Earl W. Stevick

“ Das Ziel ist, den König des Gegners matt zu setzen.
[Chess is an old board game, which originated in India, between two players, played on a chessboard with 16 white and 16 black pieces: each player has one king, one queen, two castles, two bishops, two knights, and eight pawns. The goal of the game is to checkmate the opponent's king.]
If the students have had some hand in selecting the topic, and possibly the text itself, then even a prosaic text that is totally unsuited for inclusion in a published language textbook may be exciting and effective. ”

“ Each instructor should supply his own impromptu oral paraphrase of it in class.
In a school system, or in a group of neighboring school systems, where most of the teachers of a given language are non-natives, the telephone could enable a single native speaker to provide on 24 hours notice microtexts on topics requested by several different classes. ”

“ Before he can assimilate it, he must digest it, and before food can be digested it must be chewed. Just how long digestion will take and just how much chewing is necessary of course depend on each student's ability and on his prior knowledge of the target language. Nevertheless, with beginning students the materials developer will want to supply a certain amount of 'apparatus', the purpose of which is to chop the text up so that the process of mastication can begin. ”

“ The degree to which a given text is realistic of course depends on the students with whom it is to be used. Recipes will be more realistic for (unliberated!) girls than for (unliberated!) boys; texts on animal husbandry will be very realistic for a few groups of students, but unrealistic for most. Folk stories are comparatively unrealistic for everyone, except insofar as listening to and telling such stories constitutes an essential social grace or an intrinsic pleasure. ”

“ It is important to exploit the facts in a text, as well as its purely linguistic content. For students who have at lease a potential interest in international affairs, or in the place of Quebec in the world, the following story from a random issue of the Montreal Gazette can lead into a genuine discussion:
Paul Emile victor, a French explorer who has journeyed to the North Pole, will undertake explorations of Northern Quebec next spring as part of a Franco-Quebec agreement. ”

“ Kuti mukabvisa mafuta aya, unosara wacho, ndiwo mukaka unonzi skim milk. Kune mashini inobvisa mafuta mumukaka nenzira yekugaya. Mukaka unosara, tinoudayidza kuti mukaka wakagayiwa, kana usina mafuta.
[When milk is left to stand, the next morning all its fat is on top. If you then remove this fat, what remains is milk which is called skim milk. There is a machine which removes fat from the milk by means of separation. The milk that is left behind, we call 'separated,' or 'fat-free' milk.] ”

“ Microtexts can help to make the course livelier, and more responsive to the needs of the class. To the extent that a class participates in selecting topics, they also raise the level of responsibility, and allow the students to.feel that they, too, have an ego-investment in what is going on. ”

“ The teacher asks the same questions of members of Group II.
Division into two unequal groups allows the stronger students, as members of Group I, to do more challenging work while using the same material as their classmates.
SUMMARY
Chapter 3 called for four 'basic components' in a language lesson: (1) reward (s) outside of language acquisition itself, (2) a sample of language in use, (3) structural and (4) lexical exploration moving from the sample and toward the extralinguistic goals. Chapter 6 dealt primarily with lexical exploration ”