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make frequent errors of pronunciation and grammar, and his speaking vocabulary may be inadequate to express anything but the most elementary needs, but he must be able to make himself understood to a native speaker who is used to dealing with foreigners; he must be able to take care of his need for food, street and road directions, matters of personal hygiene and cleanliness, including laundry, tell time, and handle basic courtesy requirements.

This, of course, describes only a very rudimentary (actually, pre-rudimentary) control, labelled S-l on the Foreign Service Institute's scale.

In between these two is S-2:

The trainee must learn to handle with confidence, though perhaps not with facility, most social situations including introductions and casual conversations about his work, family and autobiographical information; the same applies to limited business requirements, in that he must be able to handle routine matters even though he may need help with complications; he should be able to understand most conversations on non-technical subjects and have a speaking vocabulary sufficient to express himself simply with some circumlocutions; his accent must be intelligible; his control of the grammar, even though it may not be thorough or confident, should enable him to handle elementary constructions quite accurately.

The above descriptions are intended to be suggestive, but are not recommended for adoption.

Anyone who tries to use them in any real situation will want to be much more specific in some respects, but in many situations they will be inappropriate even as bases for amplification.

Coarse-grained specification comes before all other activities, whether the project is a conventional one of writing materials for distant and future students, or whether a lone Peace Corps Volunteer is getting ready to find his/her own way through a hitherto unwritten language of the African savanna. Lack of such specifica-

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