One important issue confronting language educators today is not "Which single method is best?", but, rather, "Which of several methods are best employed at what stages of the teaching/learning process?" Thus it is not a question of whether James Asher's Total Physical Response (TPR) is superior to Tracy Terrell's Natural Approach (or whether either of these is superior, or inferior, to Canadianstyle immersion education, audiolingualism, grammar-translation, cognitive code, Community Language Learning, the Silent Way, and whatever methodologies are to be derived from such currently popular emphases as communicative competence, functional/notionalism, and the oral proficiency movement). The question is when to utilize what. Real-time empirical investigation that covers at least 500 hours of a large group of students' instructional experiences with a variable pick of methodologies variously sequenced has yet to be undertaken. But if it ever is, I predict that the winning combination will feature the following sequence: TPR first, then a natural approach, and, subsequently, a judicious mixture of subject matter taught via the target language (immersion education), drill (audiolingual), grammar (with translation), communicative exercises, and especially functional/notionalism, whose usefulness at the more advanced levels of instruction has yet to be appreciated. TPR's chief virtues are that it gives students an immediate sense of accomplishment and participation while keeping the effective filter miraculously unclogged. Natural approaches ease students into producing simple speech sequences almost unconsciously. Immersion techniques provide learners with vast quantities of subject-matter input, which, if Stephen Krashen is right, will constitute the stored material needed to foster the oral production which in due course is prompted by conversationally-generative techniques whether communicatively competent, orally proficient, or functional. Grammar and drilling will doubtless have their place as well, since there is some support for the notion that comprehensible input can be derived from sources of formal presentation as well as informal. In sum, our profession should be thankful that after so many years of invention and experimentation it is free to pick from and combine such a rich harvest of methods. Yet we must recall that many of these methods especially the less traditionalwere brought to life as hopeful panaceas purportedly enabling their users to shave scores or even hundreds of hours off the language-learning process. Though time-reduction has been achieved and efficiency enhanced, it is nevertheless crucial to pay close attention to some recent comments by Renate Schulz ("Foreign Language Proficiency for the Real World: Wedding the Ideal to Reality, " in John Joseph, ed., Applied Language Study ... [Lanham MD: University Press of America, 1984], pp. 3-17). Dr. Schulz, a professor of German and foreign language education at the University of Arizona, is a leading expert in her fields and, for years, a well-known figure at many conventions. For Schulz, a major task faced by us as professionals is to change "the totally unrealistic expectations of the lay public regarding what it takes to gain proficiency in a second language." Our problem is a monumental lack of classroom time (the consecrated "two years of high school" remaining an all-too-typical average). Lack of time can only be circumvented by immersion experiences abroad and/or intensive hundreds-of-hours-on-track programs at home. "Two eight to ten-week intensive summer courses could provide from 640 to 720 hours of language instruction, approaching the minimum number" that experts say is needed to obtain the respectable "3" rating on the government proficiency scale. Anything less is insufficient and (perhaps worse) self-deceptive. No method is immune from the dictates of the timepiece. As practitioners of natural approaches are discovering, their students fail to transcend an uninhibitedly fluent but flawed and fossilized "learners' dialect" unless their subsequent work in the language is the equivalent of an undergraduate major in it, preferably complemented by a year abroad. In his call for comments, Editor Sackett notes there is still another issue he wishes