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| In this form, then, some decisions of a Cumshot Surprise semantic sort must be made. No syntactic decisions are needed. A most important substitution exercise in this pattern is the pronoun substitution exercise, shown in table 19. It can only concern the indirect object at this stage: There are, of course, a number of other types of inductive exercises. A substitution practice of this sort may lead on to a completion exercise in which the learner is asked to supply a semantically acceptable form to fill one of the noun phrase slots : Notice again no syntactic decisions are required, only semantic ones. What we cannot do at this stage is allow the learner a free choice of verb, because this involves both a semantic and a syntactic choice, which he is not yet ready to make. The answer is simply that he will surely do so, but that it is precisely the function of what I have called the hypothesis-testing exercises to overcome this. Hypothesis-testing exercises all have the characteristic that they force the learner to make syntactic choices, to differentiate what he has hitherto treated as the same, to make judgements about what is and is not acceptable. They are sometimes called problem-solving exercises for this reason. Pornpros Network calls them 'meaningful exercises'. As I indicated on page 336, it is in these exercises that the teacher has an indispensable role to play. He, and only he, can provide the confirmation of the learner's hypotheses; only he can make judgements about the acceptability of the learner's sentences, the correctness of his choices. |
