Page:Adapting and Writing Language Lessons.pdf/162

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
Presentation
CHAPTER 4

a. Identify each point and give simple directions for demonstrating it with minimum dependence on the student's native language or on other knowledge of the target language. This is the 'enactive' mode of presentation (Chapter 3, p. 61 ).

b. Give a brief, clear explanation of the structural item. Make this explanation as independent as possible from the explanations of the other points, or from the sketch that you prepared in step 1, but include cross-references to the sketch, and/or some more comprehensive treatment of the grammar. Use charts and diagrams if you think they will help. These are the 'symbolic' and 'iconic' modes.

Put each point on a separate sheet of paper (or 5"x8" card). This will make it easy for you or others to rearrange them. Appendix K, p. 220, shows grammar points of Swahili that have been treated as suggested above. Some excellent examples for English are found in Harold Palmer's little book on The Teaching of Oral English.

Just the output of this one step, if arranged in some appropriate order, would form a sparse set of lessons. The Swahili materials in Appendix K have been used that way several times. In the teaching of Eskimo, too, S. T. Mallon (1970) reports:

One hundred and twenty three-by-five inch cards were prepared, one to a lesson. On the face of each was written a phrase or sentence illustrating the structure for that lesson. No other formal lesson plan was prepared. (Last year in Ottawa the principal had written out a series of 120 fully detailed lesson plans: on arrival in Rankin Inlet he discarded them as being too restrictive and inflexible.) Instead of written

145