One major problem concerns the amount of analytic skill which students
should have at the end of such a course. As I discussed briefly above, this is a
general problem for any course in linguistics. How much should students be
expected to be able to apply the description in the narrow sense of applying
its categories in a replicable way to data? An emphasis on textual analysis
means concentration on one descriptive framework, ignoring or playing
down its limitations, and neglecting alternative descriptions. Whereas a lack
of detailed description may mean vagueness. With reference to the grammatical
sections of the course, Czerniewska (1981, p. 38), one of the Open
University staff who prepared the course says