If our goal in foreign language teaching is no more than to teach students to replace words in one language with words in their native language, then they will lose an important part of the potential for their foreign language studies.

Students have to weight the material properly when internalizing it, or their understanding will be distorted.

However, teachers rarely present material in terms of relative importance of issues.

Furthermore, students are rarely taught to distinguish the relative weight to be given to various issues that are raised or implied in a story or article.

Any issue has greater and lesser points that must be weighted in order to be understood and evaluated successfully any intelligently.

Without teaching these values, children are like the blind people who felt the different parts of an elephant for the first time. Each one made different assumptions about the nature of the elephant. They could not feel the Gestalt of the entire elephant.