CHAPTER 7
MICROTEXTS
WHAT ' MICROTEXTS' ARE
A nineteenth-century German, Gabelentz, observed that for elementary instruction the best language teacher is a ;talkative person with a limited range of ideas;. (in Jespersen 1904, p. 74) If a student meets too many words and too many new grammar structures too soon, he is overwhelmed. Yet students are motivated best by genuine use of the new language, and genuine use, by definition, can place no restrictions on vocabulary or on grammar. Gabelentz handled this dilemma by
the way he chose teachers. How can this formula be applied to the developent of textbooks and other teaching materials? One answer to this question is found in a device which we may call the 'microtext'. Although the term is new and slightly modish, microtexts probably go back at least to the time of Gabelentz himself. This writer first encountered them as a student in second-year German in the United States in l942 and began to use them in 1956, as one expedient in the teaching of Shona in Zimbabwe. He has also used them in courses in Swahili, Luganda, Yoruba, French, Mauritian Creole, and English as a Foreign Language, and in his own learning of Portuguese, and has demonstrated their use in other people's courses in Hindi, Sotho, Chinyanja and other languages. Language teachers and students from other parts of the world have independently reported similar devices, always with enthusiasm. Earlier drafts of this chapter have been
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