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Perhaps the most convincing reason for beginning early with skills that
are functional derives from this cognitive phenomenon. The logic is this: if it
takes a great deal of time to develop procedural knowledge, why would one
spend a substantial amount of time developing mastery, or automatic proces-
sing, of material in a format that is not functional? Obviously it makes no sense
to spend precious classroom contact hours on activities that do not feed directly
into skills that are both time consuming to acquire and critical to proficiency.
A further reason for focusing on "act" rather than "fact" is that this type of
knowledge is less textbook-specific. The goal of textbooks has traditionally
been to organize the factual knowledge of students, and the differences among
textbooks are most keenly felt in the choice of vocabulary and depth of training
in particular areas of topical knowledge and functional abilities.
Over the course of the first two stages, then, we are advocating a gradual
increase in the extent of structural knowledge that we build into our programs.
As noted above, we are proposing as a goal for the end of the intermediate
stage that learners have been exposed to and have achieved a certain level of
competence in the manipulation of the grammatical structures of Russian. The
accuracy of knowledge for even the best student will, of course, vary
tremendously according to the nature of the task they are performing. We have
found the ACTFL proficiency guidelines to be the best way to indicate
acceptable ranges of accuracy at particular stages. However, as will be
described in more detail below, these guidelines do not help much in
addressing the kinds of recognition knowledge that necessarily precede the
strong type of recall that counts as accuracy in proficiency testing.
This developmental approach to instruction (both as it applies in
particular ways to developing maturity in our principal populations of learners
and to the ways in which learners acquire skills) leads to an advanced stage at
which learners have acquired substantial functional skills and are prepared,
both in their level of maturity and in the strength of their knowledge base, to
move on to refining their accuracy and to improving their ability to analyze their
own language use. They will be able to do this most effectively if they possess
the analytic tools that make it possible to understand the structures they are
seeking to manipulate effectively. We are recommending, therefore, that a
significant goal of the advanced stage be that students have sufficient control of
analytic vocabulary to allow them to diagnose their own mistakes, describe
them, and know how to correct them.
Management of learning. Our recommendations concerning the shifting
locus of learning management across the stages follow directly from principles
1 and 2. If we are to allow for the possibility that the learning of Russian will be
a life-long endeavor for some of the students who begin with us each year, we
must not ask that they undertake this task in programs that do not facilitate long-
term learning.2 6A necessary consequence of this fact is that, since the learners
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