A MODULAR APPROACH TO MATERIALS DEVELOPMENT
Most language courses violate some or all of these five assumptions. One reason is that they attempt to be too massive and too permanent. Great quantities of curricular concrete and steel are assembled and formed into a mighty bridge across the chasm, in anticipation that the oncoming traffic (the students) will want to cross at just the point where the bridge is.
This anticipation is often disappointed. When it is, the Golden Gate-style course fails on responsiveness (Assumption III), it almost always fails to provide for user responsibility (Assumption IV), and often it is not directly usable (in the sense of Assumption I). Its one strength (unless it is poorly constructed even by its own standards) is in organization, and superior organization alone will not produce superior results.
Most of the textbooks that this writer has used or helped to produce have tried to be more or less massive bridges. The needs and the mood of the students have never been exactly those that the course was written for, but the discrepancies have often been small enough so that some kind of useful result could be achieved. In this, as in many other respects, experience with Peace Corps language training has provided stimulating, if discomforting, ventilation of old complacencies. Students' specialized interests are at the same time more specialized; trainees are more conscious of their own dissatisfaction with both content and method; instructors are mostly willing but inexperienced, brought up in an educational system that knows nothing of audio-lingual materials. Peace Corps programs have also demonstrated the value of giving to the users--both the students and the instructors--a certain amountof leeway for their own creativity. These observations point toward a new approach to materials development, one which has seemed more appropriate for Peace Corps needs, but which also seems promising for programs of a more conventional sort.
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