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I was very moved. I cried. Not great sobbing gouts of tears or anything, just a quiet happy-sad little trickle from both eyes and a short little catch in the throat.

The value of a film like Philadelphia, a toned-down mainstream look at an alternative lifestyle, is that it forces us to see the adherents of that lifestyle as people like us. They have hearts that can be wounded and broken. They have families that love them and whom they love. They have friends they care about and who care about them. They have their loyalties and disloyalties, their heroisms and betrayals. From a distance, in the words of the song, they are pretty much like everybody else. They just dress differently, eat different food, have sex with a different gender.

That's one side of a very valuable coin.

The film makes a point, through the person of Andrew's lawyer, Joe, of bringing up mainstream objections to homosexuality and neatly disposing of them. Joe, like the mainstream viewer, comes to see homosexuals as people, not problems, people with hopes, dreams and needs, people with lives they deserve and have the right to keep, people with secrets they have the right to keep. We rejoice with Andrew in his victorious bid against callous, abusive prejudice. We grieve with Andrew over the loss of his life, both physical and social. We laugh and cry with his family over the antics of a curly-haired little angel as he plays on the beach with his siblings and drags a heavy picnic basket to the porch steps. The film draws out our sympathies–and rightly so.

The film also makes a point of showing us a member of a recently abused and maligned minority in a position of unchallenged power and authority. The message here is that the still feared and suppressed sexual minority deserves the same acceptance and assimilation as the mainstream now cherishes for the once despised and oppressed racial minority.

The film likewise draws a distinction between moral and legal attitudes toward homosexuals. Joe's opening address to the jury asks them, and through them the mainstream viewer, to remember that what matters in the courtroom is not morality, but law. It is a question of the legal, not moral, code whether Andrew Beckett was wrongully dismissed. It is a question of the legal, not moral, code whether homosexuals may occupy positions of influence in our communities, from the highest offices of government to the lowest offices of education.

That's where it gets tricky. It's easy for me to accept that some people desire or need to be actively homosexual. But I get uneasy when personal active homosexuality breaks down the bedroom door from the inside and becomes public homosexual activism. This is the point that Joe attempts to make when propositioned in the drugstore. It's one thing to be yourself. It's another to shove your individualism in other people's faces. Put another way, it's one thing to come out of your closet and quite another to walk into mine. Or my children's.

People like me are in something of a bind. We are educated intellectuals (that is not redundant), liberal in outlook, conservative in lifestyle, morally religious, professionally secular. We see homosexuality as a sin, not a crime; as not a crime, and yet a sin. We believe, as Joe declares, that all men (read humans) are created (or evolved) equal, whatever their sexual orientation, and that most things in life have nothing to do with sexual orientation. We wish to see everybody free, happy and fulfilled. We try to be "wise as serpents and harmless as doves". But being wise as serpents, we know that people affect each other, even without trying, and that not all effects are good (read desirable, positive, expedient).

The law reflects our tolerances, not our morals. That is, it directly reflects our tolerances and only indirectly reflects our morals. We are generally happy to tolerate diversity "out there", but we are occasionally loathe to admit it "in here"–and rightly so.

You may read the word rightly in two ways: right as in correct and right as in having a prerogative. If I do not wish to raise my children with the notion that homosexuality is a viable option, equal in physiological naturalness and social value to heterosexuality, is that not my right as a father? What I would do if one of my children chose to experiment with homosexuality or pursue a homosexual lifestyle is another matter and a very complex one that I'll address below. For the moment, I am concerned with my "natural" and "socially sanctioned" responsibility to nurture and socialize minors. If I am to socialize them, I must teach them values. What values shall I teach them and what weight shall I give to those values? How far shall I go to reinforce, or even enforce, those values?

To be continued

For discussion of a related issue, see A Clairvoyant Selfportrait of the Artist as a Published Author. See also the story A Dream of Fortune/The Fate of Meteors.

The premise is that the husband/father in the family group, being a Westerner and no believer in ghosts, is entirely unaffected by the activities of the dead in Taiwan, but his wife and children are very directly affected. I don't want to spoil it for you, so I'll say no more, even though I believe a really well conceived and constructed story can easily stand a spoiling.

Praise God, whose is the might. If any should read this, be it known, when I returned from evening prayer, the last of my life, I found a man standing in my room. His skin was blackened and he smelled of smoke, but when I looked closely I could see his face and stature were my own. Upon his chest he wore a flaming sword.

I did not challenge him, for I knew before he spoke that he was a messenger, but whether of God (let him be praised, for he hath made the world and given us to cleanse it) or the Devil (let him be scorned, for he bringeth impurity into the world), I could not tell, for does not the scripture say: For my name’s sake even the angels have their wounds?

I waited and beheld. His appearance was of smoke, but of smoke so tightly bound as to resemble flesh. He regarded me silently, as if he, too, wondered whose servant I might be. Praise God, I am the Lord’s, as you shall know on the morrow, for his in all the universe is the might, to create and to destroy.

At last he spoke.

“Praise God!” he cried. “I am permitted to appear to you, from beyond the borders of the grave, though you shall have none, to warn and to plead, for the thing you design to do is not of God.”

At these words, I began to suspect that here was an angel of lies, for is not it written in the book of prayer: Oh, Lord, deliver me from mouths whose tongues are honeyed, but whose breath is poison to the lungs? But I could not yet be sure, for it is also said: The words of sorrow may be the words of life; words that seem arrows to the ears may be a soothing ointment to the heart.

I did not speak. Again he looked on me as if in doubt.

“Hear me,” he urged. “Hear me and be saved. It is in your heart that God has called you among all men to be the weapon of his ire. Your courage is acceptable to him. Your obedience to that which you suppose to be his will is acceptable to him. But life is not given you to take, for the scripture says: Hurt not the fruit of the woman’s womb. Life is the Lord’s. The Lord is life. By his command the elements combine. Only by his command shall they be sundered.”

He reasoned well, but the scripture also says: When I command it, strike. When I say kill, obey. You are the arrows in his bow. Your arms are the swords in his hand. By you shall he cleanse the earth and write his word in heart, on head and on the tongue. By you shall filth be rooted out, even by death if they will not repent.

Still I did not speak, for as the scriptures say: When angels call, men shall not answer with their tongues. And in another place: Join not the Devil in discourse. He that speaketh with the fiend walks by his own device into the snare. The snares of Satan are an iron band.

“Listen to me!” he railed, so like the noticed and rejected fiend. “It is not too late. Praise God, the merciful, who blesses with his might. I who have walked this path and tasted bile pled for grace and have been saved, but only if I turn you from the path. Praise God, for his might is in the miles and in the hours. He guideth suns and knoweth the secret ways of space, for all they are the craft of his hand, the thought and yearning of his heart. He reacheth all places and seeth all times. Nothing shall hide from him, in time or space. The sands do not stand or flow, but that he guideth them to and fro, but that his fingers feel each one, each in its stillness and its flight.

These were new scriptures. They rang true, but I had not read them in any canon. And I was no prophet that they should be revealed to me.

“No longer doubt!” he screamed. “All time is God’s to give and lend, but I have been given just this once and just this hour. Turn from the darkness and the fire. You have been deceived. It is God you praise, but the Devil you serve.”

I put my hands to my ears.  “Be gone!” I cried.

Panic seized him.

“Proud, blind fool! They said it would be so. You would not believe, though your own dead self returned from the scattered places of the grave. You will damn us both, for we are one. I have seen our error and by the grace of God come to deter you from your course, that the innocent may be spared and that we may yet kneel before God, not in shame, but in honor, for we may yet serve the Maker in life, whereas we only offend him in the death you choose.”

I confess, at these words I wavered. Is not the way of life the better way? Do not the scriptures say: Two paths there are, but one leads to rejoicing and one to endless pining for the first? But they also say: Let not the shadow guide the feet, let not the pressure of the wind lead you to right or left, let no lie tempt your feet backward from the path of right. Do they not say: Lord, I have set my course toward the sun. No wind, no wave shall overcome me now, for I sail to thee. If I fail, it shall be death that breaks me, not despair?

He continued to plead, but I knew him now. I shut my ears, my eyes and my heart. Though he shouted like thunder, I would not hear. Though his words beat like surges at the gate, the gate did not open and did not fall.

Yet I cringed in my anguish. “Be gone! Depart from me! Return to hell and tell your master, if you are not the master himself, no man of my house has changed his course once set. I serve the only God. Be gone!”

Silence surrounded me. I dared a glance. He stood as in defeat, his shoulders slumped, his hands at his sides like torn rags, his face as sagging as a flag, the flag of a defeated army on a carrion field, stirred by no wind and by no survivors.

“My own words,” he groaned. “Will you not listen, you twice-damned fool? But God is just. He knows our hearts.  Too late I see the evil in my heart. We cannot be saved. O God of mercy and of might, I surrender wholly to thy will!”

With that, he drew his sword, the sword of flame strapped like a breastplate to his chest. His fire was glorious, but I was not deceived. Does not the scripture say: Even the Devil flies in light?

The conversation reminded me that I'd planned to write a brief treatise on how to read certain of my stories which begin "in medias res" and don't supply obvious hints about what's going to come in handy down the road. I'm referring here to things like the James Bond movies, where Bond invariably pays a visit to Q, who invariably hands him a set of disguised weapons and other gear, which Bond invariably calls upon in a tight spot, or the Harry Potter stories, in which one or two magical gadgets introduced casually early in the tale end up being crucial to the plot (think of the time-turner in The Prisoner of Azkaban, the portkey in The Goblet of Fire, the pensieve in The Order of the Phoenix and the vanishing cabinet in The Half-Blood Prince).

While I don't mind, and even enjoy, this obvious style of presentation in other people's work, but I like to do it more subtly myself. I like to show you the world and let you notice what you will, the way it works in the real world. Of course, there are myriad differences between any story and the real world. Any report or representation of reality is going to be restricted in content, our attention is going to be funneled to a few pertinent items, but I so like those moments in M. Knight Shyamalan's movies when a whole mess of seemingly insignificant details or oddities suddenly string together into one tight and intense realization (as when Malcolm Crowe can't open the basement door in The Sixth Sense, David Dunn sees Elijah Price's diagrams in Unbreakable, and Graham Hess confronts the alien in Signs).

And so to "The Ninth, Not Final, Plague". I'm not entirely pleased with that title, which may be the subject of a future entry called "Evolution of a Title". It's a good title, but it's a bit heavy for the story, just as "The Ice Cream Truck's Song" was too light. Anyway, let's talk briefly about how the story works.

It starts with what for some readers would be, and is, an obvious clue: "I myself would not believe it, if not for the bell." This is a pretty plain tip off that something weird is about to be described. If that isn't enough, we have the next sentence: "Every night it rings–and rings and rings until I open the door and find–nothing." What else could we be talking about but ghosts, especially after the next paragraph, which tells us that "there was no one there. The elevator had opened and was closing and stood empty on my floor. There was no one in the stairwell for two floors and not a soul on the roof"?

Next thing you know the narrator is hearing voices. Not much later he is making them out. It could only be ghosts, ba.

The question for most of my students is "Who are the ghosts?" They really puzzle over that one. Yet the clues are so numerous it's almost embarrassing. You could be forgiven for thinking the narrator was freaked out until you read paragraph five: "It seemed like a game. It was a game. I had played it before." If that doesn't help, he tells you "I would have let it ring a decade if I could", not what you'd expect from someone experiencing fear, unless you take it to mean he'd rather hear the bell ring than face the ghosts in the corridor. Ooh! That gave me the cold pricklies! But then he goes on "grasping at shadows", actually trying to touch the ghost that rings the bell, so he's obviously not afraid of the ghosts, and then he claims to know where the ghost's hand, arm, shoulders and head should be–even what the look on its face must be! If that doesn't do it for you, he digresses about shoes and dust and about an apartment that hasn't been looked after for a while. Then there's the perfume, a sly little twist to show he has a grip on reality. He's sure he must be imagining the perfume. It wouldn't be so apparent if its wearer were returning.

Then we have paragraph eleven, which spells out in huge flaming letters the relationship between the ghosts. Taken with paragraph ten's "family grave" simile for the vacant parking spot that neighbours wish to buy or rent but which the narrator refuses to sell or rent in case "they" return and paragraph eight's dust and shoes description, paragraph eleven amounts to a statement of the relationship between the narrator and the ghosts. The second to last paragraph talks about fear, but not of the ghosts: of their eventually not coming anymore, a fate the narrator would rather avoid. Why? Well, you figure it out.

This type of story I call a brain bomb. You go along, wondering or not, and somewhere very close to the end, it all clicks and your brain explodes with it. In the explosion, all the subtle hints come rushing together to be relived, everything takes on new meaning (or just meaning, if you didn't start to get it earlier), and there's this intense, exquisite paroxysm of understanding and awe, awe not for my finesse with the pen or keyboard, but for the splendour and terror of the human soul, the beauty and horror of our state.

Does that help anybody?

At first I believed it was a joke, that the children downstairs had learned to play tricks on a lonely old foreigner. I said and did nothing the first night, grew incensed the second night and lay in wait the third night, but when I flung open the door, needing time only to throw the bolt and turn the handle, there was no one there. The elevator had opened and was closing and stood empty on my floor. There was no one in the stairwell for two floors and not a soul on the roof.

So I began to listen. We pick up on patterns quickly, we mortals. By the fifth night I knew the time to the second. At nine thirty-five and three seconds, the elevator slid into place, the doors opened and after a pause just long enough for my heart to beat twice like a drum in the clutches of a madman, the bell rang.

I tested that bell. If I opened the door immediately, it cut off immediately. If I waited for ten minutes, it rang and rang until I could stand it no more and opened the door, as I have said, on a black, dry well whose bottom seemed to rise more swiftly with each turn of the game.

It seemed like a game. It was a game. I had played it before.

I began to listen as one listening for thunder in the distant hills or the faint, approaching jangle of the ice cream truck's song. There is that moment when the sound is heard, but so vaguely and mistily that only the time of day, the flash of lightning or its utter approach assures you that it has begun. It was always like that, even when I made out voices and what they said, even when I huddled by the door in tears, listening to that bell as it rang and rang for half an hour.

I would have let it ring a decade if I could, but ever more clearly I could hear, behind the frantic ringing of the bell and the rapid pressures of a ghostly hand, a  panicked voice, high and shrill, calling and crying, impatient, distressed. In tears like Pharaoh at the ninth and final plague, I burst into that space, grasping at shadows where the hand should be, the arm, the shoulders, the small, bright head, the frenzied, pouting face suddenly alight with impish reproach and the glee of relief and victory.

But there was nothing there, only my shadow on the elevator door, the dusty blue mat which I had not washed for weeks, the equally dusty shoe rack with its burden of abandoned shoes, hers and mine. Not theirs. Theirs lay like forgotten toys in careless jumbles on the rack inside the door and on the floor before it in a sward of dust disturbed only by my passing to and from the door to leave for work, to return from work and to answer the ringing of the bell.

One time I caught the elevator door before it closed. I stood there in that hollow light and felt for a moment as if I'd caught a scent, a harsh, sweet, strangling waft of her perfume. Impossible, of course. The scent had always faded by the time she came home, though it filled the house like the cloud the temple when she was ready to leave.

One time I locked the door and rode the elevator to the basement garage. I felt the motor of the scooter. It was warm, but only from my returning from work. I still parked the scooter tight against the rail and the parking space, my heart's delight whenever we returned from church or an excursion to a park or the seaside, yawned like a family grave, a thick, black oil stain and a pile of  planks for flowers and a headstone. A few neighbours had heartlessly offered to buy or rent it, but I had refused. It was my earth and it waited for their return.

One time I stood in the basement by the elevator door. It was nine thirty-three. At nine thirty-four and six seconds, the button lighted and the door opened. I stepped inside. I heard them. Piping, bright voices and hers scolding them for some heedless infringement of the maternal code. A squabble. A shout. All heard as if through glass, thick, black, frosted glass that made shadows of sound.

The door opened. I stepped out. I stood in the corridor. The bell did not ring. Puzzled impatience engulfed me like a wind. I unlocked the door and went in.

Nobody followed.

I have ridden with them since, always with the same result. The squabbles vary and the imprecations are not always severe, but the bell does not ring and I am conscious of confused expectation, as if I, too, were of their company. Sometimes I have made them wait until an unbearable edge of anger pierces my skin and heart like the sure stroke of a well-known knife. It is rare that I provoke them.

Most nights I wait beside the door, no longer doubting, more and more afraid. Will it occur to them that it is in vain, that they cannot enter, that I cannot reach them in that cramped void?

So far the bell still rings. With luck it will ring forever.

© Mark Penny

In any case, my mind turned to the question of art and what it consists of. Readers of my previous post will remember that I spoke of communities and their aesthetics. What if a human filmmaker submitted a script to an alien bureaucrat and the bureaucrat judged the script on its artistic merits? And what if the alien world's aesthetic was worlds apart from ours?

Sounded like a good premise for a story. Sci-fi, of course. A one off? Hmmm. Maybe I could fit it into a series. How about TEAL (Teaching English as an Alien Language)? Hmmm. How would I fit in an English teacher? Aha! The English teacher is recruited as consultant and translator. He or she observes and participates in the process. Now we're talking!

All this happened before I'd finished spooning out the dog food. That's where ideas come from. From spontaneous associations, not from dog food.

Hmmm. What about dog food? Alien dog food. Alien dogs. Really intelligent alien dogs. Hmmm. Attitudes toward intelligence. Measures of intelligence. Roles of intelligence. Slavery. Cultural prejudice. Hmmm. An English teacher is hired to teach an alien dog English. The dog is as intelligent as any of us. The masters refuse to learn other languages. The dogs handle interracial relations. Hmmm.

Two ideas in one day. Not a record, but not bad.

A devastating and exalting little piece.

In the story, a self-styled great and little-understood sculptor, Morgan Mallow, aka the Master, sends his son, Lancelot, aka Lance, to Paris to study painting. The son discovers that he himself has about as much talent as a can of paint and that his father has less talent than a chisel. "I'm a hopeless muff [loser, bungler, incompetent]…, [b]ut I'm not such a muff as the Master!" he exclaims to the Master's long-time friend and his own godfather, Peter Brench, through whose eyes, if not voice, the story is told.

This is just one angle of the story (there are also the friend's heroic success at keeping his contempt for the work of the "artist" a deep and abiding secret without claiming the least respect for it, the son's struggle to keep his new and enlightened opinion of his father's work to himself, the son's apparent unfitness for any calling, the friend's deep and abiding secret love for the artist's wife, and the wife's subjection of her chronic and acute awareness of her husband's failings as an artist to her all-consuming and all-subsuming love for him and the concomitant care of his ego), but it's the one I want to deal with.

I'll bet it's the greatest fear of anyone who thinks they have talent but is aware that they might not that they will turn out to be one of those who has none but is unaware of it. You follow so far?

It is unlikely that either Morgan or Lancelot had no talent at all. The one could probably sculpt recognizable likenesses of people and things, and the other could probably paint recognizable likenesses of people and things. That's better than I can manage without a supreme effort.

The problem lies not in the ability to sculpt or paint, but in the power attributed to the sculptures and paintings. The problem lies in discernment. The Master's sin is not so much a lack of talent as a lack of discernment. He is able to sculpt likenesses, but he is unable to discern their ineffectiveness as works of art, their lack of power. If he claimed only to sculpt likenesses in a certain disproportionate style and made no claim of creating art, he would be neither contemptible nor pitiable. He would be normal. Because he so obstinately, in the face of the public's informed rejection, claims to be creating art but is so decidedly not doing any such thing, he is contemptible–or at least laughable, most likely slightly and harmlessly mad (that is, mentally out of alignment with his culture). Because he so naively persists in the belief that his work is simply not understood and because this naiveté is so essential to his self-esteem, if not his sanity, he is pitiable. There is no hope for the man. He will either dig in against the awareness of his own insignificance on that front, or crumble like Jericho when the reality penetrates his illusion.

The beauty of the story lies in the friend's, the son's and the wife's self-sacrificing subterfuge. They will quietly or vociferously, as they choose, align themselves with the Master's folly and bear the buffetings of a more discerning and less compassionate society rather than shatter the man's self-image or his image of the world. They are voluntary hostages to his benevolent but unsparing pride.

What does this mean for the rest of us, particularly us writers?

Whenever we write a story and friends or family applaud it, we must ask ourselves what motivates the applause. Is it genuine, discerning appreciation of our work, or is it self-sacrificing subterfuge, an inability or an unwillingness to confront us with the failure of our attempt? Conversely, whenever we submit a story for publication and it is rejected, we must ask ourselves why it was rejected. Was it because we failed in our attempt to create something of value, was it because there was no more room at the inn, or was it because a work of art was simply not understood?

A question might be asked about the Master's work. Was it really the pathetic scraping that his intimates and the larger public saw it to be? To him it was not. To him it had power. To him it was art. It had meaning and that meaning was conveyed. From this perspective, the question of whether a work is art depends ultimately on who is looking at it. If somebody thinks it is art, it is art. That is, it is art for them. And that is acceptable.

If you want to write, write. If you and others like what you write, then it's good writing. If what you write powerfully conveys meaning for you and others, then it is art.

The difficulty lies in the composition and conceits of the community within which and for which you attempt to write. In the story, the Master's son only sees his father's folly when he views his father's work from the perspective of an education in art in Paris. In other words, he had been brought up at home to admire his father's work, but when trained in a different aesthetic, the dominant aesthetic, he came to despise his father's work. He suffered a paradigm shift, a dramatic and traumatic one, one his godfather would have spared him. Such shifts occur all the time. What happens to any country boy or girl who moves to the city, any city boy or girl who moves to the country, any boy or girl who goes off to university, anyone who lives abroad? Do not they all come back, or at least look back, with some degree of pity or contempt on the aesthetic and cosmology of their neighbours and kin, their old community? And do they not often resume the old aesthetic and the old cosmology when they return?

So it appears to be a question of community. But then, that is what folk art and world art are for. We are quite capable of discerning power in an alternate aesthetic and the works it generates. Given a basic understanding of the aesthetic, we can say something of the success or failure of a work rendered within that aesthetic. Indeed, we may even be able to recognize art without any other introduction to its inherent aesthetic than the common aesthetic of humanity. Cross-eyed, short-sighted aliens from a planet that only shows blues would probably be unanimous in their judgment that every piece of visual art created on earth looks pretty much like every other, the way all country songs sound nearly identical to the uninitiated and all heavy metal sounds like a car crash to the violently unrefined.

Is this to suggest, then, that there really is such an objective quality as art? I suppose it is. At least, there must be some such objective quality at a certain level. That is to say, there must be degrees of art. This notion is adhered to by Penn Warren and Erskine, who quip in their introduction that "if we had got together within our available number of pages what we considered the best thirty-five short stories there would be fewer authors." They elaborate.

William Faulkner, for example, would have more than one, and, among others, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, and Frank O'Connor. There are few such real masters of the short story…. But there are others who have produced one or two stories so memorable that they must find a place in a book like this, which aims to give some representation to the considerable variety of good stories that have been written in our time.

I admit that when I read Faulkner's "Barn Burning" I was, or at least thought I was, conscious of a certain lushness not common in stories of any kind, let alone short ones, a sort of density of detail not attributable to length of sentence, paragraph or passage. On the other hand, I wasn't much impressed by Hemingway's "Soldier's Home", perhaps because I found no redemption in it (typical of Hemingway), but also because the rhythm seemed clumsily off. I'll have to go into depth about that later.

As I wrote about the subjectivity of art, or of the perception of art, it occurred to me that the aesthetically misguided may be guilty of a baser crime: vagueness. Could the Master have minutely defined in what the power of his sculptures lay? Or did his perception that his work was art spring from his belief that he was an artist and that all that he produced must by the nature of its origin be art? Can we pinpoint in what the art of our work resides? Can our friends and family when they applaud us?

1. The Natural Order Hypothesis
2. The Comprehensible Input Hypothesis
3.  The Monitor Hypothesis

The Natural Order Hypothesis posits that we acquire (as opposed to learn) language items in a restricted order, so that items of grammar, say, taught or studied out of order may be learned (i.e., memorized) for probably short-term use in form-focused environments such as tests, but normal language production will not reflect such learning.

The Comprehensible Input Hypothesis posits that we acquire language by observing it, so that speaking and writing practice do not serve acquisition (though they assist learning), but rather serve to demonstrate level of acquisition.

The Monitor Hypothesis posits that items of grammar learned but not acquired will not be tended to unless spontaneous speech is reviewed and revised by an "editor" before being uttered. Where speakers or writers are focused on meaning rather than form, many errors of form will occur. Where speakers or writers are focused on form, meaning may be hindered.

Based on these three hypotheses, I've come up with a couple of guidelines for writing ESL materials (and conducting ESL classes):

1. Natural Order Comprehensible Input
2. Acquired Language Output

The material presented, whether written or spoken, should contain a wealth of items within the learner's current "acquisition range". If the learner is at the stage to acquire the ing form, the material should be saturated with ing-form vocabulary. More advanced forms will by necessity also occur, but they should not be emphasized in either number or prominence.

Language produced by the learner should be assessed based on his or her acquired level. If the learner has recently acquired or is in the process of acquiring the ing form, only errors within range of the ing form should be corrected by the instructor. S form errors should be ignored, since correcting them will not assist acquisition at the ing form stage, and such unhelpful correction may activate the learner's Affective Filter.

Krashen, S.D. 2006. English Fever. The Crane Publishing Co., Ltd. Taipei, Taiwan. 13-18.