to invite those same professional preoccupations to distort the teachability of the end product. But to ignore the specialists altogether would be to stumble through the dark toward a distant candle, or to build a house following only a floor plan.
A very rough, but full-scale example of the grammatical part of fine specification for the linguistic aspect of an S-2 on the FSI rating scale is the following, for Brazilian portuguese. This is primarily a list of contrasts that a student must learn to control as he speaks the language. The three main headings in the list are Sentence Patterns, Verbs, Substantives and Other Matters.
Sentence Patterns
Affirmative VS. negative statements.
Statements vs. yes-no questions.
Yes-no questions vs. either-or questions.
Content questions with:
| Que? | What? (adj.) |
| O que? | What? (pronoun) |
| Who? | |
| Quando? | When? |
| Quanto? | How much? |
| Onde? | Where? |
| Como? | How? |
| Qual? | Which? |
| Porque? | Why? |
| [English equivalents are only approximate.] | |
Short answers vs. long or yes-no answers.
Exclamations that emphasize:
Noun
Verb
Adjective
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