APPENDIX B
TO
CHAPTER 3
ADAPTING A 'MICROWAVE' FORMAT. (TELUGU)
In recent years, particularly under the auspices of the Peace Corps, a number of language courses have been written which have consisted entirely, or almost entirely, of Cummings devices. Some of these courses have been surprisingly successful in spite of their lack of variety in pedagogical format. A relatively good example is Conversational Telugu, written in 1965 by Judith Beinstein. At the time of this writer's visit to Brattleboro in August 1970, staff members of the Experiment in International Living under the direction of Ray Clark were adapting this course for a Peace Corps training program. Their work illustrates some of the principles of Chapter 3.
The first lesson in the original course consisted of a single Cummings device (Chapter 3, p. 59, and Chapter 6): 'What is (this, that)?' '(This, that) is a (banana).' The individual lines are short and the things that they name are concrete, portable, and demonstrable; accordingly, they are relatively light and transparent. Because the things named are edible and everybody gets hungry, the lesson is also fairly strong.
But 'strength' in this sense is always relative to the needs and interests of a particular class. In this instance, the materials were being used to train Peace Corps Volunteers who were to help in conducting workshops for science teachers in Andhra Pradesh, India. The adapter's first step was to replace the nouns of the lesson, substituting instead the names of eight tools which the students would be using early in the technical part of
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