Hi everybody,
Here is a summary of the four basic concepts we discussed yesterday. I added some examples to facilitate understanding.
LEARNABILITY
Some structural or lexical items are easier for students to learn than others. Thus we teach easier things first and then increase the level of difficulty as students’ language level rises. This concept might tell us that, at beginner levels, it is better to teach uses of was and were immediately after teaching uses of is and are, rather than follow is and are with the third conditional. It might persuade us to teach some and any on their own rather than introduce a whole range of quantifiers (much, many, few, etc.) all at the same time.
FREQUENCY
It would make sense, especially at beginning levels, to include items which are more common in the language, than ones that are only used occasionally by native speakers. Now that corpus information can give us accurate frequency counts, we are in a position to say with some authority, for example, that SEE is used more often than UNDERSTAND, than it is to denote vision (e.g. Oh, I see). It might make sense, therefore, to teach that meaning of SEE first.
COVERAGE
Some words and structures have greater scope for use than others. Thus we might decide, on the basis of this, to introduce GOING TO future before the present continuous with the future reference, if we could show that GOING TO could be used in more situations than the present continuous.
USEFULNES
The reason that words like BOOK and PEN figure so highly in classrooms (even though they might not be that frequent in real language use) is because they are words normally used in that situation. In the same way, words for family members occur early on in a student’s learning life because of the context of what students are linguistically able to talk about.
