Recent developments in the foreign language education community indicate how concerned teachers are becoming with their students' degree of competence in speaking the languages they are learning. A variety of conferences, reports, and projects testify to the desire to make increased second language proficiency a matter of national importance. The application of linguistic knowledge and research to language teaching methodology has resulted in a definite advance from the grammar translation and audiolingual methods, but there is still a need for an approach that treats communication needs thoroughly while presenting students with the grammar and vocabulary necessary to express themselves accurately. Extensive alteration of existing text materials, at least in part along the lines of the notional-functional approach, will help bring instructional content into harmony with learning goals. The greatest service teachers can perform is to increase their own proficiency, along lines determined by how they can be most useful to students in the classroom. Student needs and program goals must match, and those needs are strongly communicative. Within the limitations imposed by the small number of hours available for exposure to the target language, teachers can themselves be unreplaceable resources in pointing students in the direction of true proficiency. (JB)