【正文】 essons: the student requires practiceof this kind in every lesson.At the same time, static patterns should be practised by means of tapeddrills. In each of these drills, the teacher seeks to elicit a particularkind of response. He provides the student with a stimulus to elicit the newpattern in a series of oral drills until the student is able to respondaccurately and automatically. Each new pattern is not presented as theexemplification of some abstract grammarrule, but as a way of saying somethingand no further explanation or elucidation is necessary. The student is trainedto use correct forms automatically, rather than by applying‘grammar logic’.Where explanation is necessary, it can be done by relating a new patternto one that has already been learnt. If, for instance, the student has learntthe use of‘must’, he can be taught the use of‘have to’by being made tosee a meaningful relationship between the two.In certain taped drills, the stimulus the teacher provides may be givenin the form of‘call words’. Let us suppose that the teacher wishes to elicitthe response: ‘I can39。t buy very much’and‘I can39。t buy very many’.The drillmight be conducted in the following way:TEACHER: What about pencils?STUDENT: I can39。t buy very many.TEACHER: What about coffee?STUDENT: I can39。t buy very much.In this particular exercise, the teacher would supply countable anduncountable nouns in the question‘What about?？’as‘call words’.Traditional fillingintheblank exercises still have a place in a moderncourse, but with one important difference: they should not be used as a meansof teaching new patterns, but as a means of consolidating what has been learnt.They are an end, not a means to an end. In this respect, they are extremelyuseful in tests and can be employed for diagnostic purposes or to enablethe teacher to assess students39。 level of achievement.Audio visual aids and translationIn a monolingual course we are faced with the tremendous task of havingto convey meaning without making use of the student39。s mother tongue. It followsthat textbook illustrations bee extremely important: at the beginner39。slevel, they are far from being merely decorative. However, textbookillustrations have severe limitations, for many of the statements that aremade in everyday speech are not visually presentable. Some linguists haveexperimented with artificial visual devices which require the student tointerpret each illustration according to particular rules. They have evolvedwhat might be called a‘visual language’which the student has to masterbefore he can begin the course. The difficulty here is that if the studentfails to interpret an illustration (and this can easily happen) he will failto understand, or even worse, he will misinterpret what he hears.At the beginner39。s level, this difficulty can be resolved in two ways.Where the meaning of a statement or a series of statements cannot be adequatelyconveyed by the illustration, the teacher should make use of gesture andmime. If the student still fails to understand, the teacher may translate,providing that he translates lexical items and not patterns In this instance,translation is used not as a‘method’, but as a means to an end. As suchit can be extremely useful and timesaving.Natural EnglishThere is a great temptation in the early stages to encourage the studentto make statements which he will never have to use. Statements like‘I havea nose’, ‘Have you a nose?’, ‘Is this my foot?’ are ridiculous. Thisdistortion of the language can never be justified. After all, the whole pointof teaching a language is to train students to make useful statements whichmight normally be made in reallife situations. This criterion must be observedat the most elementary level. The peculiar type of‘textbook English’whichis to be found in many traditional courses must be avoided at all costs.The teacher39。s book and the students39。 bookIn the past, no distinction was drawn between information intended forthe teacher and information intended for the student. Everything was printedin one and the same volume. Early in the course, the student would find extremelyplex information in his book like:‘With most nouns the plural is madeby adding“s”to the singular39。 or:‘We form the negative of the verbs“tobe” and“to have”by putting“not”after the verbs39。. Now it is inconceivablethat any beginner would be able to understand such instructions. What ismore, from the learner39。s point of view, this information is totally irrelevant:it is really telling the teacher what to teach.It should be recognized that the students39。 book is not a vehicle forconveying information, but an aid for practising the language. It shouldbe pleasing to look at and attractively laid out. It should only containmaterial which the student will actually use.At the beginner39。s level, a teacher39。s handbook is absolutely necessary.This should be in every way plementary to the students39。 book and shouldcontain practical information and material which will be used in each lesson—not merely hints and suggestions. At the intermediate level, the teacher39。shandbook bees less necessary, for the student is in a position to workfrom printed instructions. Speed and intensityTraditional courses are often divided into‘lessons’, but these‘lessons’do not take into account what can be done in an average teaching period offortyfive minutes or an hour. They simply consist of‘a(chǎn)n amount of information’and may run on for a great many pages. In the classroom, one of these‘lessons’might drag on for weeks because so much has to be done.A lesson must be precisely what the word implies: an amount of materialthat can reasonably be covered in a teaching period, possibly with additionalmaterial which can be done as homework. In other words, a lesson must beconsidered as a unit of instruction and no more