expressions, which are partlysimilar to and partly different from the modelhe has been imitating and repeating. Suchvariations explore the patterns of partialsimilarity and partial difference tolerated bythe structure of the language. Thereafter, thelearner is guided to practice selecting the properutterance to use in a particular situation to ex-press a particular meaning.

Once a reliable habit of selective productionhas been formed, the understanding reception ofthat and related utterances is automatic, rapid,correct. This holds not merely for the meaningof a particular word or idiom. It is even morevalid for the meanings of the grammatical pat-terns: sentence forms, grammatical affixes,compound constructions, phrases, syntacticconstituents.

The work of the descriptive analysts has re-vealed the complexity of language habits, andwe are nowadays aware of the enormousamount of practice needed to make theserecognitions and variations and selectionstruly automatic and habitual and usable. When

a FL habit differs structurally from a conflict-ing NL habit, hundreds of repetitions (simplerepetitions, and repetitions within variation andselection practice) are needed to form and con-firm the desired new habit. Indeed, the strategyof planning a FL class is precisely the organisingof classroom time to assure the necessary rep-etitions of the essential patterns, without at-tention-killing boredom.

Against the background of such knowledge ofthe nature of language, there is no escape fromthe conclusion that oral practice is the indi-cated basic vehicle of the first stages of lan-guage-learning. A model utterance can beimitated and repeated orally far oftener than inwriting. So can its variations. An entire classof several dozen pupils can imitate, repeat,vary a basic model many many times, undera teacher's immediate guidance, as comparedwith any other form of practice.

Just as important is the immediate correctionwhich oral practice permits. Any mistake (thatis, the beginning of a bad habit) is corrected atonce in oral practice and the appropriate de-sired habit is immediately substituted. Inwritten practice, the best the teacher can do isput a red mark alongside the mistake long afterthe mistake has been made; and the pupil's cor-rection of his bad-habit performance is hoursor days after the error itself. And all too oftenthil. pupil's "correction" is a routine alteration

. of only the offending letter or word rather thana total fresh start at imitation or repetition of adesirable FL habit.

These two factorsthe far greater intensityof guided practice, and the immediate re-medial correctionmake oral practice the basicclassroom procedure in the beginning stage ofFL habit formation.

The pace of reading and writing practice, andthe most effective place in the language courseto introduce reading and writing, vary greatlyamong the various NL-FL pairs; and the totallength of the language course is a major factorin the decision when, and how, and how inten-sively, to supplement the oral work of the be-ginning stages. These questions are not the im-mediate concern of our discussion here, al-though we recognize their importance in anycomprehensive program of FL learning.

5

The contribution of comparative lin-guistic analysis and classroom

experience

The contribution of technical linguistics tothe beginning stages of FL learning also variesgreatly for various NL-FL pairs. For languageswhere there is no tradition or lore of school-learning, the work of the technical linguists isan indispensable first stage. When the first ma-terials are devised to give Americans instruc-tion in Nepali or Quechuan, we may be surethey will be based on a searching comparison ofthe linguistic structures of the FL and ofAmerican English.

With the more familiar NL-FL pairs, there isa tradition which more or less realistically cor-responds to the observations of classroomteachers. This tradition recognizes certainpoints of "stubborn difficulty" for learners, andthe existing textbooks reflect the recognition.To be sure, this tradition like all traditions per-petuates some unsound folklore along withrealistic observations, and an injection ofscientific method can be a contribution.

The function of comparative structural anal-ysis is to indicate where practice is needed,and to suggest the efficient distribution of in-tensity of practice. On all levels of linguisticstructure, comparison can guide planning. Inpronunciation, comparative phonemics andallophonics predict difficulties of perceiving andproducing, and the intensity of practice can becorrespondingly adjusted. Similarly in gram-mar : where the FL has a singular-plural dis-tinction and the NL does not, or vice versa, thepractice must be quite differently distributedfrom that in the situation where both NL andFL distinguish singular from plural, or whereboth also distinguish a dual.Even in the"familiar FLs" there is probably room for im-provement in this respect: one thinks of thecarry-over from Latin teaching (where an un-English structure of the passive requires con-siderable practice) to modern language teach-ing; many of us have spent too much time"changing actives into passives and passivesinto actives" instead of doing a judiciousamount of habit-forming practice on passivesas such.

We are aware that the technical linguist'scontribution is only part of the task of building

6

practice materials. He tells us, objectively anddirectly, where the conflicts between NL andFL habits are to be expected and hence wherepractice must be intensive. But he cannot, quaanalyst, tell us how that intensive practice is tobe directed. The experienced classroom teacherwho knows the zone between boredom and in-sufficient practice has an indispensable contri-bution to make in the construction of effectiveteaching materials.

We are assuming, in our description and dis-cussion of a teacher-training program, thatthere exists or will exist a body of classroom ma-terials which are reasonably constructed withdue regard both to the findings of technicallinguistics and to the experience of classroomteaching. If the existing materials are deficientin either respect, the teacher-training materialscan and should do something to counteract thedeficiencies.

"The average teacher," and "The oralapproach"

The trainees whom we think of as participat-ing in a retraining program are "average lan-guage teachers." They have a record of actualclassroom experience, backed by a suitable pro-fessional training in psychology and education.They possess a certain reading ability in the FLand a certain theoretical knowledge of its gram-mar. Few of them have been able to spend muchtime studying and living in the home countriesof the languages they teach. Many of them lackaccuracy and fluency in speaking and listening;and few of them have any experience in present-ing the first year of a FL using the techniques oforal practice.

A conscientious teacher as described above isoften hesitant to undertake an oral approach inhis classes. He knows that his conversationalfluency in the FL is not adequate, that his pro-nunciation is faulty and that his practical gram-matical control is insecure, that he lacks ex-perience in listening to and understandingnative-speakers' conversations, and that manyof his familiar classroom procedures are inade-quate to the needs of conducting a languageclass with an oral approach. In part, the hesi-tancy is mere over-modesty or based on a mis-understanding of the real, limited requirements

of teaching using textbooks with an oral ap-proach. In part, of course, the hesitancy isbased on real gaps in the teacher's training, andon a lack of opportunities for practice.

In terms of USA needs, such "average"teachers are a large group who could be helpedby a well-organized retraining program.

There is another group, of radically differentbackground, which fortunately could also behelped by the same kind of programexceptthat in their case it would be a training, not are-training, program. This tatter group is com-posed of those teachers who are certified toteach some subjects other than FL but who, inemergencies, are called on to take an assign-ment in some FL with which they have hadsome experience in their previous education.

With the rapidly spreading introduction ofFLs into schools at new levels, and the intro-duction of new FLs alongside established ones,a serious problem is being faced by administra-tors. The new teaching assignment often doesnot at first justify the appointment of a full-time specialist teacher, even if such were avail-able. The practicable procedure in most caseswill be to re-assign a teacher already on thestaff to the new FL course.

This re-assigned teacher will sometimes bebilingual or semi-bilingual in the FL; then sometraining in FL teaching techniques will be theprime needperhaps also some intensive re-training from a regional to a standard pro-nunciation. More often, it will be a teacherwhose record shows some courses (often quite afew years in the past) in the desired FL; in suchcases, intensive refreshing and correction iscalled for along with training in FL techniques.

Admittedly, such trainees even after the best-designed retraining course will be far short ofour concept of the ideal language teacher. Butwe must be realistic; these people will be ourpart-time language teachers, at least for someyears. And if the desired expansion of FLteaching in USA is to take place, and take placeat a satisfactory pace, we simply cannot waitfor the appearance of the required number offully-trained full-time FL teachers; we musttake steps to provide sufficient numbers of part-time, emergency-retrained teachers who canperform competently in the limited domain ofbeginning FL courses with an oral approach.

7

*,

The requirements for language teachingWith an oral-aural approach

Some perspective on the dimensions of thistask of teacher-preparation may be gained fromconsidering the minimum requirements for ef-fective teaching of a beginning FL. Many ad-ministrators of elementary and junior highschools hesitate to add FL study to their pro-gramsand many experienced teachers onthese levels who have studied "a little" Frenchor Spanish or German or Russian hesitate tovolunteer their services when such additions tothe curriculum are proposedbecause of a mis-understanding and over-estimating of the spe-cial abilities required of a teacher using an oralapproach.

One very common error is the notion thatonly a teacher with a wide range of conversa-tional ability can conduct oral practice in theclassroom. This error reflects a mistaken con-cept of the function of a teacher in a beginningFL class. His function is to help the pupils es-tablish reliable, correct, firmly-practiced habitsin the language, not to chat with them in thatlanguage on a wide range of topics. To buildthese habits, the teacher must guide the pupilsto a thorough control of a very limited part ofthe FL as a firm, secure foundation for theirlater more rapid progress. The establishment ofthe new language habits requires intensive well-planned practice on a severely limited body ofvocabulary and sentence patterns. In this de-velopment of his pupils' new FL habits, theteacher has three indispensable roles:

First, he serves as a model for his pupils'imitation. For this role he needs an accuratecontrol of the pronunciation and the sentencestructures of the materials his pupils are tolearnthose and nothing more. He need not,and he should not, use any more of the FL inhis pupils' hearing. His knowledge of French,Spanish, German, Russian, or Swahili, for pur-poses of teaching those particular pupils, is pre-cisely and exclusively the exact French, Span-ish, German, Russian, or Swahili sentenceswhich he is using as teaching materials.* Often,

* A limited and desirable exception is the use by theteacher of certain classroom, expressions and directionswhich it would be unrealistic for the pupils themselves touse but which fit into the real situation and furnish useful

1.1

of course, the teacher will be aided in his role asmodel for the pupils' imitation by specially pre-pared tape or disc recordings. We visualize asideal the combination of optimal audio aids andthe well-trained teacher, whose live voicesupplies what no tape can fully supply: freedomfrom mechanical defects, flexibility, and the im-portant accompanying facial postures andgestures.

The teacher's second role is that of judge ofthe pupils' accuracy. If he himself has thor-oughly learned the material, he will hear hispupils' departures from the desired correcthabits. (Incidentally, as he notices his pupils'difficulties and counteracts them, his own pro-ductive control is sharpened and he becomes aneven better model for imitation.) In this role ofjudge of the pupils' accuracy, the teacher mustdraw upon both his own secure control of thedesired habits and his theoretical knowledge.His knowledge of the points of conflict betweenthe pupils' NL habits and the structure of theFL will enable him to foresee and understandthe pupils' difficulties, as well as to determinethe appropriate kind and intensity of practiceto overcome them.

In his third role, the teacher serves as a man-ager, a stage director, an orchestra conductorof the oral practicea function which only theclassroom teacher can perform. The textbooifurnishes the text for the basic sentences to beintroduced and practiced, and gives generaldirections for developing the pupils' control andversatility. But no two classes require the sameamount of practice, and it is the teacher's taskto continue the various indicated activities tothat point which represents the balance be-tween insufficiency and fatigue, and to give tothe FL practice a tone of well-planned effective

performance.As audio aids gain acceptance as part of the

listening practice. The meaning of such expressions or direc-tions should, of course, be self-explanatory or be carefullyexplained. The teacher who is fortunate enough to havemore than a minimum conversational ability in the FL isoften tempted to comment in class on some unusual class-

room event or situation. This temptation should be yieldedto only when the teacher is sure that in doing so he does nottransgress the delicate line between genuine enlivenment ofthe classroom and confusion or frustration for his pupils.Teachers who are native speakers of the FL are under aparticularly strong temptation to err in this direction.

8

regular classroom equipment, and as publishersof elementary FL materials continue to makeavailable recordings of the basic sentences anddialogues in their texts, it is becoming clearhow carefully prepared tapes can supplementthe teacher in certain aspects of his three roles.

Recordings of native speakers of the FL cansupplement the teacher's voice in providing amodel for the pupils' imitation. A tape record-ing provides a uniform, consistent model. It isfree from the human tendency to vary a stressor melody through over-correction of a pupil'smistake. A recording can inspire the pupils'confidence as being unquestionably genuine FL,and can relieve the teacher of the burden ofsupplying sufficient repetitions to provideample listening practice.

A foreign language laboratory with individ-ual booths and provision for supervisory moni-toring offers many advantages: greatly in-creased individual production by the pupil,equalization of hearing opportunity, a sense ofintimacy (reduction of the "air-gap") and pri-vacy which may be helpfully reassuring for thebeginner.

The tape as model for imitation has certaindefinite limitations. The best of recordings andtape playbacks are subject to mechanical im-perfections, and the live voice is still an almostindispensable first model. Since a tape has noface, it can provide neither the important facialgestures and postures which accompany speechnor the help via lip-reading, which all of us con-sciously or unconsciously practice. Further, un-less the teacher has considerable skill in themanipulation' of audio equipment, the neces-sary starting, stopping, and rewinding of tapecan be both time-consuming and distracting inthe classroom. And, of course, whereas theteacher can move about the room to be surethat he is heard clearly by all the pupils, unduedependence upon recorded material as themodel for class imitation can put pupils in somesections of the room at a disadvantage.

Tapes can aid the teacher in his second func-tion, as judge of the pupils' accuracy, in settinga standard by which the class performance ismeasured. The tape's role here is an auxiliaryone, for only the teacher can notice and com-ment upon a pupil's deviation from, the desiredstandard.

1

It is only after a number of hours of guidedpractice that the pupils can begin to hear theirown mistakes or notice the ways in which theirperformance differs from the model utterance.The beginning FL pupil, left on his own to imi-tate a recording and monitor his own produc-tion, will continue to mispronounce because hecontinues to hear the model in terms of his NLhabits of sound discrimination. (The length oftime, in terms of class hours of supervised in-struction, during which the pupils will con-tinue to hear the FL models inaccuratelyi.e.filtered through the screen of their NL habits ofdiscriminationand are therefore unreliablejudges of their imitative production, varies ac-cording to the degree of difference between thesound systems of the FL and the NL, and ofcourse from pupil to pupil. During this period,

self-monitoring via dual-track playback is dis-couraging or misleading.) Throughout the ini-tial stages of practice in discriminating andproducing unfamiliar sounds and patterns ofrhythm and melody, the pupil is dependentupon a teacher who is monitoring to detecterrors at the predictable points of difficulty andto direct the needed corrective practice.

Once a pupil's mistake has been noticed bythe teacher, the recording serves as the criterionto convince the erring pupil and his fellows thatthere really was a difference between the re-corded sentence and the pupil's imitation. Thisuse of a recording reinforces the teacher'sprestige: it is the teacher who notices and com-ments on the difference between the model andthe faulty imitation.

3. The 1958 "Seminar Script" inthe ELEC project

[A "profile" of the traineesThe need for a Training ScriptScope and detail of theScriptEssential competences to be supplied by the ScriptBasic structure of the 1958Script]

A "profile" of the traineesTHE trainees who participated in the 1957and 1958 ELEC Seminars in Japan were

young teachers, who were regarded by com-petent judges as "promising" on the basis oftheir performance in the classroom. Aside fromtheir relative youth, they were quite compa-rable to a large fraction of the FL-teaching pro-fession as we know it in the USA. They had hada standard preparation for the teaching of a FL(English, in this case). Their preparation usu-ally included a standard language-and-liter-ature major and a prescribed complement ofcourses in Education. They had a fair-to-excel-lent reading knowledge of English; their writingin English was fair-to-good. (Their formaltraining in English had covered about ten oreleven years, including school and university,most of it in the post-war period with its strong

VIONNIPINIONIROW00.0Ma.mtenparttnr...

9

American influence.) They were uncommonlygood teachers, for their experience, in Englishclasses primarily oriented toward grammar-reading-translation objectives. Their oral con-trol of English ranged from poor to fair; theyfrequently failed to understand and were fre-quently incomprehensible in conversation.They were familiar with effective classroom de-vices and procedures for elementary instructionwith grammar-reading objectives; they wereunfamiliar with (and hesitant to attempt) themethods appropriate to an oral-approach be-ginning classroom, since they rightly distrustedtheir oral command of English.

The need for a Training Script

The preceding descriptions have outlined therequirements for effective teaching of a begin-ning FL, and have pictured the Japanese teach-

ers before the retraining Seminars. The differ-ence between the two was a definition of ourtask for the 1958 Seminar. The severe limita-tions on the time available demanded the sharp-est possible focus on the truly indispensablefactors, and a hard-boiled readiness to accepttruly minimum skills at the end of the Seminar.The teacher retrained by the Seminar wouldcertainly be far short of any ideal of a FLteacher; but if he or she could be equipped toconduct a first-year English course in a reason-ably satisfactory manner, the Seminar wouldhave performed its function.

Three kinds of pitfalls had to be avoided inplanning the Seminar activities: (1) mere in-spirational exhortations to the teachers to im-prove themselves; (2) mere samples of class-room activities suitable for children beginners,but very wasteful as inflicted on mature teach-ers who were already in commandhowevershaky commandof the vocabulary and basicgrammar which the real children beginnersacquire slowly and laboriously; (3) diffusegeneral discourses on the foreign cultural back-ground, or on theories of language teaching,or on technical linguistics. Some of these in-gredients could be defended as desirable con-tributions to the formation of an ideal FLteacher, but in the practical situation as itexisted they were luxuries for which a time-limited Seminar had no room. Similarly, ran-dom conversational practice with native-speak-ers of the FL is a desirable experience, but ithad to be kept as a peripheral activity, and notallowed to sap the trainees' energy unduly nordistract them from the primary task of master-ing those minimum competences for theteaching assignment which faced them.

The instrument to guide the activities of theSeminar was a full set of lesson plans, whichcame to be known as "the Script." It had sev-eral functions which were considered indis-pensable to the efficient conduct of the Semi-nar:

To insure parallel activities in multi-sectionclass hours.

To insure consistent, cumulative, and com-plete practice on the essential English sentencesand constructions.

To provide multiple reinforcement in thevarious types of Seminar class hours.

10

To provide the trainees with material forstudy and review outside the classroom.

To be a record of the 1958 Seminar, and toserve as a basis for desirable improvements insubsequent. Seminars.

Scope and detail of Ike Script

One consequence of the time limitations in apractical retraining situation is an extremelytight control of the activities. The authors ofthe Script have to insure that there is a mini-mum of leeway for time-wasting in the fewhours available; and this demands an explicitformulation for every fraction of every classhour. From an ideal standpoint, this is regret-table, since individual initiative and inventionhave little scope under such a Script. But anyrealistic appraisal of the tasks of a retrainingprogram leads to the recognition that thetrainees need reassuring guidance, not scope forinitiative and invention, in a form of teachingwhich they do not yet understand, and inwhich they have had no experience, and whichthey are nervous about having to undertake inthe near future.

Certainly the Script should provide a basisfor later adaptations by the trainees to theirparticular teaching requirements. But the pri-mary need of those trainees is confidence andguidance in an unfamiliar teaching assignment.As teachers, many of them are and will be dras-tically overworked, with little time or energyfor planning individual teaching campaignscertainly not the first time they undertake thenew FL assignment. Programs designed to pre-pare for teaching later years of the FL shouldbe designed to give practice in trainee-initiative(presumably to trainees who have already hadthe basic retraining); and increasingly in suchlater programs the practice will give scope forindividual modifications of the sound funda-mental teaching procedures. but for the situa-tion we are describing, the trains % would havebeen ill-served by exercises in premature initia-tive; what they needed was the minimum equip-ment to function adequately in a difficult andfrightening new assignment. At this stage, com-petence and confidence are the prime goals; in-vention and adaptation can and must comelater.

Essential competences to be suppliedby the Script

Hence the Seminar Script had to focus pri-marily on building up a control of the minimumcompetences, and secondarily on providing abackground of basic principles. The basic prin-ciples, indeed, had to be immediately related tothe practice of the minimum competences; ifthat relation could be displayed clearly, therewould be a residue of implication for the enter-prising teacher to make later the intelligentadaptations and individual invention's to meethis or%her special local needs.

The minimum competences, and the basicbackground principles as well, fell into threecategories:

(1) Pronunciation and grammatical controlof the actual FL material to be taught in thefirst-year course. Here the standards must bevery high; the trainee simply must be equippedto produce that first-year material accurately,quickly, and with comfortable assurance. Forhe is to be the model of his pupils, and thejudge of his pupils' performance of preciselythat material.

(2) An understanding of the most salientconflicts between the two linguistic systemsthat of the pupils' NL (Japanese) and that ofthe FL (English)in order to anticipate themost stubborn difficulties of his pupils and tobe intelligently patient in dealing with them.

(3) A control of usable classroom proceduresand devices adapted to effective pupil practiceof the first-year material.

In all three categories, the Script primarilyhad to supply practice to bring the trainees tothe maximum competence attainable withinthe time limitation. Secondarily, the other twocategories (linguistic comparison, pedagogicaldirection) should be enriched by apposite dis-cussion of the basic principles underlying thespecific examples, for later use by enterprisingteachers.

Practice to assure control of the FL materialof the first-year course was directed towardpronunciation and grammatical control. Ob-viously, the trainees did not need practice invocabulary as vocabulary: i.e., they certainlyalready knew the meanings of all the words inthe elementary courseas meanings. Theyneeded practice in pronouncing those words ac-

11

ceptably, not in associating them with theirmeanings. Similarly, they knew all the gram-matical rules exemplified in the first-year courseas grammatical rules. They needed practice informing unshakeable habits of producing Eng-lish sentences which accorded with those rules.

Hence, the needs of a trainee in the Seminarwere radically different from those of his futurepupils in the classroom, although the FL ma-terial might be the same in both cases. Hereinlies the raison d'être of the Seminar Script. Formere samplings from a pupil's textbook cannotserve the trainee, whose needs are for a veryreliable accuracy within a predetermined frac-tion of the FL, rather than the beginner'sgradually increasing familiarity with that frac-tion. It is for this reason that the pupil's text-book cannot be used directly for teacher-train-ing purposes, since that textbook is to be theteacher's instrument, not the source of hisknowledge.

From language-pair to language-pair, therewill be varying emphases on this or that aspectof pronunciation. In the Japanese Seminar, itwas considered most efficient to concentrate onthe factors of English rhythm, timing, stress,and melody, since these are most often the chiefdeficiencies of the partly trained FL teacher.And since these aspects of speech are among themost deep-seated of learned habits, they repre-sented the most serious conflicts between thetrainees' NL usage and that of the FL. In over-coming those conflicts, the lesser difficultieswith the vowels and consonants of the FLtended to be overcome as incidentals in theoverall imitation and repetition practice.

In the domain of grammar, the task of theSeminar was to replace a theoretical knowledgeof rules with a reliable habituation to the cor-rect major sentence units of the FL. Compara-tive grammatical analysis of the two languageshad indicated the points at which intensivepractice was required to bring the trainees toautomatic control of the proper sequences andcombinations, especially those where his NLhabits (and those of his future pupils) are mostlikely to produce incorrect word-for-wordtransfers. As with pronunciation, the problem ofthe Script writers was to distinguish clearly be-tween the needs of the trainee-teacher and thoseof the real beginning pupil, and to design the

Script for the former. Intensive and varied prac-tice to assure complete control of the basicgrammatical patterns was the business of theScript, not a cautious gradual introduction ofthe grammatical structures themselves. Ingrammar, as in pronunciation, the traineeneeded a certain amount of comparative anal-ysis, so that he could understand the basis ofhis pupils' difficulty in the conflict betweentheir NL habits and the usages of the FL. And,as in pronunciation, this linguistic analysis hadto be as non-technical and non-frightening aspossible, with a minimum of jargon.

Basic structure of the 1958 Script

After our experiences with the first (the1957) Seminar, we corresponded extensivelyand at three meetings conferred at length. Werecognized that the 1957 Seminar had requiredimprovisation by us and had placed uncom-mon demands upon both our Japanese col-leagues and the American junior trainers, as anemergency first trial; any continuation and ex-pansion of the retraining program would haveto be based on a much better planned and muchmore detailed set of lesson plans for trainersand trainees, to spare all concerned the strain ofextempore decision and execution, and thusfree energy for the efficient presentation andpractice of the truly essential content of theprogram. It was from these discussions thatthe general notion of a specific retraining-fo-cussed Script emerged and was gradually elab-orated in overall outline. The practical detailedstructure of the 1953 Script was settled in thelast half of June when we resumed full-time col-laboration in Tokyo.

We knew then that the August 1958 Seminarwould consist essentially of fifteen days of sixhours each. The gross division of the materialinto fifteen parts was thus given. For purposesof terminological convenience in our planning,we called each of these fifteen parts a "Chap-ter," in order to avoid any confusing associa-tions with such terms as "lesson, section, unit."Within each of the fifteen "chapters" weadopted the neutral terms "hour" or "sub-sec-tion" to describe each of the six smaller com-ponents: it was sometimes useful to distinguishbetween an "hour" of teaching on such-and-sucha day and a "sub-section" of Script to directthat hour's teaching.

12

A first major division within Chapters wasinto a "first three hours" and a "second threehours." The first three hours were to be pri-marily focussed on presenting and practicingthe actual sentences, phrases, and their pro-nunciation and grammatical structures. Thesecond three hours were to concentrate on pre-paring the trainees to direct their future pupils'learning of those sentences and phrases throughpractice in the future classroom. In each half ofeach Chapter, the complementary focus was tobe reinforced: In the first ("contents") half,there should be reviews of the earlier practicedclassroom devices and procedures; in the sec-ond ("methods") half, there was to be a con-tinuation of practice of the preceding content.

Within each half, the structure was to be of asandwich-nature: vigorous trainee-activity inthe beginning and end, with an interveninghour of more dispersed trainee-activity.

In the first halfthe "content" halftheintervening hour would be a discussion, inJapanese, of the linguistic cruces of the con-tent: a non-technical examination of conflictpoints resulting from structural differences be-tween Japanese and English in pronunciationand grammar. In the second halfthe "meth-ods" halfthe intervening hour was to be anintroductory exposition of a particular class-room procedure appropriate to an oral ap-proach, and then a battery of graded exercisesto supply practice in applying that procedure;of course the "content" of this "methods"exercise was to be taken from the first half ofthe Chapter.

Within each half-chapter, the beginning hourwas primarily for reception and guided imita-tion by the trainees, the last hour for productionby the trainees and correction by the trainers.In the first half, the beginning hour was inten-sive trainee practice of the key sentences andphrases, the last hour was individual productionand individual practice after correction. In thesecond half, the first hour was trainee participa-tion-as-pupils in a demonstration lesson, thelast hour was practice-teaching by trainees.

Thus there evolved a six-part structure of

each of the fifteen Chapters:

1 First presentation and practice2 Linguistic analysis and teaching problems3 Further presentation, and reading practice

* .

4 Demonstration lesson5 Classroom procedures and devices6 Practice teaching

The term "Seminar Script" seemed an ap-propriate one to characterize this particularkind of teacher-retraining text. In detail likethat of a dramatic or movie script, it includedall that was presented, practiced, and discussedduring each of the 84 class hours of the three-Seminar. (For special reasons of scheduling,three of the fifteen Chapters were treated in a

more compressed fashion to provide an oppor-tunity for two three-hour workshop periods.)

In the section which follows, this innerstructure will be illustrated; and certain minormodifications which we would now (after thework on the 1958 Script) recommend aresketched for whatever use they may be to ourcolleagues and to administrators who may findthemselves responsible for teacher-retrainingprograms in one or another capacity.

4. Description of the 1958 Seminar Script

Sub-section I: First presentation and practice

THE first class hour (in the Script, thefirst sub-section of each of the fifteen chap-

ters) was devoted to the presentation and prac-tice of sentences which included "new" vo-cabulary and grammatical structures. Thetrainees met in groups of about twenty, andeach group was taught by one of the Americanjunior trainers. In this one hour, the trainerpresented material roughly equivalent to whatwould be a full week's work under ordinaryclassroom conditions. The work was largelychoral at first, and the "new" sentences wereintroduced chiefly by the techniques of mimi-

cry-memorizing.The key sentences were divided into groups

of five or six, each group exemplifying one

grammatical construction. Each such group of

sentences had a descriptive label in grammati-cal terms like "Negative interrogative forms,""Possessive 's," "Plural forms," etc. In order toprovide variety and a change of pace, eachgroup of new sentences was followed by shortpractice dialogues or question-and-answer se-quences. The method of presentation, however,was designed for the attention span of adults.Since the trainees were already familiar withthe vocabulary of the key sentences, the ob-jectives of this first sub-section were the prac-tice of pronunciation and the gaining of as-surance with the grammatical constructions.This focus determined a difference of presenta-tion from what would be found in a pupil'stextbook.

[Sample of First-Hour material, from Chapter III]

CHAPTER THREE: First presentation

(The usual "Good afternoon" greetings. At the end of the hour, the "Good-bye" formula of parting.)

an Americanan English

New vocabulary

man fatherwoman mother

grandfathergrandmother

NEGATIVE INTERROGATIVE FORMS

1 Isn't Edgar an American boy?

2 No, he isn't.

He's an &slid, boy.

.41.11110.011. MOM*

3 Isn't your English name Norma? 1.11.111 OSUMI

WINIIMM1.111111.

13

oldyoung

4 Yes, it is.My English name is Norma. --

5 Isn't your friend's name Masako?

6 Yes, it is. ------\Her Japanese name is Masako. - -

,..

=m1

Practice on Negative Questions

T -Cl, T-P, P-P [Teacher-Class, Teacher-Pupil, Pupil-Pupill

A Isn't Norms an English girl?B No, she isn't. She's a Japanese girl.A Isn't Norma an English name?B Yes, it is. It's an English name.

.11MMIII.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-ooFor the first question of the next practice, the trainer looks directly at one pupil, whose English name he uses; then

the trainer points to another nearby pupil."*ABC" is used to indicate that the trainer should use a pupil's real

Japanese or English name; "*XYZ" indicates that the trainer should supply an "incorrect" name in order to

elicit a negative answer.

A *ABC, isn't /he/she/ a Japanese /boy /girl /?

B Yes, /he/she/ is.A Isn't /his/her/ Japanese name *XYZ?

B No, it isn't.

T-P, P-PA Isn't your Japanese name *ABC?B Yes, it is.A Isn't your English name *XYZ?B No, it isn't.

T-C1, T-PA Isn't your friend an English boy?

B No, he isn't. He's a Japanese boy.A Isn't his Japanese name *XYZ?B No, it isn't.A Is his English name *XYZ?B No, it isn't.

0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0

0-0-0-0-0-0-0-C-0-C-C-C-C-0-C-0

0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0A What's your friend's name?B My friend's name is *ABC.A Isn't *ABC an American /boy/girl /?

B No, /he/she/ isn't.A Is /he/she/ an English /boy/girl /?B No, he/she/ isn't. /He's/She's/ a Japanese /boy/girl/.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

The second part of the First Hour materialfor this Chapter consists of seven more keysentences extending the interrogative pattern.The heading is: "Are you? Aren't you?""Iam, I'm, I'm not." The key sentences are:"Are you a young boy?Are you an old man?No, I'm not. I'm not an old man. I'm a youngboy.Aren't you an English girl? No, I'm notan English girl. I'm a Japanese girl.Are youa young Japanese girl? Yes, I am."

After the sentences, which are to be learned

by mimicry-memorizing, there is a pattern-practice exercise for full question-and-answer

14

drill on these new verb-pronoun forms.The third part of the sub-section proceeds

similarly with key sentences illustrating third-person plural forms: "Frank and Edgar areboys.Are Akio and Jiro Japanese boys? Yes,they are. They're Japanese boys. They're notAmerican boys.Aren't Norma and EdgarEnglish names? Yes, they are. They're Englishnames." The practice on this part of the hourconsists of questions, positive and negative, tobe answered first in the full form, then in theshort form:

Aren't Akio and Jiro young boys?Aren't Masako and Taro Japanese names?Are Jiro and his friend Japanese boys?Aren't Masako and her friend Japanese girls?Are Akio and his friend American boys?Aren't Edgar and Betty Japanese names?

Answers:

First, full: "Yes, Akio and Jiro are young boys." "No,Aldo and his friend aren't American boys."

Then, short: "Yes, they are." "No, they aren't."

Sub-Section II: Linguistic analysisand teaching problems

In the second hour, the entire group of sixtytrainees met together. This class was conductedin Japanese by one of the Japanese linguists:Takashi Kuroda, Akira Ota, Tsutomu Makin°.It consisted of a technical discussion of the"new" grammatical and phonological pointscovered in the material of the Chapter. Thelecturer dealt with the specific difficulties inpronunciation, word order, etc., which begin-ning Japanese pupils would encounter due toconflicts between the new English patterns andtheir own NL habits.

A mature technical discussion of the problemsinherent in FL learning for the pupils (and alsofor the trainees!) was needed for its own sake,as a body of useful professional information.This Second Hour also constituted a desirablerelief between the strenuous practice of theFirst and Third Hours, and it satisfied thetrainees' legitimate intellectual curiosity asadults.

In the actual 1958 Seminar Script, the sub-sections prepared for the Second Hours con-sisted of analytical notes, listing the topics tobe discussed by the lecturer and furnishing theexamples. In effect, they were careful lecturenotes prepared in advance to insure accurate re-minders for the trainees' later study, and to re-duce blackboard writing by the lecturer andnotebook copying by the trainees.

In the second sub-section of Chapter Three,eleven "pronunciation points" were listed, suchas:1 Melody of "What's your grandmother's name?"3 Lip-rounding in "Norma, old."5 /f/ in "Frank, friend, father, grandfather." Note espe-

cially the /fr/ cluster.9 {{woman" /wu/ is difficult for a Japanese speaker to

pronounce.

15

Minimal-pair practice was supplied:"set /sat, pen/pan, lend/land, pet/pat, met/mat." (No attempt was made to limit the word-pair practice to the vocabulary of the Script; itwas enough to assure the trainees that the con-trasts were crucial ones in English phonology,and to practice them as such.)

Six "structure points" were listed, such as:

Negative question beginning with "Isn't.""Are you a young Japanese girl?"the order of the two ad-jectives cannot be changed."Yes, they are. " they is a substitute for " and

f!

A cultural note: Many English names are almost the samefor men and for women- "Norman /Norma, Gene/Jean,Francis/Frances."

The special conditions under which the 1958Script was prepared and used dictated theabove form for the sub-sections for the SecondHours. Since the underlying basic textbook wasin 1958 still in a preliminary state, it wouldhave been wasteful to attempt a full written dis-cussion of the linguistic aspects of each Chapter.However, for an ideal Script, we think of a de-cidedly different function and form for theSecond Hours.

In our judgment, the Second Hour materialshould conform to the principle that traineesshould not spend time listening to a lecture, ifthe material of that lecture can be studied bythem in their own NL: reading in their ownlanguage is more rapid, more effective, andmore permanently available for review, whenthe content is intellectual and technical. Classtime should be maximally available for relevantpractice which the trainees can get only inclasses, not for substantive matter which can beput into print for them to study.

A future, better form of Second-Hour ma-terial, as we see it, should be something alongthe general lines of Sub-section Five, to be de-scribed later. A discussion of some importantfeature of linguistic structure should be thefirst part of Sub-section II, to be studied by thetrainees before the actual class. Just as theexisting Fifth-Hour discussion treats some onephase of classroom pedagogical procedure anddevices, so this projected Second-Hour dis-cussion should treat one linguistic phase of thematerials being practiced in the retraining pro-gram. The totality of such discussions should

constitute, by overt exposition and by exempli-fication, an introduction to the basic principlesof structural linguistics as applied to veryspecific practical teaching problems, just as thetotality of the Fifth Hours constitutes a peda-gogical survey.

In the nature of the material and the realclassroom situation, the linguistics of theSecond-Hour materials preparing teachers fortruly elementary work would focus on pho-nology. (Presumably subsequent programs, fortrainees expecting to teach intermediate andadvanced courses in the FL, would use Second-Hour materials dealing with morphology, syn-tax, and even stylistics.)

Again parallel to the Fifth Hours, the idealSecond Hours would provide opportunity forpractice by the trainees, coordinated withboth the theoretical exposition and the actualvocabulary-and-grammar content of the Chap-ter. As a specimen, here is a sample from a pos-sible Sub-section II of Chapter Three, herepresented not as a record of the 1958 Scriptbut as an illustration of the format we have inmind.

The exposition would build on a previous dis-cussion of sentence melody in Chapter Two, inwhich simple definitions of pitch and melodyhad been given, the differing functions of pitchin Japanese and English had been discussed,and the English pattern of mid-high-low hadbeen practiced as such, with the trainees begin-

A Aren't you an English girl?

1 Aren't you an American girl?2 Aren't you a Japanese girl?3 Aren't you an English boy?4 Aren't you an American boy?5 Aren't you a Japanese boy?6 Isn't she an English girl?7 Isn't she an American girl?8 Isn't he an English boy?9 Isn't he a Japanese boy?

10 Isn't he an American boy?

B Isn't your English name Jack?

011110

NIN.MMOMIO 11111

11 Isn't your English name Jane?12 Isn't your friend's name Bob?13 Isn't your friend's name Bill?14 Isn't your friend's name Ann?15 Isn't your friend's name Frank?

C Isn't your English name Norma?

16 Isn't your English name Edgar?

ning to use the intonation symbols and to directthe oral practice on the basis of the symbols.

The Chapter Three exposition would reviewthe mid-high-low pattern, and introduce twoimportant new intonations: the mid-high-risefor short "Yes-No" questions, and the mid-high-mid for the first part of "long" sentences.(There would be a note on the fact that theseare the simple English intonations, that thereare important variants to be studied in laterSecond Hours.) Only one major variant need beadded in this Chapter Three exposition: theextra-high pitch of contrast,* used in negativeanswers with correction of one part of thequestion: "No, I'm not an English girl; I'm aJapanese girl." or "No, I'm not a Japanesewoman; I'm a Japanese girl."

The exercises would be designed to insure amaximum of confident correct performance.One of the sentences from the First Hour, alongwith its intonation marking, is a model for eachpart of the practice. Then five or ten other sen-tences of the same pattern are presented with-out intonation markings. The practice consistsin having various trainees at the blackboard,each to mark the intonation (syllable by syl-lable) of one of these practice sentences, andthen to call for a single repetition of that partic-ular sentence by the rest of the trainees.

* As illustrated on page 19, the extra-high pitch is com-bined with the mid-high-mid intonation for closely consecu-tive sentences.

16

111.111.0.0181101M6

al=11100.10111

17 Isn't your Japanese name Taro?18 Isn't your Japanese name Ueda?19 Isn't your friend's name Warren?20 Isn't your friend's name Jiro?

D Isn't your English name Archibald?

21 Isn't your Japanese name Tanaka?22 Isn't your Japanese name Yamada?23 Isn't your friend's name Yamada?24 Isn't your friend's name Masako?25 Isn't your friend's name Aldo?

E Yes, it is.My English name is Jack.

26 Yes, it is. My Env1;, name is Jane.27 Yes, it is. My 7..agi$ name is Bob.28 Yes, it is. My law% a name is Bill.29 Yes, it is. My frstnd's name is Ann.30 Yes, it is. My friend's name is Frank.

F No, it isn't.My English name isn't Norma.

31 No, it isn't. My English name isn't Edgar.32 No, it isn't. My Japanese name isn't Taro.33 No, it isn't. My Japanese name isn't 'Ueda.34 No, it isn't. My friend's name isn't Warren.35 No, it isn't. My friend's name iral Jiro.

111111,

111, 1.01,

G I'm not an English girl.

I'm a Japanese girl.

ZIMM:=1111111103

OIN=1,1 ./BIA 011011110111111211111111111116111C

111.110.01

36 I'm not an American girl. I'm an English girl.37 I'm not a Japanese girl. I'm an English girl.38 I'm not an English boy. I'm an American boy.39 I'm not an American boy. I'm an English boy.40 I'm not a Japanese boy. I'm an English boy.41 She isn't an English girl. She's a Japanese girl.42 She isn't an American girl. She's an Engli sh girl.43 He isn't an English boy. He's a Japanese boy.44 He isn't a Japanese boy. He's an American boy.45 He isn't an American boy. He's a Japanese boy.

Such exercises should have, like all parts of aScript, various useful purposes beside the prin-cipal one. The practice sentences invcve ad-justment to different syllable structures ("Eng-lish," "Japanese," "American"), so that a com-pletely mechanical copying of the model in-tonation is insufficient. Naturally, along withthe intonation, some major grammatical pointsof Chapter Three are being practiced: in thisinstance the negative question form and theOifficult answer formula. There is also contribu-tory review of the pronouns and associated verbforms.The various English names presentpronunciation features (clusters, final conso-nants) well worth practicing. The Japanesenames, which in an English sentence have to be

17

I MOM., =1110

distorted into a stress pattern and a syntacticrather than lexical pitch pattern, are impressivereminders of differences between the Englishand Japanese supra-segmental phonemes.

On the linguistic side, the exercise is pri-marily devoted to intonation practice. lint italso provides further pedagogical practice ofthe mimicry-memorizing techniques whichoccupy the Fifth Hour of Chapter One. If it isconsidered desirable, the intonation practicecould be used in part to provide additionalpractice in the use of tapes, which was the topicof the Fifth Hour of Chapter Two.

One consequence of using the Second Hoursfor such linguistically-oriented exposition andpractice would be the possibility of relegating

.4.4a54..-7,-.. 7.1,..,--aatININNY-41,11.74

the detailed "pronunciation points and struc-ture points" to a set of Notes for evening studyby the trainees. There would seem to be no es-sential virtue in having these teaching problemsdiscussed orally by a lecturer; a somewhat fullprinted presentation, in the trainee's language,ought to be as satisfactory. Judicious planningcould assure useful interlocking of the generaldiscussion cf the Second Hours with the specific"points" of the various Chapters; the "points"could anticipate a later general discussion orcould refer back to a preceding general dis-cussion when appropriate.

In summary: we describe as an ideal Second-Hour format one with suitable intellectual con-tent in the form of relevant linguistic theory ex-emplified by the FL material of the Script andaimed at realistic use by the teacher in hisclassroom.

Sub-section III: Further presentationand reading practice

Sub-section Three, covered during the thirdclass hour, continued the presentation and prac-tice of "new" vocabulary and grammar itemsin the Chapter and completed the work begunin Sub-section One. For this hour, the trainees

met in groups of ten, and each group was di-rected by one of the American junior trainers.Since the practicing group was small, there wasopportunity for individual as well as choralwork, and the instructors were able to give at-tention to individual problems of pronunciation.

In addition to the groups of sentences illus-trating vocabulary and sentence patterns, thethird sub-sections of all Chapters after the firstcontained exercises called Dialogue ReadingPractice. These exercises consisted of conversa-tions to be practiced by individual trainees,who read the various character parts. Thispractice forced the trainees to produce sen-tences without the guidance of the teacher'smodel pronunciation. Thus any remaining diffi-culties in pronunciation became readily ap-parent and the trainers could determine whichpoints required practice. The dialogues also re-vived vocabulary items and sentence typeswhich had not recently been intensively prac-ticed, thus refreshing memories.In the prep-aration of materials for the 1958 Seminar,Prof. Mary Lu Joynes displayed special skillin the composition of these rather intricatepractices, and she drafted all of the DialogueReading Practices in the Script.

[Sample of Third-Hour material, from Chapter III]

CHAPTER THREE: Further practice

Review of the 18 sentences of 3.1.

POSSESSIVE 's

19 .1Akio is a boy's name.

20 What's friend's Englishyour name?

21 What's father'syour name?

22 Isn't Setsuko?your mother's name

His father's father is his23 grandfather.

24 Is Taro boy's MIMEDa name? ---Isn't Betty25 a girl's name?

26 What's your grandmother's name?

Practice: Questions to be answered with full answers. First T-C1, then T-P, then P-P. Each question P-P through-out the group.

Is Norman a boy's name?Is Norma a boy's name?Is Yoshiko a girl's name?

18

0.,1.001.00

Are Taro and Yoshiko Japanese names?Aren't Frank and Betty Japanese names?Isn't Edgar a girl's name?Isn't Mary an English name?Are Taro and Jiro boys' names?Isn't your father's father your grandfather?Isn't your mother's name Setsuko Nakamura?Are Peter and Norman Japanese names?

ACCENT AND CONTRAST

(Practice by mimicry-memorizing with the men trainees)

27 Are you an American boy?

28 No, I'm not an American boy.

I'm a Japanese boy.

29 Are you a Japanese man?

30 No, I'm not a Japanese man.

I'm a Japanese boy.

aIMM =NMI.

/

(Practice, with the women trainees, the corresponding sentences using "girl" and "woman.")

0-0-0--0-0-0-0-0-0--0-0-0--0-Cr-0

PracticeTeacher: My father's name is *ABC.

What's your father's name?Pupil: My father's name is *ABC.Teacher: Is *ABC an English name?Pupil: No, it isn't. It's a Japanese name.

(After the pattern of Q-and-A is established, the teacher can omit his first statement. Then the little dialogue is

to be done by chain practice.)

Teacher: What's your Japanese name?Pupil: It's *ABC.Teacher: Is *ABC a /boy's/girl's/ name?Pupil: Yes, it is. It's a /boy's/girl's/ name.

Practice in longer memorized passages

My father is a man He isn't a boy. He isn't an American man. My father is a Japanese man.My mother is a woman. She isn't a girl. She isn't an American woman. My mother is a Japanese woman.

Practice in adding a correcting statement: The trainer explains that after he has stated a negative fact, thepupil is to state the positive fact.

Teacher: Masako isn't an American girl.Pupil: She's a Japanese girl.Teacher: Aldo isn't an English boy.Pupil: He's a Japanese boy.Teacher: Yamada isn't an English name.Pupil: It's a Japanese name.Teacher: Ann isn't a boy's namePupil:Teacher: Ann isn't a Japanese name.Pupil:

19

DIALOGUE READING PRACTICE

AldenBoydA What's your friend's Japanese name?B His Japanese name is Saburo.A Is he a Japanese boy?B No, he isn't. He's an American boy.A What's his English name?B His English name is Bill.

AmesBrillA Isn't your name Taro?B Yes, it is. My Japanese name is Taro.A What's your English name?B My English name is Steve.

Miss AndersonMr. Baker

A My friend's name is Ann. She's an English girl. What's your friend's name?

B My friend's name is Bill.A Is Bill an English boy?B No, he isn't. He isn't an English boy. He's a Japanese boy. Bill is his English name.

Miss AlexanderMiss Burns

A What's your father's name?B My father's name is Henry Burns.A Is he a Japanese man?B No, he isn't. He's an American man.A Are you an American girl?B Yes, I'm an American girl. I'm not an English girl.A Is your friend an American girl?B No, she isn't. She's a Japanese girl.A What's her name?B Her English name is Jill. Her Japanese name is Masako.A What's her father's name?B Her father's name is Fumio Tanaka.A What's her grandmother's name?B Her father's mother's name is Hanako Tanaka. She's a Japanese woman.A What's your grandmother's name?B My grandmother's name is Elizabeth Burns. She's an American woman.

Review the thirty sentences of 3.1 and 3.3 rapidly, by single mimicry-memorizing repetitions in chorus.

"Good-bye until tomorrow morning"

Sub-section IV : Demonstration classDuring the study of the first half of each

Chapter (Sub-sections One, Two, and Three),the trainees' attention was focussed primarilyon the content of the material, the practice andanalysis of vocabulary and grammar. The shiftin the focus of their attention away from thelinguistic content to teaching methodology wasbegun with their participation in Sub-sectionFour, which was presented in the form of alesson from an imaginary Teacher's Guide.During these Fourth Hours, the entire group ofsixty trainees, acting the part of twelve-year-old pupils, participated in demonstrationclasses taught by the American trainers. (The

20

reasons for this arrangement will be discussedon Pages 27-29.)

The specific items of vocabulary and gram-matical structure taught in each of these dem-onstration lessons were selected from thosepresented and practiced in Sub-sections Oneand Three of the corresponding Chapter of theScript. However, unlike those sub-sections,which were highly condensed presentations,Sub-section Four presented material at a pacesimilar to that of a real beginning class. Newsentence patterns were introduced gradually;there was copious practice of new sentences andreview of the old. Techniques for conductingoral practice with a large class were demon-

strated, and the trainee "pupils" could both ob-serve and participate in the various classroom"games" and activities which had been se-lected as appropriate for Japanese classrooms.

The trainees were encouraged to read the

fourth sub-section of the Script before the dem-onstration lesson, but during the class hourthey worked with closed books, to increase theresemblance to a real class with beginningpupils.

[Sample of Fourth-Hour material from Chapter III, corresponding to approximately the second "real" classhour of the material represented by Chapter III]

CHAPTER THREE: Dimonstration

New vocabulary: "man, woman." Review of recent vocabulary: "Japanese, American, English"New grammatical structure: Extra-high pitch for contrast. Review of recent new grammar: "Are you ? I'm, I'm not."

"Good morning ft

Review mimicry-memorizing:

He's a Japanese boy.Yes, he is. He's a Japanese boy.She's a Japanese girl.Yes, she is, She's a Japanese girl.

Review conversation: the trainer points to individual pupils.

T: Is *ABC a Japanese boy?Cl: Yes, he is. He's a Japanese boy.T: Is *ABC a Japanese girl?Cl: Yes, she is. She's a Japanese girl.

(This is practiced 8-10 times with various pupils, then similar practice 8-10 times with the question form "Isn't*ABC a Japanese /boy /girl / ? ")

T: Mr. Genji Takahashi* isn't a Japanese boy. He's a Japanese man.

Mimicry memorizing:

He's a Japanese man. He isn't a Japanese boy.

Mimicry-memorizing with men trainees only:

I'm a Japanese boy. I'm not a Japanese man.

Practice

T: Is *ABC a Japanese boy?P: Yes, he is. He's a Japanese boy.T: *ABC, are you a Japanese man?*ABC: I'm a Japanese boy. I'm not a Japanese man.

(If the pupil hesitates to reply with the last sentence, the first few times this conversation is practiced, the trainerwhispers the correct answer and the pupil then recites aloud.)

Mimicry-memorizing

Are you a Japanese man?No, I'm not. I'm a Japanese boy. I'm not a Japanese man.Are you a Japanese woman?No, I'm not. I'm a Japanese girl. I'm not a Japanese woman.

Practice:

(T-P then P-P practice among the men trainees with the first Q-and-A. Similarly amongthe women trainees withthe second Q-and-A. The sentence accent with extra-high pitch is on "boy, man, girl, woman" in the answers,

to mark the contrast.)

* Dr. Genji Takahashi, President of Meiji Gakuin University, was the Director of the 1957 and 1958 Summer Semi-

nars of ELEC.In a normal teaching situation, the name of the school principal could be used to identify a man well-

known to the pupils.

21

Mimicry-memorizing:

Miss Tanaka* is a Japanese woman. She isn't a Japanese girl.Mr. Takahashi is a Japanese man. He isn't a Japanese boy.Mr. Takahashi is a Japanese man. He isn't an American man.Miss Tanaka is a Japanese woman. She isn't an American woman.

Practice: (The trainer checks carefully on the proper placement of the extra-high pitch for the appropriatecontrast.)

T: Is Mr. Takahashi an American man?P: Mr. Takahashi is a Japanese man. He isn't an American man.T: Is Miss Tanaka an American woman?P: Miss Tanaka is a Japanese woman. She isn't an American woman.

Mimicry-memorizing [The mid, extra-high, mid intonation]

No, I'm not.I'm not an American boy;I'm a Japanese boy.

No, I'm not.I'm not an American girl;I'm a Japanese girl.

A:B:A:B:

Practice: first T-P, then P-P, then with several P-P chains. Each questioner must use "boy" or "girl" appropri-ately.

Are you an American boy?No, I'm not. I'm not an American boy; I'm a Japanese boy.Are you an American girl?No, I'm not. I'm not an American girl; I'm a Japanese girl.

Extended practice: first T-P

A: Are you an American /boy /girl /?B: No, I'm not. I'm not an American /boy /girl /; I'm a Japanese /boy/girl/.A [to the class]: /He/She/ isn't an American /boy /girl /; /he's/she's/ a Japanese /boy/girl/.

(After 8-10 T-P practices, P-P.)

[The remaining third of the demonstration class hour in this Chapter is devoted to further conversational prac-tice of patterns already introduced.]

* In an actual class, the teacher would select the name of a woman teacher well-known to the pupils. Here, u anexample, the name of a "Miss Tanaka" is used.

Sub-section V : Classroom proceduresand devices

The Fifth Sub-section of each Chapter dis-cussed and practiced various teaching devicesand techniques appropriate to a beginning classusing an oral approach. Each Sub-section Fivecontained a discussion of one general type ofclassroom procedure, its purposes, advantages,and limitations, and also provided extensiveexercise material for practice in conductingclass drill. Among the topics treated were themimicry-memorizing presentation, varioustypes of Question-and-Answer practice, the re-versed role device, the use of non-verbal cues,techniques for enlarging the pupils' memory

22

span, and the beginning of practice in writing.A special feature of the 1958 series of FifthHours was a demonstration of pattern practice,using Japanese instructions to the class, by Mr.Tamotsu Yambe, the Executive Secretary ofELEC. Sub-sections Five and Six of ChapterTen were devoted to discussion and demon-stration by Mr. Yambe of the advantages andlimitations of several varieties of pattern prac-tice.

The trainees were expected to have read thepreliminary theoretical discussion before theclass hour, and to have familiarized themselveswith the directions for the practice exercises.During the actual class, conducted by one of

the American trainers, there was a brief reviewof the teaching procedure in question, but themajor part of the hour was devoted to the exer-cises. Each of the exercises was very shortrarely more than five to eight seconds in lengthto allow each of the trainees to perform in-dividually by conducting the entire group inoral practice, using the device being studied.

While the primary emphasis during this hourwas on methodology, the linguistic content ofthe exercises, the items of vocabulary andstructure included in the short drills, was se-lected from the material which had been pre-sented, practiced, and analyzed in Sub-sectionsOne, Two, Three, and Four of the same Chap-ter.

In the preparation of the exercise material forthe Fifth Sub-sections, every effort was madeto facilitate the trainees' rapid and confidentperformance of the relevant classroom pro-cedures. Every possible vocabulary difficultywas eliminated, and the variety of grammaticalconstructions in any one exercise was limitedseverely. In the sample of Fifth-Hour materialwhich follows, the vocabulary-and-grammartheme is "Is X a (Japanese, etc.) name?" and"Are X and Y (Japanese, etc.) names?" Theexercise included practice in positive and nega-tive questions, and affirmative and negativeanswers.

[Sample of Fifth-Hour material, from Chapter III.The discussion of "Question-and-Answer practice,"which is the first part of the sample, should ideallyhave been in Japanese.]

During the mimicry-memorizing practice, the model forthe pupils' performance is the recent acoustic stimulus ofthe teacher's model pronunciation. Following this mimicry-memorizing presentation, the practice of Question-and-Answer sequences provides a transition from the recogni-tion and imitation stages of the pupil's foreign language ex-perience to that of repetition. In the repetition stage, thepupil's response is guided by his own memory of the pre-viously practiced phrases and sentences rather than by animmediately recent model pronounced by the teacher.

In the class practice of Question-and-Answer sequences,several forms should be used to give variety to the class-room procedure and to provide ample monitoring as well asspeaking experience for all the pupils.

1. Teacher-Class (Class-Teacher): The teacher asks aquestion; part or all of the class gives the answer. (Or viceversa.)

2. Teacher-Pupil (Pupil-Teacher): The teacher's ques-tion is directed to an individual pupil, who answers; the restof the class monitors. (Or vice versa.)

23

3. Pupil-Class: One pupil asks a question; the entireclass or some portion of the class gives the answer; theteacher monitors.

4. Pupil-Pupil: An individual pupil asks a question; asecond pupil answers; the class and the teacher monitor.

Types 1 and 2 (T-Cl and T-P) should also be practicedwith reversed roles (Cl-T and P-T); that is, the class or theindividual pupil takes the role of questioner, in order togive the pupils practice with questions u well as answers.Types 3 and 4, both of which are pupil-directed, add varietyto the practice and give the teacher an opportunity to moni-tor the group and the individual responses.

Type 4, P-P practice, may take the form of "chain prac-tice." The pupil in the extreme right seat takes the A rolein a Question-and-Answer sequence, and the pupil at hisleft takes the B role. Then the second pupil becomes thequestioner, the pupil to his left gives the answer, and so onto the extreme left seat. This practice can be done withsome or all of the sets of pupils sitting alongside one another.Chain practice can provide a welcome change of pace tothe practice, but to be effective it must be done rapidly andonly after the questions and answers have been thoroughlypracticed with group responses. Chain practice gives theteacher an opportunity to check for mispronunciations. Atthe end of each chain, he may pronounce the question oranswer himself, and then call for double repetitions fromthe entire class in order to correct mistakes, or to improverhythm and speed, and to involve all the pupils in activespeaking practice.

In the early Question-and-Answer practice, as indeedthroughout the early weeks of the FL course, the emphasisis on accuracy rather than vocabulary expansion. Theteacher should avoid forcing a pupil to produce a word orphrase not yet fully learned by imitation and repetition.Whenever a pupil hesitates, either to begin or to completea sentence, the teacher does not go on to the next pupil,but quickly supplies a correct model for immediate imita-tion by the hesitating pupil. A fumbling, hesitant perform-ance is bad, both for the fumbler himself and for the othersin the class. When the unsure pupils are always required toproduce a correct performance in imitation of the teacher'smodel, they soon learn that fumbling will not exempt themfrom full performance.

EXERCISES in directing Question-and-Answer

Practice

[The following questions are unrestricted,* so phrasedthey can be answered realistically by all the class or

* Other questions (those calling for "realistic exclusion")are of the type "Is Taro Yambe an English boy?" Theproper answer is "No, Taro Yambe isn't an English boy."which would not be a sensible answer for Taro himself togive. Much of the highly necessary practice in third-personforms will require the "realistic exclusion" of the pupil orpupils referred to. The teacher must call upon some clearlyindicated part of the classa single row, the front or backhalf of the class, etc.which does not include the pupil orpupils referred to. The exercises in this sub-section are de-signed to avoid this complication, which will be discussedand practiced in the fifth sub-section of the next Chapter.

1

by any portion of the class. The pupils are instructedto respond in different sized groups: the entire class,a single row, the right or left half of the class, etc.They are also instructed to give the answer in one offour different forms. In Parts I and IV the teacher(in this case the practicing trainee) calls for a fullanswer: "Yes" or "No" followed by a declarative sen-tence which is a full echo of the question. In answeringthe questions in Parts II and V, the pupils are to giveshort answers involving pronoun replacement: "Yes,it is. Yes, they are. No, it isn't. No, they aren't."In Part III, the teacher calls for short plus full formsfor affirmative answers, and in Part VI for a shortplus full form plus correcting statement for negative

answers.)The teacher tells the pupils in Japanese which partof the class is to answer the question. He also tellsthem which form of answer they are to give.

SAMPLES

Part I: Questions with full answers

1 Entire class answers the questionT: Is Akio a boy's name?Cl: Yes, Akio is a boy's name.

2 Entire class answers the questionT: Isn't Masako a girl's name?Cl: Yes, Masako is a girl's name.

3 Entire class answers the questionT: Aren't Norma and Edgar English names?Cl: Yes, Norma and Edgar are English names.

4 Entire class answers the questionT: Isn't Betty a girl's name?Cl: Yes, Betty is a girl's name.

5 Right half of class answers the questionT: Isn't Betty a girl's name?HfCI: Yes, Betty is a girl's name.

6 Left hall of classT: Aren't Norma and Edgar English names?HfCI: Yes, Norma and Edgar are English names.

7 Front half of classT: Isn't Masako a girl's name?HfC1: Yes, Masako is a girl's name.

8 Back half of classT: Is Akio a boy's name?HfCI: Yes, Akio is a boy's name.

9 One rowT: Aren't Masako and Akio Japanese names?R: Yes, Masako and Akio are Japanese names.

10 One rowT: Is Betty a girl's name?R: Yes, Betty is a girl's name.

* * *

Part II: Questions with short answers

11 Entire classT: Is Akio a boy's name?Cl: Yes, it is.

24

12 Eritire classT: Aren't Norma and Edgar English names?Cl: Yes, they are.

* * *

Part III: Questions with combined answers,short plus full form

21 Entire classT: Is Akio a boy's name?Cl: Yes, it is. Akio is a boy's name.

22 Entire classT: Aren't Norma and Edgar English names?Cl: Yes, they are. Norma and Edgar are English

names.

* * *

Part IV: Questions requiring negative answers, full form

31 Entire classT: Is Betty a Japanese name?Cl: No, Betty isn't a Japanese name.

32 Entire classT: Aren't Norma and Edgar Japanese names?Cl: No, Norma and Edgar aren't Japanese names.

*

Part V: Questions requiring negative answers, short form

37 Entire classT: Is Betty a Japanese name?Cl: No, it isn't.

38 Entire classT: Aren't Norma and Edgar Japanese names?Cl: No, they aren't.

* * *

Part VI: Questions requiring negative answers, shortplus full form plus correction

43 Entire classT: Is Betty a Japanese name?Cl: No, it isn't. Betty isn't a Japanese name.

It's an English name.44 Entire class

T: Aren't Norma and Edgar Japanese names?Cl: No, they aren't. Norma and Edgar aren't

Japanese names. They're English names.

*

Sub-section VI: Practice teaching

Completing the shift from the practice of

linguistic content to that of teaching method-ology, the last part of each Chapter providedmaterial for practice teaching by the trainees.The lesson-plans for practice teaching weredivided into halves, each occupying approxi-

mately 25 minutes of the class hour. Thesetwo halves of each practice lesson were pre-sented by two different teacher-trainees whohad been notified in advance to prepare toteach the material to eight or nine of theirfellows who would take the part of pupils.

The material for each Sixth Sub-section wasselected from that introduced or reviewed pre-viously in the Chapter. The explanations forthe practice teacher were detailed, and theactual sentences to be used in the presentationand class practice were clearly indicated bybeing printed in the right-hand part of theScript page, with space allowed to the left ofthe sentences, where the practice teacher couldinsert notes and marking for his own guidanceduring his teaching.Ideally, the instructionsfor the practice teacher should have been sup-plied in Japanese.

During the second and third weeks of theSeminar, the practice teaching included practicein grading pupil performance. While one of thetrainees was performing as the practice teacher,a second trainee, using a rating card andfollowing the grading points listed at the end ofeach lesson, evaluated the oral performance ofthe "pupils." In order to give each of thetrainees an opportunity to do practice teachingseveral times during the Seminar, for this period

each day they met in groups of about ten, andeach group was supervised by one of the Ameri-can trainers. At the end of the hour this trainermet privately with the practice teachers andthe "graders" to discuss the lesson and to offersuggestions.

Here follow two pages of an eight-page prac-tice-teaching script. The material correspondsroughly to the third or the fourth hour of the"real" teaching content covered by ChapterIII. The previous practice-teaching during thishour has involved intensive work on positiveand negative questions. The sample which fol-lows deals with the somewhat special problemof "Am I . . . ?," a positive interrogative formfor which there is in normal simple English nonegative correspondent. Hence, there is specialpractice on this positive form (and also thereis no unnecessary disturbing of the "pupils" byreferring to this anomolous gap in the Englishverb system). The section begins with mimicry-memorizing of key sentences illustrating theone question form and the two answer forms:"Am I?""Yes, you are. No, you aren't." Atfirst the pupil can concentrate on the answerforms, to insure firm understanding of themeaning of the constructions. Then, by a re-versed role technique, the teacher guides thepupils into practice with the question form.

[Sample of Sixth-Hour material from Chapter III]

Mimicry-memorizing

AM I A JAPANESE MAN?YES, YOU ARE. YOU'RE A JAPANESE MAN.AM I A YOUNG GIRL?NO, YOU AREN'T. YOU AREN'T A YOUNG GIRL.

Practice, T-P. The teacher asks various pupils questions with"Am I I. . . ?," mixing questions requiring "Yes, you are" withthose requiring "No, you aren't."

These questions are asked of individual pupils, rapidly andwithout interruption, several times through the list.

1 AM I A JAPANESE MAN?2 AM I AN ENGLISH WOMAN?3 AM I A YOUNG BOY?4 AM I A YOUNG WOMAN?

AM I AN OLD AMERICAN WOMAN?6 AM I A YOUNG JAPANESE MAN?7 AM I A JAPANESE MAN?8 AM I AN OLD JAPANESE MAN?9 AM I A YOUNG WOMAN?

10 AM I AN AMERICAN MAN?

25

To a "boy," the teacher says:

Before the pupil can answer, the teacher quickly says inJapanese: "Please ask me that question."

Similarly with "girl."

In Japanese: "Please ask me that question."

The teacher, in Japanese, instructs the pupils to ask questionswith "Am I" to which the answer is "Yes."

Then the teacher instructs the pupils to ask questions towhich the answer is "No."

Mimicry-memorizing

AM I A JAPANESE BOY?YES, YOU ARE. YOU'RE A JAPANESE BOY.AM I A YOUNG GIRL?YES, YOU ARE. YOU'RE A YOUNG GIRL.AM I A YOUNG AMERICAN BOY?NO, YOU AREN'T. YOU AREN'T A YOUNG

AMERICAN BOY.

T: AM I A JAPANESE BOY?

P: Am I a Japanese boy?T: YES, YOU ARE. YOU'RE A JAPANESE BOY.

T: AM I A JAPANESE GIRL?

P: Am I a Japanese girl?T: YES, YOU ARE. YOU'RE A JAPANESE GIRL.

P: Am I a Japanese /boy /girl /?T: YES, YOU ARE. YOU'RE A JAPANESE

/BOY/GIRL/.

P: Am I an English /boy /girl /?P: Am I a Japanese /man/womannP: Am I an old /man /woman /?

etc.T: NO, YOU AREN'T. YOU AREN'T *XYZ.

YOU'RE *ABC.

If there is time at the end of the hour, such Question-and-Answer practice is carried on P-P. If there is notsufficient time, the next class hour can begin with brief mimicry-memorizing review and then chain practice,first with questions requiring "Yes," then with questions requiring "No," then finally with mixed questions.

"Good-bye"

26

5. 21dministrative Details of the 1958Seminar, and Comments

[Class sizes in the six sub - sections Schedule Workshops The deMonstration classesUse of English outside the classroom]

Class sizes in the six sub - sections

FOR a variety of practical reasons, the num-ber of trainees planned for in the 1958

Seminar was sixty. The various class sizes forthe six hours were planned to fit the special pur-poses of each hour.*

The First Hour (presentation and beginningof practice) called for three sections of 20trainees each. This was considered small enoughto assure adequate listening by the trainees,and large enough to exemplify the group-prac-tice aspects, at a stage where it is important toavoid shyness and insecurity. In the grouppractice of the first hour, the sequence wasnormally performance by the total group, thenwith halves and somewhat smaller groups, butnot less then five. Thus a certain amount ofconfidence was built up before the individualtrainees were called upon (in the followinghours) to perform alone. Each of the three 20-trainee groups was composed of two 10-traineegroups; see below for the Third and SixthHours.

The Second Hour was presented to the entiregroup of 60 trainees. As a lecture, the discus-sion of teaching problems and structural fea-tures ought to be identically available to alltrainees, and it was obviously more efficient tohave one inclusive audience rather than threeconsecutive or simultaneous lectures. In termsof the suggested form of the Second Hour, westill regard the large trainee group as desirable.The kind of practice described on Pages 15-18is practicable in terms of giving each of 60trainees a small assignment within a class hour,and a wide distribution of the assignments is de-sirable to avoid overworking the trainees.Further, the practice of "teaching" a largegroup more nearly approximates actual class-room conditions.

The Third Hour involved the division intothe smallest groups: 10 trainees each.t In thesesmall groups, the procedure shifted from group

27

to individual performance. Any new material,to be sure, was first practiced briefly by thewhole group of ten; but this was followed byindividual performances. It was in this hourthat the trainers concentrated on the specialproblems of the individual trainees. Each groupquickly became a little team (and the samejunior trainer was always in charge throughoutthe Seminar); so there was a minimum of shy-ness about performance or embarrassmentabout corrections. The variety of material inthe Reading Practice gave adequate scope forpair-practice without boredom.

During the second half of each Chapter, thesubdivisions of the sixty trainees was planned as60-60-10.

For the Fourth Hour (demonstration teach-ing of a full-scale sample lesson), it was desir-able to have the entire group of sixty. This in-sured uniformity of experience for all trainees;the large number more realistically resembledactual elementary language class size in Japan.The very difficulties of listening and respondingin a large group were a valuable reminder to thetrainees that a language teacher needs to moveabout the classroom to insure being heard by allpupils, and to keep a high level of loudness andclearness in his own speaking and in the pupils'respondings. (For the demonstration teachingof sample lessons, the various junior -trainerswere rotated, to display a maximum variety of

* Two fortuitous changes disturbed the original plans:65 trainees were admitted, instead of 60; the number ofjunior trainers was reduced from six to five as a result ofcertain earlier administrative confusions. These two changesrequired somewhat larger and less neat subdivisions of thetrainee group, and imposed a heavier-than-planned teach-ing load upon the junior trainers. In the account which isgiven here, the planned-for rather than the actual classsizes are described.

t Under the actual conditions of the 1958 Seminar therewere five groups of 13 each. Each of the groups had its dis-tinctive name: "Robins, Swallows, Eagles, Hawks, Peli-cans."

individual teaching procedures an to indicatethat there is no one magic "method" of con-ducting oral practice.)

During the Fifth Hour (practice in a specificclassroom procedure or device) the entiregroup of sixty again met together. The reason-ing was parallel to that for the Second Hour(Page 27): As a lecture-discussion, it shouldbe available uniformly to all trainees; as a simu-lated beginning class, the total group resembledthe actual number in a real class; in practice oftiny components of classroom procedure, over-working should be avoided.

The Sixth Hour placed the heaviest burdenof performance on individual trainees: practiceteaching from a detailed lesson plan. Hence, formaximum assurance and freedom from em-barrassment, this practice teaching was donewithin the familiar ten-traineee teams (Robins,Swallows, etc.). The team's regular trainer wasalways present to help the practice teacher inany emergency.

Schedule

The Seminar classes were scheduled to runfrom 9 a.m. Monday to noon Saturday. Mon-day of the first week was used for registration,ceremonies, testing, and orientation. Fridayof the last week was used for testing, and thefinal ceremonies occurred the next day.

As a basic pattern, the first three sub-sections(the "content" half) were studied during theafternoon hours. The remaining sub-sections(IV, V, VI) were presented during the threeclass hours of the following morning. This divi-sion of work on one Chapter over two half-days, an afternoon and a morning session, wasplanned to allow time for the trainees to reviewthe material at their leisure, to do some pre-liminary study of the discussions of teachingtechniques, and to prepare for their per-formance as practice teachers.

Workshops

The basic pattern for the three-week Seminarwas a Script of fifteen Chapters with six sub-sections each; but there were departures fromthe pattern on several days to allow time forsupplementary activities. The two morning ses-sions of August 19th and 26th were devoted to

28

less formal meetings in workshops. In theseworkshops there was discussion, and practice,of three activities: audio aids, visual aids, andsocial activities suitable for school languageclubs.

The demonstration classes

The special conditions of a total programmust determine whether demonstration classesare taught to real children beginners or totrainees who act as beginners during this hour.

In the 1957 and 1958 Seminars in Japan, thesecond course was followed. This was duechiefly to practical reasons. It would have beendifficult to gather a realistic class of 12-year-oldchildren during their brief summer vacation.Not all of the junior trainers had a sufficientcommand of Japanese to give classroom direc-tions and answer questions in the children'sNL. Another difficulty was physical: it wouldhave been hard to provide a realistic classroomfor an average Japanese class of 50-60 pupilsand at the same time have facilities for 60trainees to observe them, quite apart from thestrangeness of the situation. Nothing likeclosed-circuit TV was available.

Complete observation of a real course forchildren beginners was recognized as probablya boring experience for the trainees, if carried tothe extent of five class hours a week. Any at-tempt to combine demonstration of a course forreal beginners with a practice-teaching programwould obviously have disrupted the languagelearning of the children; in all professional con-science, beginning pupils deserve continuity andintegration in their classroom work. Childrenlearners can adjust to the presence of observers;but experimentation on them would be hard tojustify.

There are other factors which speak in favorof the second course. It provides all traineeswith another hour of active practice on thematerial of each Chapter; and in an intensiveprogram, fifteen out of ca. 90 hours are notlightly to be sacrificed. In the Seminars inJapan, it was considered desirable for thetrainees to observe a variety of individualteaching procedures; hence all the junior train-ers and the senior trainers participated asdemonstration teachers. Such a variety ofteachers was good for the trainees, but it would

obviously have been unsuitable for real childrenlearners.

Further, the use of real beginners poses anadditional problem for the script writers. Sincethe children have to learn at a beginner's rate,the fifteen demonstration hours with real chil-dren must necessarily be fifteen consecutivelessons in a real beginner's course. But thetrainees will have covered that portion of thecourse in their first two days of the intensiveretraining program; the remaining 80-85 per-cent of the material would thus have to be leftundemonstrated and unpracticed on the fullscale which it is the purpose of the FourthHours to display.

Use of English outside the classroom

We are aware that there are arguments forand against the use of the FL by trainees out-side the controlled class hours. We incline to-ward considerable caution in attempting toprovide "an experience of living in the FL."For genuinely advanced teachers, who alreadypossess a quite secure control of the pronuncia-tion and basic grammatical habits, practice inexpanding their conversational fluency is ob-viously desirable. But for precisely those FLteachers who most need retraining, good habitsare far more important than conversationalpractice. Inter-trainee conversations in the FL,in all realism, would have to go far beyond thecontrolled materials in vocabulary and syn-tactic complexity. Inevitably, such conversa-tion would be practice of bad habits, thestrengthening of inaccuracies and downrightmistakes in the FL, together with an unde-sirable admixture of NL vocabulary to fill in thetrainees' inadequate FL vocabulary, especiallyif the trainees' previous FL experience has beenof a primarily literary orientation.

For such trainees, it seems to us more sen-sible to restrict the use of the FL to the care-fully-planned practice of the class hours andavoid the perils of reinforcing bad habits out-side the classroom. This consideration is quiteapart from the factor of fatigue: Even threehours of controlled FL practice a day is hardwork; six hours a day is on the border of over-straining. To add yet further strain, plus frus-trations at being unable to accomplish normalsocial business (or a sense of guilt at reverting

29

to the NL in practical situations), seems to usunwise.

Admittedly, there is a very strong desire onthe part of trainees to improve their generalconversational fluency. Many of them, indeed,mistakenly believe that it is the purpose of a re-training program to enable them to converse ona wide range of topics. Although we considerthis goal (desirable as it certainly is in itself) tobe less relevant than the development of accu-rate pronunciation and grammatical control of alimited corpus, we recognize that some con-cession ought to be made. A relatively safe de-vice is the familiar one of mealtime conversa-tion in the FL. The 1957 and 1958 Seminarswere fortunate in having available sufficientnumbers of speakers of English to man numer-ous tables at meals. The ideal distribution(which we realize can seldom be attained underusual, less favorable retraining conditions) wasto have tables for five: three trainees, oneJapanese with a very good command of Eng-lish, and one native speaker of English. Thismade it possible for the two speakers of Englishto converse sensibly and as adults, on topics ofgenuine substance. At first the trainees couldmerely listen without embarrassment; simplequestions to them, requiring simple answers,gradually involved them in feasible conversa-tional practice. In this way it was possible toavoid some of the weaknesses of mealtime FLconversation: the monolog by the one nativespeaker; the strained asking of trite questionstransparently only for the purpose of practiceand not of true communication; the dilemma ofeither accepting a mistake or turning the mealinto a class exercise.

We did not regret that the trainees at firstdid far more listening than talking; listeningpractice was if anything more needed by mosttrainees than speaking practice. They could, al-though with difficulty, manage to contrive somekind of intelligible question or answer, givenenough time for thought; it was at first muchmore difficult for them to understand Englishspoken in anything like a normal conversationalstyle: the listening experience was a salutaryone. And the observation of one of their fellow-countrymen who had acquired a high degree ofcontrol of English conversation was in itself areassurance and an incentive.

Although, as noted above, we realize that theconditions were uncommonly favorable and notlikely to be found in most retraining opera-tions, we suggest that thought be given to ar-ranging for maximum adult realism in tableconversation. For the early days, at least, itmight be desirable to have larger groups oftrainees and two competent speakers groupedinto a mealtime unit, to provide an initialperiod of listening practice. Thereafter a dis-tribution into small groups, each with onefluent speaker, might be resorted to.

Similar considerations prescribe the natureof the supplementary lectures and social activ-ities. Lectures of serious content, of an "Area"nature, where the purpose is genuinely informa-tive, are most effective in the trainees' NL. Animportant exception is a type of lecture whichproved valuable in the 1957 and 1958 Seminarsin Japan: lectures in the FL (English) by dis-tinguished compatriots of the traineesJapa-nese leaders in English scholarship and in na-tional affairs. The effect one observed was a sig-nificant raising of morale. The trainees had theopportunity to see and hear outstanding menand women whose names are known through-out Japan; this was in itself a memorable ex-perience. Further, as at the meal tables men-

tioned earlier, the trainees were impressivelyencouraged by seeing an older Japanese whohad achieved a high competence in English, asshown not only in the lectures themselves butalso in the following free discussions betweenthe senior Japanese and the American con-sultants.

As for sports and games played by thetrainees for genuine relaxation, they shouldnormally be played in a normal' mannerthatis, in the NL. Of course, the introduction of afew calls or technical terms in the FL to replacethe usual NL ones involves little strain and onlya pleasant artificiality.

Either as part of a workship or as a supple-mentary social activity, games involving man-ageable amounts of the FL are a positive prac-tice and assuage the consciences of the mostdutiful trainees: counting-out games, mock ac-cusations and denials in a "passing-on" se-quence, varients of bingo (e.g., involvingcalendar practice), and frame-filling contests.

The well-known eagerness of trainees to singFL songs makes it imperative to include a com-petent choral leader in the trainer staff if at allpossible. The combination of tapes and mimeo-graphed words is an obvious supplement (or, ifnecessary, substitute).

6. Adaptations of the "Script Pattern"to Other Types of Programs

[A six or eight weeks Language and Area program--A special program in a new FL forsenior FL personnelThe Script pattern in a regular academic curriculumModifica-tions for in-service training]

A six or eight weeks Languageand Area program

THE scheduling and apportionment of thetrainee's time so far discussed has been in

terms of an intensive three-weeks course. Spe-cific local conditions, such as the length of theschool vacation periods or the availability ofstaff and facilities, may permit the schedulingof a longer retaining course. Particularly in theUnited States, where an extended session would

30

fit into the patterns of college and universitysummer programs, a training period of six oreight weeks would be well suited to the needs ofprospective FL teachers for the elementary orjunior high schools.

The additional time available in a course ofsix or eight weeks would permit the material tobe covered with more spacing. Many features ofan ideal teacher-training course, features whichwere of necessity omitted in the austerely

limited time of the 1958 Seminar in Japan,could be provided for in a longer program.Among the possible additions to the basic pat-tern as sketched above might be:

A coordinated Area program of lectures,readings, and motion pictures dealing withvarious aspects of the foreign culture.

Additional workshop sessions for the prepara-tion and classroom demonstration of audio-visual materials.

Periods for individual practice in the lan-guage laboratory.

Discussions of the ways in which the pupils'FL activities could be related to their otherclassroom work.

We urge that such additions to the program,important as they are, should be viewed by thestaff and the trainees as an enrichment of theretraining rather than as a reason for dilutingthe emphasis on the major objectivesthe at-tainment of linguistic control of the corpus andof the classroom techniques useful in an oral ap-proach.

The adaptation of the schedule of a three-weeks program as described above, to one ofsix or eight weeks, would require adjustment ofthe time-schedule only. Changes in the basicpattern of instruction would not be necessary,and the same Script could serve for both an in-tensive and a more extended training course.For a six-week program, for instance, oneChapter of the Script (one day's work underthe intensive schedule) could simply be dividedinto two halves for study on two successivedays. The first half-chapter, devoted prin-cipally to the presentation and practice of newvocabulary and grammar items, could bestudied during one morning session. Thesecond half-chapter, which provides furtherwork with those same items of vocabulary andgrammar through the demonstration and prac-tice of appropriate teaching techniques, couldbe covered during the following morning. Theafternoon sessions would thus be left free forthe scheduling of supplementary lectures,workshop periods, or discussion groups as de-sired.

An adaptation of the time scale to an eight-week program could follow either of two lines:(1) More material could be included, by havingtwenty instead of fifteen Chapters, or by some-

how expanding the size of the Chapters. (2)More enrichment on the Area side could be pro-vided. For example, two Chapters of a 15-chapter core on language and teaching could bedistributed over Monday through Thursday ofeach week, with Friday devoted to a relatedseries of workshops on various topics, speciallectures and panels by visiting authorities andofficials.

31

A special program in a new FLfor senior FL personnel

One modification to which we have givensome thought is a six-week or eight-week pro-gram for language supervisors and departmentheads, to prepare them to cope with an ex-panded language offering in their school sys-tems, involving a language with which thesupervisor or department head is not yetfamiliar. (In the USA, one thinks primarily ofRussian at this time.)

The adaptation of the regular retrainingprogram for such supervisors would be in thedirection of providing additional practice andtheoretical grammar discussions. These wouldsupplement the regular Script. When the regu-lar trainees (those who already know some-thing about the language and are being trulyretrained) are at work on the Area aspects of theprogram, the supervisors could be providedwith additional practice in the language itself.We think of two supplementary hours: one ofpractice to confirm vocabulary control and oneof theoretical grammar, with workbook assign-ments.

Our assumption is that the supervisors anddepartment heads, after six or eight weeks atthe rate of 25 hours a week ( =150 or 200 con-tact hours) would be equipped to welcome andadminister in their systems new beginningcourses in the language. The supervisors wouldhave the advantage of already knowing one ormore FLs well, and of understanding the lan-guage-learning process. The opportunity to addanother language to their professional compe-tences would provide a strong motivation, aswould also the association with their colleaguesin a joint enterprise. We accordingly expectthat they would acquire at least the minimumfamiliarity with the new FL which they wouldneed to guide its introduction into their school

systems. It is regrettable that the Area aspectswould have to be sacrificed for such super-visors; but their maturity and experienceshould enable them to fill in via subsequentreadings.

This adaptation of the Script pattern to thespecial needs of supervisors and departmentheads seems to us worth taking seriously. It isneither humanly nor professionally plausibleto expect an expansion of language offerings un-less the immediately responsible professionalsare and know themselves to be ready to guidethe teaching of a new language.

The Script pattern in a regularacademic curriculum

If the Script pattern is used as part of a regu-lar academic program in pre-service teachertraining, it might be desirable to schedule two

Atifewatoariat

closely coordinated coursesone called "Prac-tice in Oral FL" and the companion coursecalled "The Teaching of Oral FL." The ob-jective of the two courses would be to give theprospective teachers the same multiple rein-forcement of language skills and teachingtechniques which is the aim of the integrated in-tensive program.

Modifications for in-service training

The basic pattern of the Script could also beadapted to programs of in-service training dur-ing the school year. Through the scheduling of aseries of "Saturday workshops," one Chapter(or one half-chapter) of the Script could becovered each week, thus extending the period oftraining through a semester (or through a fullyear).

* FL e.g. French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian.

7. Further Developments of the Script Pattern[Retraining for intermediate FL teachingRevision of a script: needs and aimsRepairs, revisions, and the beginning of tapingThe second editionThe third editionThe massive retraining networkThe script pattern in professional trainingAccommodations to new textbooks]

THE training script we have been de-scribing is defined as being circumscribed

in two ways:(1) It is designed to retrain teachers for an

oral-aural approach in teaching the first year ofa FL;

(2) it is in a format for its first use and test-ing in a particular retraining program; it is ex-pected that the Script itself will undergo re-vision and improvement after a first use, andthat later "editions" of the Script will differ insome important ways from the first-time-through version.

There has been some thinking and discussionof Iffetopments beyond these two limitations.

Retraining for intermediate FL teaching

The most urgent need in 1959, here in theUSA and in many other parts of the world, is toprepare teachers to direct oral practice as the

32

very beginning of their pupils' FL study. Butan oral approach is only an approach. Thepupils to be helped in their beginning work bythe retrained teachers will move out of the be-ginning phase into intermediate learning of theFL; and then they will have to be taught inthat intermediate phase. Where there are majorprograms of integrated language-study pro-gression through three, four, six, or more years,it may be degirable to construct training ma-terials to equip teachers to direct courses follow-ing the beginning year.

Such succeeding retraining programs willideally be attended by teachers who have al-ready gone through the experience of intensivepreparation for oral-approach teaching. Thelater programs will have the task of maintain-ing and refreshing pronunciation control. Butthe control, of more complex grammaticalstructures and of a larger vocabulary will have

to be provided on the content side. And class-room procedures appropriate to the increasedemphasis on reading and writing in the inter-mediate phases will have to be discussed andpracticed.

We recognize that the linguistic analysis(Sub-section II) and classroom procedure exer-cises (Sub-section V) will have to be adapted toa format and content quite different from thosewe describe for the beginning-stage Script.

The selection of an appropriate Corpus toserve as the basis for the intermediate-stageScript will be no problem where there is a co-herent integrated language program under anauthoritative state board or a Ministry ofEducation. But elsewhere the problem of se-lecting from a list of optional texts will be atroublesome one, as will be the task of devisingpronunciation refresher practice with a widevariety of possible textbooks. However, thebasic objectives of a Script will be valid: con-firming the teacher's control of the material hispupils are to practice, and assuring his con-fident performance of the appropriate class-room procedures.

Revision of a script: needs and aims

The Script we have described is in the formatfor a first use. We think of it as being later re-vised in the light of that first use, and as beingdeveloped in the direction of a reduced ratio oftrainers to trainees and an increased use ofaudio devices.

We are not so optimistic as to believe that a"first edition" of a Script will be free from errorsof inclusion and exclusion, or misjudgments oftime-allotments to practice on various struc-tural features. It is to be expected that duringthe period between the first and second retrain-ing programs, a revision to correct the dis-covered weaknesses will take place.

Since such correction will be needed, it is un-economical to attempt to tape any portion ofthe first version of a Script, except perhaps as apedagogical demonstration in connection with aclassroom procedure exercise (Sub-section V) ora workshop on the use of audio devices.

Since the 1958 Seminar in Japan was thefirst use of the Script, the practice material waspresented entirely with native-speaking juniortrainers. (The original plans, it will be recalled,

33

provided 6 trainers to 60 trainees.) They wereable to make on-the-spot accommodations tocounteract any ineptitudes in the Script and toreport on them.

But the ratio of 1:10 between trainers andtrainees is obviously not one which can be in-definitely continued. When the teacher popula-tion in need of retraining for oral practice is inthe thousands (or the tens of thousands, as insome situations abroad), it is clear that thehundreds or thousands of native-speaking jun-ior trainers required to maintain that 1:10 ratio -simply cannot be found or paid for; the machinemust be pressed into service. And precisely be-cause a large part of the model-for-imitationrole will have to be assumed by the tape, it isnecessary to plan thoughtfully for the transi-tion from live speaker to tape, and not to com-mit oneself prematurely to a distribution oftime in detail which may be shown as inefficientin actual use.

In a cooperative overseas program on Englishas a FL, where there is a large component ofUSA consultants, the revisions of the Scripthave a strategic place quite apart from thetechnical adjustment of trainer-trainee ratios.As the USA junior trainers are replaced by tape,so the senior USA consultants play a smallerand smaller part in the total program, with thelocal experts and administrators taking over anincreasing share of the responsibilities. The re-vision of the Script, planned for as the finalstage of special USA participation, is a logicaland a graceful mode of disengagement.

It is recognized that for some purposes suchUSA participation is indispensable. But it isalso undeniable that it has its disadvantagesand awkward concomitants. Script-revision isan inconspicuous part of the total task, furnish-ing a natural tapering-off of USA influence andavoiding either an unwelcome prolonging offoreign involvement or an abrupt terminationof cooperation.

Repairs, revisions, and the beginningof taping

The notes of the senior trainer, summarizingthe reports of the junior trainers and checkedby the senior trainer's own observations of thevarious groups and sub-groups, constitute direc-tions for desirable revisions of the Script itself.

J

Between the first and second "editions" of aScript, we think of two behind-the-scenes tasks:

(1) The indicated revisions and repairs mustbe made, on the basis of experience during thefirst run.

(2) Tapes of the revised, repaired Script areto be prepared with native-speaking voicescovering parts or all of the presentation andpractice (Sub-section I), presentation andreading practice (Sub-section III), and practiceteaching (Sub-section VI). The practice-teach-ing tapes should be available to those traineeswho are assigned to this role, Chapter byChapter; they can prepare themselves for theirtask by studying the tapes in consultation witha trainer.

A second edition

We think it would be safe to replace onethird of the junior trainers by regular localteachers of the FL for the revised Script'ssecond use. The work of the first and thirdSub-sections (presentation and practice, presen-tation and reading practice) could be dividedclass by class on alternating days between anative-speaking junior trainer and a regularteacher of the FL. That teacher should be oneof the most successful trainees of the precedingprogram or an experienced teacher with an un-commonly reliable pronunciation of the FL.The same pairs of trainers should function asteams in coaching and supervising the practiceteaching (Sub-section VI).

In this way, we would hope, the first use oftapes would receive a check, and some key per-sonnel in the regular teacher group would getpractice in the use of audio aids.

This second retraining program would testthe tapes. Like the Script in the first program,the tapes in the second would betray weak-nesses calling for revision and repair. Again, thesenior trainer would be the channel, balancinghis observations in the classrooms against hisappraisals of the individuals who are partici-pating; his recommendations will be the guideto revisions and repairs in the tape versions.

A third edition

Between the second and third editions, themajor task is in the tapes department. (To besure, there will be some refinement of the Script

34

itself, as residual blemishes in the original ver-sion are revealed, and also blemishes resultingfrom the first major revision and repair. But itis the audio aspect, we think, which will be themajor field for revision and expansion.) Thesenior trainer's report on the second programis the guide line for the revisions.

In addition to the revision-and-repair workat this stage, an expansion of the tape coverageshould occur. The detailed exercises to accom-pany the linguistic analysis (Sub-section II)and classroom procedures (Sub-section V) canby this time be usefully put on tape, for pre-liminary study by the regular teacher conduct-ing the relevant Hours, and for his occasionaluse during the Hours. Similarly, the demonstra-tion Hours (Sub-section IV) should by thisstage be sufficiently tested in the first and sec-ond programs to be ready for taping, for pre-liminary listening by the regular teacher whopresents the lesson. Judgments will differ as towhether it is preferable to tape the demonstra-tion hour with real beginners (who make mis-takes to be overtly corrected on the tape) orwith an unrealistic but safely-imitable class ofyoungsters who are themselves native speakersof the FL. We hazard no recommendation;perhaps judicious mixing of the two typesmight constitute an effective teacher-trainingadjunct.

In addition, it might be desirable to preparerepresentative tapes for samples of the actualtext or texts which constitute the Corpus under-lying the Script. Such samples could be realisticillustrations of the way in which audio aidswould be used in an actual classroom to supple-ment the activities of the regular teacher, whenand where such equipment is available.

A coherent program of special audio work-shop's could include demonstrations by an ex-perienced teacher who understands both thepedagogical function and the mechanical func-tioning of machines. Later, under his guidance,the trainees could practice both the manipula-tion and then the classroom application ofrecording devices. (In some of the large pro-grams overseas, such tapes will already exist asa part of the teaching materials; the task of theScript team would be one of selection and ofpreparing directions for demonstration andpractice.)

The third edition is the final stage of prepara-tion for an expanded teacher-retraining cam-paign. In programs abroad, this third stagewould be a battery of geographically distributedenterprises, away from a capital or a uniquemetropolis, in order to test the retraining outin the field, where most of the work, after all,will have to be done if the total FL program isever to take hold.

For this stage, we think of only two nativespeakers of the FL as being associated with eachprogram: one senior and one (former) juniortrainer. The two, we think, should be adequatenative-speaking manpower to cope with a groupof up to 120 trainees. Their function would beto check on the performance of the tapes, andto advise the (by now) majority of regularteachers who are the backbone of the trainingstaff. The reports of the native-speaking twocontribute to the really-final revision and re-pair of tapes and remaining residual Scriptflaws.

The substantive function of the native-speak-ing trainers during the third program is in pre-cisely the role that a tape cannot perform: ap-praising. Their schedules must be arranged sothat one of them observes every trainee in thecourse of each Chapter, to detect and correctthe then current difficulties. In so doing, theywill reinforce the regular teacher, and make hima better trainer for following programs by theirauthoritative reminders of just those points ofconflict where both the teacher and his pupilsare most likely to succumb to an un-FL produc-tion. This appraising role (see above, Pages 8-9)is one which the teacher cannot abdicate to thetape: he can use the tape to validate his ap-praisals, but it is the live teacher's ear whichmakes the appraisal in the first place. For teach.,er training, that live ear should be a native-speaker's ear. We recognize the drastic man-power shortage, here and abroad; but in all pro-fessional conscience we cannot conceive ateacher-training program without a nativespeaker's ear as the final arbiter of the "Yes-or-No" decision in answer to the question: "Isthat good enough?"

The massive retraining network

The 1:60 ratio of native-speaking trainers totrainees may be stretched a bit in the extension

35

to a state-by-state, prefecture-by-prefecture,administrative area-by-area network of re-training programs. We recognize, on the basisof our experiences and our observations of theformidable dimensions of the manpower re-quirements which confront any effort to im-prove FL instruction, that compromises willhave to be made. We hope that we havesketched a realistic program to develop localregular-teaching trainers through successiveprograms to assume their roles as trainers oftheir colleagues.

When the numbers are large (as the numbersare), some dilution of the ideal proportion ofnative-speaking trainers to trainees has to beaccepted as a practical necessity. One hopesthat the compromises will be postponed as longas possible, and that a prudent anticipatoryprogram will be worked out to develop a corpsof regular teachers qualified to take over trainerfunctions for the massive retraining program.

The scrip pattern in professional preparation

It was foreseen above (Page 32) that oneadaptation of the script pattern would be itsuse as a normal part of a teacher-training cur-riculum. As such we suggested that it might beadministratively most feasible to divide theScript materials into two closely coordinatedcourses: "Practice in Oral FL*" and "TheTeaching of Oral FL." The approximately 80-90 hours of the Script could thus amount to twoconvenient 40-45 hour halves. The advantageof mutual reinforcement between the "content"and the "methods" aspects should be at least asvalid in the training of future teachers as in theretraining of experienced teachers.

We see no serious modification of the basicScript pattern which would be required for suchuse in the regular training curriculum. If suchuse is made of a Script in the form of its "thirdedition" as described above, there would be theadditional benefit of practice with tapes: thefuture teacher would gain a useful insight intoboth the potentialities and the limitations ofaudio aids and would be a better user of them inhis own future teaching. The lowered trainer-to-trainee ratio aimed at in the later stages ofScript revision would make such twin courses

* -e.g. French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian.

possible even when the teacher-training staff of

a particular institution happened not to includea native-speaking professor of the FL involved.

Accommodations to new textbooks

Since the foreseen evolution of a Script asoutlined on the preceding pages covers a periodof years, it must be expected that new text-books will have appeared during that period.If the normal course of events occurs, some ofthese textbooks will be definitely superior tosome of their predecessors.

In large measure, the successive revisionoperations can and must take account of theintervening publications. Often a new appear-ance on the market may be accepted as firmlydisplacing one of the components of a composite.

Corpus and as permitting the welcome deletionof some eccentric vocabulary or grammaticalfeatures which had been included in earlierversions.

Fortunately, the flexibility of tape permitserasures and dubbings to accommodate suchadjustments.

Even more important, the nature of languageinsures that the statistical stabilities of high-frequency lexicon and major-syntax sentenceforms will not be severely perturbed by the in-clusion of a new textbook. A competent crew of

Script writers, backed by alert and well-in-formed reports from senior trainers, can adjustsuccessive editions of the Script to the realneeds of their trainees as teachers in real classesduring the coming years.

APPENDIXReports and Comments on the Construction of a Script

IT IS obvious that a satisfactory Script, as weare describing it, requires thorough prepara-

tion. A very rough estimate, based on our ex-periences and our estimates of requirements forwhat we would have liked to include in ourpreparatory work, would be in the order of 2000to 2500 hours. If this figure seems formidable,we can only agree. But the figure is still con-siderably smaller than any realistic estimate ofthe time required to produce satisfactory class-room teaching material. And we hold that atext-making project deserves the additional in-vestment of time to prepare the average teacherto use the new texts, however substantial thatadditional investment may be.

Naturally, the Script is not written in theorder in which it is finally performed in the re-training classrooms. The limitations of time inthe actual retraining program demand an inter-twining of the various modes of practice withineach Chapter, and also a meticulously con-trolled progress from Chapter to Chapter.

What follows here is an account (partly his-torical as a report of the 1958 preparations,partly ideal) of the construction of such aScript. Clearly each program will present itsown special requirements, and presumably noScript identically like the one we describe willbe written; hence the blueprint as here outlinedwould be correspondingly modified.

The Script-writing team

For many reasons, the construction of theScript should be a collaborative enterprise. Avariety of background experiences of the writersis desirable to avoid partial or doctrinaire biasin the procedures and formulations. Further,there is much drudgery, and this is more bear-able when shared; a fellow-worker can see the.way out of a blind alley or suggest an alterna-tive solution of a stubborn problem. It is hardto imagine any one worker who could remainfresh and ingenious and really interestedthrough his months of Script-writing; it is astrain to live within a rigorously limited vo-cabulary and syntax. (In our own 1958 experi-

37

ence we discoveredlaterl--that near the endof our writing we had slipped at some stage ofdrafting or revising or copying, and had in-chided two vocabulary items not a part of theprescribed lexical domain ("eat, comes"). Suchblemishes testify to the difficulty of continuedoperation within lexical restrictions; we foundthat our predecessors had similarly slipped fromtime to time in the syntactic domain; and weare confident that an accurate check on ourScript would reveal syntactic transgressions byus.) Close collaboration, however, reduces thelikelihood of such slips escaping unnoticed andalso reduces the fatigue and frustration whichtend to produce the blunders in the first place.

An ideal Script-writing team, for such aScript as we describe, would consist of four orfive people working together for 10-12 weeksafter the preliminary analysis of the Corpusunderlying the Script.

One worker should be an experienced teacherof the FL, to report on known difficulties andprobable stubborn conflicts as a matter of hispersonal practical observation.

One worker should be a native speaker of theFL, to insure that nothing actually impossibleor offensively awkward is presented for prac-tice.

Of these two workers (both of whom may ofcourse be both native speakers and experiencedteachers of the FL), at least one should havesome understanding of basic linguistic prin-ciples.

Two more workers should be people with acapacity for collaboration, with experience inclassroom teaching, acquaintance with class-room realities, familiarity with the competenceof the prospective trainees, some experience inwriting and publishing textbooks, a grasp ofgeneral linguistic principles, and at least atheoretical knowledge of the comparativestructures of the FL and the trainees' NL.These two need not be native speakers of theFL, nor even necessarily highly competentspeakers of the FL. We suspect that our beingnative speakers of English was sometimes a dis-

.E.

advantage to us in our writing, in that we tend-ed to rebel at the triteness or practical im-plausibility of much that we had to wr;te tosecure the necessary variation and selectionpractice drills. We knew intellectually, as teach-ers and linguists, that the drills were indispensa-ble and that we had to contrive exhaustivevariations on the limited material of theCorpus. But intuitively as native speakers ofEnglish we were frustrated by the unnatural(for real practical speaking) limitations of thecontent.

A fifth worker, permissibly less experiencedthan the others, could have specific limitedroles, either with the first two or with the lasttwo mentioned above, depending upon the dis-tribution of assignments among the four.

Sources and content of the Script

What part of the FL should be taken as thebasis of the Script in the retraining program?The decision is a crucial one. For it is obviouslysenseless to base a retraining program on a dif-fuse or random Corpus with a vague objectiveof "increasing the trainees' general pro-ficiency." It is also impossible to enroll a groupof trainees with identical previous study of andidentical present competence in the FL, andthen "build on" that study and that compe-tence.

Hence, we consider it beside the point to tryto devise a Script which is a replica of any givenyear or semester of language study, e.g. theequivalent of the fifth-and-sixth semesters, orthe seventh-and-eighth semesters, of an under-graduate college course. A retraining programis not part of a cumulative curriculum nor anoffshoot of a cumulative curriculum. The con-ventional "Conversation and Composition"course in an undergraduate FL major is not theanswer to the trainees' needs, nor is the conven-tional "Methods of teaching foreign languages"course.

We conceive the retraining objective as beingat once more limited and more thorough: toprepare the trainees to do a particular job, andto do it well. That job is to direct the oral-auralpractice of their future pupils, and to direct itso that those pupils' practice will establishsound FL habits.

The indicated source of the Script is thus the

38

teaching materials of the trainees' future class-room activities. That portion of the FL whichsuch teaching material represents is the FL thetrainees will need to control accurately, andwithin which they will be directing their pupils'practice by appropriate classroom proceduresand devices.

We confess to trepidation in thus prescribinga high-school (including junior high-school)text or texts as the source of the Script. The firstreaction, we have found, even from interestedand well-disposed laymen, has been that noth-ing like graduate post-baccalaureate intensivestudy can be based on such elementary ma-terials. We suggest, with all sympathetic under-standing of the first reaction, that graduatecourses in Chemistry properly concern them-selves with carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Thecriterion is not the elements of the material butthe organization of the course. We describe anorganization of the relevant portion of a FL tooccupy constructively the intelligence and self-discipline of serious adults during a trainingprogram. The fact that the same basic materialsin another form and in a quite different applica-tion, are to be used for different purposes byadolescents in a quite different classroom,should not be allowed to obscure the differences.

It goes without saying that basing the Scriptupon the actual text or texts does not mean amere sampling from the text or texts. For onething, the trainee must cover the material ofthe text(s) much more rapidly than his futurepupils will. Further, he must cover all of it, not"representative parts" of it, since he will haveto present, appraise, and direct the practice ofeverything his future pupils will be learning,though at a quite different rate from that of thetrainee's own work with the materials.

Thus the source of the Script is the materialsof the text(s), not the text(s) themselves. It isthe task of the Script writers to determine thematerial through analysis of the text(s) as tovocabulary, sentence structures, and teachingprocedures. Then that material has to be trans-formed into suitable sections for effective prac-tice by adults already somewhat familiar withthe language, for purposes of increasing theiraccuracy. Around that material the Script is toprovide professionally valid discussion and ex-ercises in the two appropriate technical fields:

f

,IIL"-gr-

linguistic comparison and pedagogical tech-niques.

A BLUEPRINT FOR SCRIPT-WRITINGPreliminary steps: the Corpus

If the Script writing is part of a larger project,where new text materials are being preparedfrom scratch, there is no problem of selectingthe Corpus: the appropriate parts of the textmaterials are the Corpus. Similarly, if there is asingle existing textbook which is officially pre-scribed or which is in universal use, that text-book constitutes the Corpus.

If there are many textbooks, any of which thetrainees may have to use later, the first step isto decide which of them are to be used as theCorpus. The experienced teacher of the FL hasto make the decision. We estimate that up tofive different textbooks would be manageableas a composite Corpus. Our assumption is thatamong a group of sensible textbooks which canbe seriously considered as acceptable teachingmaterials in actual language courses, there willbe very considerable overlap in vocabulary andsentence structures. The divergences within thegroup of textbooks would necessarily receivesome, but less intensive, practice in the Scriptthan the overlap.

The analysis of the Corpus

Depending upon the availabilities of theworkers, one or more of them analyzes the Cor-pus. The analysis has three major divisions:vocabulary, grammar, teaching procedures.

If the Corpus consists of a single text, a nota-tation merely by "lesson, unit, or section" ofthat text suffices to indicate location. If theCorpus is composite, a letter code to identifythe particular text plus a number for "lesson,unit, or section" etc. would be used.

It is desirable to have for each of the threedivisions a record of the place of introductionand the subsequent appearances of an item laterin the text.

For practical Script-writing purposes, wefound it sufficient to know only that an item didor did not appear in a particular "lesson, etc."of the textbook. If this information suffices forthe workers on a Script, the analysis phase of

the work becomes manageable. A clerical work-

er can easily be trained to do the vocabularycheck, given the suitable worksheets derivedfrom the end-vocabularies of the textbooks un-derlying the Corpus. Somewhat more discrimi-nation is needed for recording the occurrencesof various grammatical features; but practice inscanning soon makes this a fairly rapid opera-tion.

For the analysis of teaching procedures inpreparation for the 1958 Script, M-B type cardswere used. The procedure was typed on thecard. When all procedures had been typed, acode with 28 component features was drawnup, covering objective (vocabulary, grammar),nature of function (introduction, review),whether the procedure was an elaboration of anearlier simpler procedure, whether props wererequired and if so whether those props requiredspecial preparation or availability; and the like.A location code was also punched. By the use ofmultiple needles it was possible at all times tosurvey possible procedures for Seminar practicefor various purposes.

[It should be pointed out that in the case of alarge coherent project, the analyzing is properlycharged against the textbook writing ratherthan the Script writing: the textbook is un-finished until precisely such an analysis has de-termined that there are sufficient recurrences ofeach item of vocabulary and grammar, that therate of introduction of new items at each "les-son, unit, or section" is reasonable, and thatthere is a practicable evolution of classroomprocedures.]

Sub-sections One and Three: Presentationand practice (the "Basic Sub-sections")

Once the analyses are made, work on theScript proper can begin. The first step is toblock out roughly the vocabulary and grammarof the Corpus into fifteen Chapters (or whatevernumber of Chapters is decided upon) of theScript. Since a maximum of cumulation and re-vival is necessary, one worker" concentrates ondrafting the sub-sections for presentationtheFirst and the first part of the Third Hourstraight through from beginning to end. Hisdrafts are continuously discussed with andscrutinized, criticized, and supplemented byhis co-worker, who becomes thoroughly fa-miliar with these basic sub-sections, which

39

contain all the linguistic content of the Script.As these basic sub-sections are being drafted,

they are reviewed by the experienced teacherand the native speaker of the FL for quick cor-rection of blunders, either linguistic or peda-gogical, and as guides for the construction of

later Chapters.As the once-revised drafts of the basic sub-

sections (One and the first part of Three) be-come available, work on other sub-sections canproceed to develop the material in the variouspertinent ways. There is no hard-and-fast ruleabout priorities except that the Reading Prac-tice in the last part of Sub-section Three mustbe the final stage of construction, and it is pref-erable to have the pedagogical practice of theFifth Hour at least well-sketched before thefull-scale practice teaching of the Sixth Hour isprepared. If suitable manpower is available,work can go forward on the Second, Fourth,and Fifth Hours simultaneously, once the basicsub-sections are in semi-final form.

Sub-section Four: Demonstration teaching

In consultation, it is decided which segmentof the total material of a Chapter is to beselected for treatment as a full-scale demonstra-tion lesson in the Fourth Hour. As the reviseddrafts of the basic sub-sections become avail-able, Chapter by Chapter, a co-worker can beelaborating the selected segment into a detailedteaching plan as a demonstration lesson. Oneof the workers should go straight through frombeginning to end of the Script constructing theFourth Hours, providing a variety and a cau-tious cumulation of classroom procedures.

As the Fourth Hours are drafted, they aresubjected to the same discussion and scrutinyas the basic sub-sections, by all the workers intheir various functions.

In selecting the segments of the Chapters forelaboration as Fourth Hours, it is desirablethat there should be variety. Some FourthHours should cdrrespond to the very beginningof the material of a Chapter, others to the endas review, others to various stages of introduc-tion and practice of new and old material. Forthe early Chapters, it is helpful to select aFourth Hour such that it can lead directly intothe practice teaching (the Sixth Hour) as thefollowing segment of the total material of thatChapter.

40

In writing Fourth Hours, the writers of aScript may occasionally find themselves in anunusually favorable situation. If the funda-mental Corpus consists of a single authorizedtextbook, or if the Script writing is part of alarge project including the writing of a new setof textbooks and teacher's guides, then theScript writers may be able to use some of thatreal existing material as Sub-section Four insome or all of the Chapters. In this case, it maybe necessary to adjust the instructions to thedemonstration teachers, depending on theircontrol of the trainees' NL.

Sub-section Two: Linguistic analysisand teaching problems

Before, during, or after work on the FourthHours, the drafting of the second sub-sections(linguistic analysis and teaching problems) canbe begun. The basic sub-sections supply thematerial for exemplification and practice.

The Second Hours are to be cumulativethroughout the Script. And there should besome correlation between the kinds of practiceon linguistic matters constructed for the Sec-ond Hours and the pedagogical practice in theFifth Hours, via constant consultation.

The Second Hours are to present some back-ground discussion of general linguistic prin-ciples and their applications to the trainingmaterial and to classroom situations. We as-sume that the Second Hours in a retrainingprogram for elementary oral practice will focuschiefly upon phonology, with non-technical dis-cussion of the principles of phonemics and anoutline of the two phonological systems in-volved: the pupils' NL, and the FL.

If the linguist-writer of the Second Hours isnot a native speaker of the trainees' NL, thediscussions should be translated by the native-speaker member of the total writing team.

Sub-section Five: Classroom proceduresand devices

The pedagogical practice in Sub-section Fiveconsists of a background discussion of objec-tives, functions, and limitations of variousclassroom procedures and devices, togetherwith tiny practice exercises. The material forillustration in the discussion and for practicein the exercises is selected from the First, Third,and Fourth Hours. The practice should also be

coordinated with the trainee practice-teachingto follow in the Sixth Hour. It is probably mostpracticable to have the Fifth Hour wellsketched before drafting the Sixth Hour.

In contriving the practice exercises, theScript writer's knowledge of the previous teach-ing experience of the trainees will determinethe intensity of various kinds of practice. Itcan usually be assumed that the trainees willinitially hesitate to use the FL orally; the ma-terial for practice should be selected so as toassure the trainees' confidence in their abilityto pronounce every sentence correctly. Obvi-ously the exercises themselves should be cumu-lative within each Fifth Hour, and should startoff from some examples which have been verythoroughly practiced in the First, Third, andFourth Hours, as well as in previous Chapters.

If the writer of the Fifth Hour is not a nativespeaker of the trainees' NL, his draft of the dis-cussion and instructions for practice should be

translated.

Sub-section Six: Practice teaching

As practice teaching, these sub-sections placea heavy load on the trainees selected to per-form. Hence they deserve the most intensescrutiny and criticism before they are acceptedas in final form. (In the other sub-sections, thejunior trainer can compensate for a mistake insequence or a gap in practice or a miscalcula-tion of time. But in practice teaching, anyblunder in the Script damages the trainee'sself-confidence and revives the fears of theother trainees that oral practice is a too difficulttype of language teaching.)

As the sample given earlier (Pages 25-26)shows, we tried to supply to the practice teacherevery help in conducting the class. We consid-ered it far better to err on the side of over-specifying every step in the teaching procedure.The fear of stifling trainee initiative simply didnot seem to us realistic; the trainees we weredealing with could not be encouraged to runand jump before they could toddle. We con-sidered their needs to be confidence and ac-curacy; unless they had those strengths, theywould never dare develop individual initiativeand contrive their special variations for theirspecial needs. Given a justified confidence,through careful guidance to a secure skill in pre-scribed procedures, some of them would go on

41

from there; others would remain where the re-training left themwhich one hopes is betterthan before. Realism in appraising the previousequipment and the desired new skills of traineesis urgently needed in planning the practiceteaching sections.

As a protection against miscalculation oftime (either by us or by the trainee-teacher),we included at the end of each practice-teachingsection a flexible practice, to be done "if thereis time" which lent itself to considerable con-tinuation if needed to fill out the period.

If the writer of the Sixth Hour is not a nativespeaker of the trainees' NL, his draft of the ex-planations to the practice teacher should betranslated.

Recurrence check, and the Readingpractice in Sub-section Three

As the checked and revised Sixth Sub-sec-tions are completed, Chapter by Chapter, avocabulary analysis of the then existing partsof the Script is made. (If time and manpowerare available, a similar check of grammaticalstructures might be made; but this is less likelyto be necessary.)

The purpose of the vocabulary analysis is toassure that there is continuous revival of pro-nunciation practice on all the vocabulary itemsof the Corpus. Since the vocabulary consistslargely of the FL words best known to thetrainees, errors in pronouncing them will be

among the most stubborn, and reversion toerror most likely, unless there is a consistentprogram of renewed correction and practicethroughout.

Despite all reasonable efforts as the varioussub-sections are constructed, it is almost cer-tain that at this stage there will be certain gapsin the history of revival of individual words.It is the business of the vocabulary recurrencecheck to detect these.

From the tabulation of the gaps, it is easy todetermine at which Chapters a revival of agiven word is needed. These "needed revival"notations are combined, Chapter by Chapter.Then, for each Chapter, two lists of vocabularyitems are combined: one is the "needed revival"list and the other is the "new vocabulary" listfor that Chapter.

The Reading Practice is then constructed, soas to include the vocabulary of both lists, and

the grammar of the Chapter. (If a grammaranalysis is also undertaken, any needed revivalof a grammatical construction is also takencare of, in writing the Reading Practice.)

The reason for delaying the drafting of theReading Practice until after all other sub-sec-tions have been drafted and revised is that aconsiderable amount of incidental revival nec-essarily occurs in the Second, Fourth, Fifth,and Sixth Hours, in connection with the elab-oration and practice of the material of thebasic sub-sections. It would be wasteful towork on a spurious "needed revival" if theitem in question should happen to be inciden-tally revived in another sub-section of the Chap-ter.

An extra benefit of the vocabulary analysisis the revelation of any blunders of inclusion:items like the "eat" and "comes" mentionedabove on Page 37, included by unconscioustransgression of the lexical limits, come to lightin the recurrence check and can be eliminatedwhile there is still time.

Transcription

The role of transcriptions in a Seminar Script,or in any program for teacher retraining, is amatter for careful prior discussion and decision.Prejudices are likely to run high, aAd the situa-tion varies from language-pair to language-pair, and even from country to country.

Objectively, the decision should depend onthe relations of the phonemics and graphemicsof the FL, of the trainees' NL and the FL alpha-bets or other writing systems, and of thetrainees' previous acquaintance with a par-ticular transcriptional system for the segmen-tals and/or supra-segmentals of the FL. As ourforced decision in 1958 dictated,* we adopted aprimitive marking of four pitch levels in Eng-lish as a minimum; an arbitrary and merelysuggestive hint at stress-differences was in-corporated by using lines of different lengthsin an intonation marking.

The system of transcription ought to be amatter for earnest preliminary consultation, towhich all members of the writing team canmake significant contributions; the judgmentof the experienced reacher and the native

42

speaker of the FL should ultimately be ac-cepted. The native Speaker is, ceteris paribus,the indicated marker of intonations and thetranscriber of the segmentals, provided he issophisticated enough not to be misled by anorthography or by school clichés about "toneof voice," etc. or about punctuation rules.

Stenography

We attempt no estimates of stenographicrequirements in time or supplies; the widelyvarying applications of the basic pattern of aScript will demand wide variety of size, format,and method of reproduction.

Merely as a matter of record, we note thatthe 1958 Seminar Script consisted of 384 mime-ographed pages, including a nine-page prefacefor the orientation of the trainees, If a fullertranscription had been provided, it might haveinvolved an increase of 5-10 percent in thelength of the Script. The 1958 format of theSecond Sub-sections averages about five, pageseach; the format we consider desirable, as de-scribed above on Pages 15-18, would average8-10 pages, thus adding about 60 pages.

It is obviously desirable to plan the prepa-rations for the retraining program so that theScript can be prepared and definitively revisedbefore any of it is stencilled' or otherwise proc-essed, for reproduction. Blunders and omis-sions are sure to elude detection until a finalsystematic check, and the writers should bespared the inefficiency of prematurely makingtentative checks, merely because the mimeo-graph machine is breathing down their necks.

* In the 1958 Seminar in Japan it had originally beenplanned to provide full intonation markings throughout thepresentation and practice sub-sections, and to provide anappendix consisting of a segmental transcription of allwords and all phrases involving variants due to stress con-ditions. Professor Mary Lu Joynes had originally been ex-pected to take charge of this aspect of the Script writing asher share in the enterprise. However, a major reduction ofthe Script-writing staff from its planned strength made itnecessary to curtail drastically the preparation of trans-criptions in order to complete the indispensable parts of theScript by deadline time. Only a few salient intonation mark-ings could be included, as the samples of Sub-sections Oneand Three above (Pages 13f., 18f.) show; these weredrafted by Professor Joynes as one of her contributions, andwere reviewed and entered on the mimeograph stencils byProfessor Haugen.