1. Students are their own teachers. Native-speaking tutors are providers of sequentially ordered dialogues and conversation.

2. Students should stay at least one lesson ahead of the tutor: a classroom session is a venue for students to drill and to practice the most recent lesson that they taught themselves outside of class.

3. The most basic precept for learning/teaching another language is Fluency Before Accuracy. Students should learn to reproduce the new language fluently (ie., as a flow of speech, without analysis or inordinate attention to correctness) through a series of graduated dialogues and enhanced conversations.

4. The tutor's primary task is first to drill and to practice for fluency, not accurate native-like pronunciation. The tutor's secondary task is to drill and to practice for accuracy, but only after fluency has set in.

5. Only after a student demonstrates fluency should the tutor adjust the student's speech for correctness and accuracy. Fluency and accuracy can be accomplished during the same setting.

6. The tutor may offer occasional, minimal translation to beginning students when a student new to the language seems unduly stuck, or when the tutor has no pictures or props to which to turn. However, no translation should be provided to intermediate and advanced students.

7. Students should study the next lesson's grammatical explanations before coming to class. A conversational class should not be interrupted by grammar discussions.

8. Because students achieve grammatical insight in different ways, such insight is often a private and personal piece of reasoning. Hence, neither students nor tutors are there "to teach" one another in any traditional, discursive sense.

9. While practicing the language with the class, a tutor should randomly drill individual students so that predictability does not ever characterize the tutor's personality or the atmosphere of the instruction.

10. Toward the end of the self-instructional hour, the tutor should dedicate some time to reviewing previously studied material from a day or two before the current lesson.

11. The emphasis of the self-instructional hour is on orality, not literacy. Reading and writing are accomplished by the students outside of class and only quickly checked at some point during the lesson. For the most part, the student's book is always closed. (Of course, this changes at the very advanced levels when newspapers and readers are introduced into the course)

12. At the very advanced levels, readings are never translated.

13. At all instructional levels (beginning, intermediate, and advanced), the tutor asks oral comprehension questions on the readings in each lesson.

14. From time to time, some written work may be done at the blackboard by one or two students, while the rest of the class carry out the same assignment at their places. In such cases, the students seated check their work against the work of the student(s) at the blackboard.

15. Homework is always assigned. Homework should be writing assignments (usually taken directly from the text, workbook, or lab manual).

16. A tutor is not expected to have to prepare from one lesson to the next. The tutor simply follows the assigned text, from one page to the next. Of course, it's a good idea for the tutor to browse -- not study or analyze -- each lesson before entering the classroom to avoid hesitations and false starts.

17. Most texts can be divided neatly in half, devoting each half of the text to a single school term. So the tutor needn't be in a hurry to get through a text. Also, a tutor need not try to accomplish one lesson in a single class.