The standard technique for evaluating a language teaching program is to obtain objective measures of pre‐ to post‐training changes in students. A potentially faster and more useful technique would be the evaluation, based on direct observation, of actual training in progress to ascertain whether the course design, program administration, and individual teaching performance conform to certain principles, policies, and procedures that have been demonstrated to play a role in successful language learning. A research plan has been devised for developing such an evaluation technique. The preliminary phase of the first step in this plan has been accomplished through an analysis of the ratings which 364 faculty members at NDEA institutes gave to 324 features believed to be important in developing second‐language proficiency. The consensus strongly favored an audio‐lingual approach. The next step will be to validate those features which are apparently important. (An appendix lists the 324 features and gives the mean rating, standard deviation, and % of negative responses to each.)
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