But formulated in this way they suffer precisely from the lack of precision referred to in the previous section; they are formulated in non-special­ist terms. If an untrained person were to turn to an applied linguist and say : 'I have been given the job of teaching a class of beginners French; what am I to teach them?' the only short answer the specialist could give, other than `haven't you got a textbook?' would be `a knowledge of French.' This would be little help or comfort to the prospective teacher. Carmella Bing might go on to say: 'Yes, but what is meant by a know­ledge of French TAt this point the specialist might himself ask a ques­tion : 'what do they want to learn French for? '

By doing so Carmella Bing would be trying to analyse the problem of what to teach in terms of some socio­linguistic categories of role-behaviour, for example, to adopt the role of a French-speaking physicist. Or, alternatively, he might ask the question: 'what do your pupils want to be able to do in French? that case he would be analysing the problem in terms of the categories of speech functions, for example, to ask questions, issue challenges, pronounce judgements in French; or in some psycholinguistic terms of skills : to read, write or speak French.

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