What do students need to learn?
What ‘language’ should students learn?
David Wilkins wrote: “without grammar, very little can be conveyed; without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed” (Wilkins, 1972). This explains why foreign tourists walk around with dictionaries or phrase books rather than grammar books..!
Despite this, many traditional ESL teaching approaches have focused more on grammar. Vocabulary has been ‘tacked on’ seemingly selected more or less at random, simply because it fits in well with the grammar structures being presented. In the early 1990s, books such as ‘The Lexical Approach’ by Michael Lewis started to stimulate more of an interest in vocabulary. Today, although most modern coursebooks still have a grammatical syllabus, there is far more of a focus on vocabulary than there was in the past.
Course books which follow a grammatical syllabus are usually very predictable in terms of the grammatical structures they include and the way these structures are sequenced. The order generally depends on their complexity, learnability and teachability. When deciding which vocabulary to include in a coursebook, two additional key factors are usefulness and frequency.
The English language is well-known for its rich vocabulary. Research shows that an educated native speaker has a vocabulary of about 20,000 words. How many words do ESL students need to learn? Clearly, this will depend on what these students want to be able to do. If they are going to spend a two-week holiday in New York, their needs will be very different to those of students who want to study English literature at Oxford University in the UK.
Research has shown that an average native speaker uses around 2,000 words in daily conversation. A ‘core vocabulary’ or one which will be adequate in most situations, consists of between 2,000 and 3,000 words, which is roughly equivalent to B2 on the CEFR (The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages).
An introduction to analyzing language
When students learn a new item of vocabulary or a new grammatical structure, they need to know what it means / how it is used, its form and its pronunciation.
Analyzing grammar
Example sentence: ‘By the time Mark arrived at school, the lesson had started.’
The language which we want to teach, or the ‘target language,’ (TL) is the past perfect.
Meaning / Use: We use this structure to talk about a past action which happened before another action in the past.
Form: subject + had + past participle
Pronunciation:
When analyzing grammatical structures, it is a good idea to focus on sentence stress together with features of connected speech (such as linking or weak forms).
Analyzing vocabulary
Example sentence: ‘Mark was embarrassed because he was late.’
The target language is the adjective ‘embarrassed.’
Meaning / Use: (of a person or their behaviour) shy, uncomfortable or ashamed, especially in a social situation
(Source: Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary)
Form: adjective
Pronunciation: /ɪmˈbærəst/ With items of vocabulary, it is a good idea to focus on word stress and sounds.