ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the first-year work, which was on the Great Artesian Basin, Australia. The artesian principle was re-explained orally before they began. The Great Artesian Basin is about twelve times the size of England. The language of the worksheets also suggests strongly the dependence of its colloquial explanatory features on text which stresses formal features without having moved with the pupils from ordinary to conceptual language. Language would in this sense be 'placed before language', the constituted before the constitutive. The chapter suggests that such a relation to language may be pupils' experience in the work on artesian wells, that they deal with 'language placed before language', and consequently have the feeling of dealing only with words. The teacher liked the idea of using tubes and water to demonstrate aspects of the artesian concept, and generally felt it necessary to deal with empirical embodiments of such concepts before terms were introduced.
