Before sharing with you some reflections on teaching with the Natural Approach, it might be worthwhile to review very briefly some basic operating principles of this methodology. One of the early formulators of the Natural Approach, Tracy D. Terrell, has singled out the following primary considerations: 1) immediate communicative competence [not grammatical perfection] should be the goal of beginning instruction; 2) instruction should be directed to modifying and improving the students' grammar [rather than building it one rule at time]; 3) students should be given the opportunity to acquire [rather than be forced to learn it]; and 4) affective [not cognitive] factors are primary forces operating in acquisition ['A Natural Approach 329].1 I should also like to establish the context of the fixed text and the fluid text appearing in the title. A fixed text, or classroom agenda, is one in which the material to be learned is taught in isolation (fragmented from the system as whole) or within rigid boundaries. Conversely, the fluid text would designate manner of presenting the same material which would permit those boundaries to expand and perhaps even dissolve, while keeping acquisition anchored in the system as whole. The framework for these comments is as much Albert B. Lord's The Singer of Tales as it is Tracy Terrell's formulations of the Natural Approach. To my knowledge, Lord's important little book has never before been associated with teaching methodology; yet, Lord's landmark study of techniques for composition among unlettered singers of Yugoslavia and other South Slavic regions certainly is an exposition of highly refined methodology. That methodology relates very specifically to acquisition and mastery with one significant difference: the language studied by Professor Lord is the unique to epic verse-making by the use of formulae. Lord's theory of composition during performance is an extension of the work of his Harvard mentor, Milman Parry, and is founded on Parry's definition of the formula as a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express given essential idea (Lord 4). The way in which the poet uses formulae in the of composing in performance is unique and prodigious in which oral composition and transmission almost merge; they seem to be different facets of the same process (5). This observation lends itself to some of the most successful learning techniques that we use in the classroom which are perceived by the studentconsciously or unconsciously-to be different facets of the same process. The student, after all, is learning language. The student is not in our classroom to cover ser and estar, the uses of the subjunctive, irregular future stems, etc. Rather, s/he is there to learn system which most commercial texts have broken