ASSUMPTION III ('RESPONSIVENESS').
Hawthorne and Emerson met on the wood paths of Concord, and passed on, Emerson with his head full of bright futuriti es and relevances, Hawthorne with his head full of the irrelevant past… We revere Emerson, the prophet whose prophecies came true…, but we find in [Hawthorne's] work a complex, tangled an revolutionary vision of the soul, which we recognize as our own.
Emerson spoke nobly about relevance.
Hawthorne was relevant.
The moral is that it is hard to tell at any given moment what is relevant.
Our third assumption is that individuals, but also groups, vary widely not only in general language aptitude, in their emotional involvement with the new language, and in the degree of pre-existing motivation, but also in the lexical content that they can make immediate use of, in the approaches that they will put up with, and in the methods that are appropriate for them.
Valdman, 1966, p. 225) 'Language is complex; language learning is complex. It takes a variety of organized activities to teach language successfully, for the art and science of teaching include the judicious selection, timing, measuring and blending of the many ingredients involved.' The level of agreement on this point is exceeded only by the level of disagreement on just what principles, procedures and formats should provide that organization. A good general treatment in terms of 'limitation,' 'grading,' 'presentation' and 'testing' is found in Halliday et al (1964) chapter 7; Mackey (1965), especially in Part 2 (Method Analysis), is encyclopedic on this subject. Kelly (1969) provides a readable diachronic view of the same matter.
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