Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Dave Willis
COLLINS E.L.T
London and Glasgow
Contents
Introduction iii
Chapter 1 From methodological options to syllabus design l
Chapter 2 Words and structures 15
Chapter 3 The lexical research and the COBUILD project 27
Chapter 4 Syllabus content 39
Chapter 5 Communicative methodology and syllabus specification 57
Chapter 6 Syllabus organisation 74
Chapter 7 Word, structure, function and discourse 91
Chapter 8 A brief review 124
Bibliography 133
Index 134
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First published 1990
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Introduction
There is general agreement nowadays that we learn a language best by using it to do
things, to achieve outcomes. Communicative activities involving games playing and
problem solving have become a more and more important part of the language
teacher's stock in trade over the last fifteen years or so. Some writers (see, for
example, Maley and Duff, 1978) display great ingenuity in devising such activities
and there is a wealth of supplementary material which exploits these activities. Yet in
spite of this virtually all coursebooks rely on a linguistic syllabus which 'presents' the
learner with a series of linguistic items.
It seems that communication is good fun and well worthwhile for a bit of variety,
but that the serious business of language learning needs to have a firm grammatical
basis resting on the assumption that the grammar of the language can be broken down
into a series of patterns and reconstructed in a way accessible to the learner. Even
coursebooks based on a notional-functional syllabus specification, which take units of
meaning as syllabus items, still rest on a methodology which 'presents' learners with a
series of patterns. The notionalfunctional syllabus is communicative in that it tried to
specify the syllabus in terms of meaning, in terms of what was to be communicated.
But the methodology which realises the notional-functional syllabus is little different
from the methodology which realises the structural syllabus which it seeks to replace.
Both depend on a three part cycle of presentation, practice and production.
My dissatisfaction with this methodology has a theoretical basis but it is strongly
reinforced by experience in the classroom. The theoretical base draws on the work of
people like Prabhu (1987) and Rutherford (1987) both of whom point to the glaring
inadequacy of pedagogical grammars. They argue that we cannot begin to offer
anything like an adequate description of the language on which to base a pedagogical
grammar. Given this, our only recourse is to depend on the innate ability of learners to
recreate for themselves the grammar on the basis of the language to which they are
exposed.
The conclusion is similar to that drawn by interlanguage theorists like Corder
(1967) and Selinker (1972) and classroom resear~hers like Ellis (1984). Teachers and
researchers have been aware for many years that 'input' does not equal 'intake', that
what teachers claim to be teaching bears only a tenuous relationship to what learners
are actually learning. But in spite of this, coursebook writers continue to act on the
assumption that language can be broken down into a series of patterns which can then
be presented to learners and assimilated by them in a predictable sequence. It does not
seem to worry people a great deal that this assumption flies in the face of our
experience as teachers.
My experience in the classroom, like that of all teachers I suppose, has seen both
failures and successes. On the one hand I found that students often failed to learn what
I thought I was teaching them. On the other hand most of them showed an ability to
transcend the limited language which I had so carefully presented to them. It was
clear to me that my efforts to present the grammar of the language met with very
limited success, yet in spite of this mv students' English was improving. It is
encouraging to know that so much learning is taking place in the classroom. It is
sobering to realise just how little control the
teacher has over what is being learned. The obvious conclusion to be drawn from this
is that students learn a great deal directly from exposure to language through reading
and listening, without the need for the teacher to impose a description on what is
learnt.
One of the most plaintive cries in any staffroom goes along the lines of "I've
taught them that so many times, and they still get it wrong." There is overwhelming
evidence from my experience as a teacher that teachers have little control over what is
actually learnt and reproduced in spontaneous language use. How many times, for
example, do we teach the distinction between the present simple and the present
continuous before students begin consistently to get it 'right'? It usually takes them a
long, long time. Could this be because it is not the controlled presentation which does
the trick but rather constant exposure over a period of time? Could it be that students
learn in the controlled environment of the language classroom not because language is
presented to them, but because they are constantly exposed to language? And if this is
the case should we not be looking to methodologies which maximise meaningful
exposure to and use of language?
Taking meaningful exposure as a starting point it is possible to develop an
approach to language teaching which takes advantage of the learner's natural tendency
to make sense of language and to learn for himself. In order to take full advantage of
this approach, however, two other things must be done. First a methodology must be
defined which encourages the learner's ability to learn. Teachers need to encourage
learners to look critically at language and to recognise the need to develop and refine
their language code in order to achieve their communicative aims. Secondly we need
to look carefully at the kind of language to which learners are exposed. Random
exposure is of little value. Exposure must be organised.
What should be aimed at, is exposure that is organised in three ways. First the
language that learners are expected to understand and produce should be graded in
some way so that learners do not face such difficulties and complexities at an early
stage that they become demotivated. Secondly the language they are to be exposed to
should be carefully selected so that they are given not random exposure, but exposure
to the commonest patterns and meanings in the language - the patterns and meanings
they are most likely to meet when they begin to use language outside the classroom.
Thirdly there should be some way of itemising the language syllabus so that it should
be possible not simply to expose students to language, but also to highlight important
features of their language experience, and to point to what language we might
reasonably expect them to have learned from their experience.
The first of these problems is relatively easy to surmount. It is not too difficult to
design tasks which involve a meaningful use of language but which can still be
handled by learners who have relatively little control of the language - the kind of
learner who is often referred to, somewhat unfortunately in my opinion,as a remedial
or false beginner. Tasks which have a clear outcome and involve the exchange of
highly specific information can be made accessible to false beginners. As I have said,
such tasks have been used as supplementary material for many years.
The second and third factors were, until recently, more problematic. When
Introduction v
my wife Jane and myself were asked by Collins ELT in 1983 to begin to research and
write a series of coursebooks, the Collins COBUlLD English Course, we began to ask
ourselves a number of related questions. How could we identify the commonest
patterns and meanings in English and how could we highlight these for students?
Obviously many of them are covered in most elementary courses. The verb be and its
forms and most of its uses would obviously come high on any list as would
prepositions of place. But other equally common forms such as the passive voice and
modal verbs are traditionally left until much later. Also, we discovered as we became
more involved in the research that a number of important words and patterns are often
omitted altogether. Words like problem, solution, idea, argument and thing are
commonly used with a noun clause introduced by that to structure discourse. It is
difficult to get very far in speech or writing without them.
And what about items which seemed to take up far too much time in elementary
courses, items like the present continuous used to talk about what is happening here
and now? Apart from a traditional belief that certain patterns are 'difficult', there
seems to be little objective reasoning behind the selection and ordering of items. We
were soon to find evidence that a syllabus based on these established values was
likely to be highly uneconomical.
But how could we go beyond the traditional approach to itemising and organising
a syllabus? Given the range of language experience which is bound to come from
exposure to a series of tasks which are graded for difficulty but not otherwise
linguistically graded, how would one choose which elements of language to
highlight? How would one decide which items to specify as part of an efficient
learning programme? Perhaps the most convincing attempt in the field so far was the
Council of Europe Threshold and Waystage Syllabus. But this was ultimately a very
subjective piece of work. It took as its basis the intuitions of scholars and teachers. It
did not rest on an analysis of actual language use.
In the mid-1980s a number of things began to come together. After years of
teaching English as a foreign language, a period of work as a teacher and teacher
trainer in the second language environment of Singapore had forced me to look more
closely at methodological issues, particularly the relationship between accuracy and
fluency (Willis and Willis 1987). This helped to formalise a communicative approach
to ELT and to identify some of its important components. The writing of the Collins
COBUILD English Course provided us with the opportunity to put these
methodological insights to work.
The coursebooks were to be a part of the COBUILD research project in lexical
development, a major computing and publishing venture involving cooperation
between Collins and the English Language Research Department at Birmingham
University.
The first part of this project had involved the assembly on computer and
subsequent analysis of a 7.3 million word corpus (later extended to over 20 million
words) of spoken and written English. It was proposed by John Sinclair, Professor of
Modern English Language at Birmingham and Editor-in-chief of the COBUILD
project, that this computational analysis should provide the basis for a new
coursebook syllabus, a lexical syllabus. Sinclair advanced a number of arguments in
favour of the lexical syllabus, but the underlying argument was to do with utility and
with the power of the most frequent words of English.
The 700 most frequent words of English account for around 70% of all English text.
That is to say around 70% of the English we speak and hear, read and write is made
up of the 700 commonest words in the language. The most frequent 1,500 words
account for around 76% of text and the most frequent 2,500 for 80%. Given this, we
decided that word frequency would determine the contents of our course. Level I
would aim to cover the most frequent 700 words together with their common patterns
and uses. Level 2 would recycle these words and go on to cover the next 800 to bring
us up to the 1,500 level, and Level 3 would recycle those 1,500 and add a further
1,000. We would of course inevitably cover many other words in the texts to which
students were exposed, but we would highlight first the most frequent 700, then 1,500
and finally 2,500 words in the language.
In one way this took us back to the pioneering work in the analysis of lexis of
scholars like West and Thorndike in the 30s and 40s. But the computer would be able
to afford a much more thorough and efficient analysis than had been possible in those
days. The database assembled at Birmingham would provide us with detailed
information about the commonest words and patterns in English and the meanings and
use of those words and patterns. At first we had doubts about the practicality of the
lexical syllabus. But the more we worked with the information supplied by the
COBUILD research team the more we became convinced that the syllabus which
emerged was highly practical, entirely realistic and vastly more efficient than
anything we had worked with before.
I have already pointed to words like problem, solution and idea which are omitted
from most language courses, even though they play a vital function in structuring the
way we speak and write. A particularly striking example is the word way, the third
commonest noun in English after time and people. The word way in its commonest
meaning has a complex grammar. It is associated with patterns like:
. . . different ways of cooking fish.
A pushchair is a handy way to take a young child shopping.
What emerges very strongly once one looks at natural language, is the way the
commonest words in the language occur with the commonest patterns. In this case the
word way occurs with of and the ring form of the verb and also with the to infinitive.
It is also extremely common with a defining relative clause:
I don't like the way he talks.
The lexical syllabus does not identify simply the commonest words of the language.
Inevitably it focuses on the commonest patterns too. Most important of all it focuses
on these patterns in their most natural environment. Because of this, the lexical
syllabus not only subsumes a structural syllabus, it also indicates how the 'structures'
which make up that syllabus should be exemplified. It does this by emphasising the
importance of natural language.
As we began work on the course design, therefore, a number of basic principles
were agreed:
- The methodology employed would be based entirely on activities involving real
Introduction vii
language use.
- Learners would be exposed almost entirely to authentic native speaker language. They would not be
taught through the medium of'TEFLese'- a language designed to illustrate the workings of a
simplified grammatical system and bearing a beguiling but ultimately quite false similarity to real
English.
- Spoken material recorded specially for use in the course would not be scripted and rehearsed. It
would be spontaneous speech and would therefore contain many linguistic features normally
idealised out of language teaching material.
- We would not 'present' learners with language but would encourage them to analyse for themselves
the language to which they were exposed and thus to learn from their own experience of language.
We would not say to learners 'I, the teacher, will exemplify for you the important features of English,
and you, the learner, will thereby build up a description of the language in the way that I have
determined'. We would say instead 'You, the learner, already have valuable experience of the
language. We will help you to examine that experience and learn from it'.
Antonio says:
Socoop, do you like being a father?
Socoop replies:
Yes, I erm . . . I am father of four children.
Socoop listens to the question and then tries a series of replies without real success
until the teacher resolves the issue by answering for him:
Yes, I do. I like being a father.
The learners do not challenge the truth of the teacher's utterance, even though the
teacher is a woman, because they know it is not a real statement intended to
communicate something about the teacher's attitude to parenthood. It is simply the
teacher correcting Socoop and giving him a model of the target pattern. Socoop's
mistake, of course, was to behave as if the question he was asked was a real question,
and as if he really was expected to explain to the class his feelings about fatherhood.
McTear (1975) gives a similar example:
Teacher: Where are you from?
Students: We're from Venezuela . . .
Teacher: No. Say the sentence: Where are you from?
Students: Where are you from?
Here again the students imagine that the teacher is asking a real question whereas in
fact the teacher is simply giving them a model to follow. The literature on classroom
research is full of misunderstandings of this sort, where an utterance is taken as
having some communicative value, when in fact it is simply intended as a sample of
language for the learners to copy or manipulate in some way, usually by repeating
word for word or by producing another sentence incorporating a similar pattern.
Unfortunately, it is not only learners who are sometimes confused about the nature
and purpose of language produced in the classroom.
Most teachers nowadays would claim that their approach to teaching rests, as I
have already said, on the belief that we best learn a language by using that language
rather than simply by producing samples of it for the teacher's inspection and
correction. Broadly speaking such an approach is referred to as communicative, since
it is based on the use of language to communicate. Even if a language programme is
based on a grammatical syllabus, it may be described as communicative on the
grounds that it rests on a communicative methodology. But what if there is, as I have
claimed, a conflict between syllabus and methodology?
I believe that such a conflict is revealed in attempts to harness a communicative
methodology to a grammatical or structural syllabus. The syllabus aims are expressed
as a series of language patterns with their associated meanings. The aim of each unit
is that by the end the learner should have mastered the prescribed pattern or patterns.
One methodology which might realise such a
and so on. The content of the students' answers may be controlled, for example by the
use of a series of flashcards:
Teacher: What are you doing tomorrow?
(Shows picture of people playing tennis.)
Learner: I'm playing tennis.
Teacher: Good. And what are you doing at the weekend.
(Shows picture of a cinema queue.)
Learner: I'm going to the cinema.
Gradually the control of content is relinquished as the lesson moves into the
practice stage. Learners may, for example, be expected to give true answers to the
teacher's questions. But the teacher still hovers in the background to ensure that the
language produced is relevant to the aim of the lesson - the accurate production of the
target form. The purpose of the activity is not simply to give learners the chance to
talk about what they are planning to do at some time in the future. It is, quite
specifically, to give them opportunities to use the present continuous tense.
In the presentation and practice stages, then, the focus of attention is very much on
the form of the language which is to be produced. It might be argued that there is a
focus on meaning too. But meaning implies choice, and the purpose of presentation
and practice is to restrict choice. In the lesson above, the
is not:
I don't know. I might play tennis.
or:
I'll probably play tennis if the weather's okay.
or:
I'm going to play tennis.
The 'right' answer is:
I'm playing tennis.
This is because the focus of the activity is not really on the content of the language,
the meanings that are being exchanged. The real focus is on the form of the utterances
used to realise those meanings.
Presumably, then, it is at the production stage that learners are involved in real
language use. The first two stages have an enabling role. They provide students with
the language they will need in the production stage. But what is it that is to be
produced? If, as the label implies, the purpose of this stage is to produce the target
form, then what we have is yet another form-focused activity. The intention may be
that the production of the target form is subordinate to some other activity, a role play
or problem solving exercise for example. But if learners are predisposed to produce
specific forms of the language, then it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the
activity is one which focuses on form and on formal accuracy. During the presentation
and practice stages, learners have been encouraged to give the 'correct' response to the
question - correct in that it incorporates the form under study. In the same way during
the production stage learners will be strongly predisposed to produce the target form.
In the example I have given they will be predisposed to make statements about the
future not by using the modal will or might or by using going to, but by using the
present continuous, irrespective of the meaning they wish to convey. In other words
learners will have a mental set such that form takes priority over meaning. When it
comes to talking about the future in a classroom context, the focus of the production
stage is very much on form.
Sometimes this predisposition on the part of the learners is reinforced by the
teacher and the materials used. Learners may be encouraged to 'try to use phrases like
these'. They will then only be regarded as having performed successfully if they do
indeed produce the forms which have just been presented and practised and if they fail
initially to do this the teacher will intervene to ensure conformity. Socoop made the
mistake of assuming that he was being asked a real question, and he had to be
corrected by the teacher. In the same way a learner who fails to produce the present
continuous after the kind of presentation and practice stages we have described may
be 'corrected' by the teacher. It is easy to drift into a situation in which the main
purpose of the pro-
duction stage is not to exchange meanings but to produce the target form.
In spite of this, there is sometimes a claim that this kind of methodology is in some
way communicative. Littlewood (1981) outlines a sequence based very much on
presentation, practice and production in which he subsumes presentation and practice
under 'pre-communicative activities', leading up to 'communicative activities'
corresponding to the production stage:
Through pre-communicative activities, the teacher isolates specific elements of
knowledge or skill which compose communicative ability, and provides the learners with
opportunities to practise them separately . . . In communicative activities, the learner has to
activate and integrate his pre-communicative knowledge and skills, in order to use them for
the communication of meanings. He is now engaged in practising the total skill of
communication. (Littlewood 1981)
Littlewood suggests that the normal sequencing will be for teachers to provide input
in the form of a form-focused pre-communicative activity, and to follow this with a
communicative activity 'during which the learners can use the new language they
have acquired and the teacher can monitor their progress'. But if the purpose of the
so-called communicative activities is for students to demonstrate control of the newly
introduced language forms, how does the teacher 'monitor their progress'? Presumably
by listening to see if they do indeed incorporate the target form, and additionally to
see if they produce it accurately.
It is difficult to see how such activities can be regarded as truly communicative if
the learners' main object is not to achieve some outcome through the use of language,
but to demonstrate to the teacher their control of a target form. True communication
involves the achievement of some outcome through the use of language, and demands
that the language used should be determined by the attempt to achieve that outcome.
In the kind of communication described by Littlewood, the so-called communicative
activity is simply an opportunity to use a particular form and the language used is
conditioned by this.
There is, therefore, a tension, perhaps a basic contradiction, between a
grammatical or structural syllabus and a communicative methodology. A grammatical
syllabus demands a methodology which focuses on the correct production of target
forms. It is form-focused. A communicative methodology, if it involves real
communication, demands that learners use whatever language best achieves the
desired outcome of the communicative activity. There is no real sense in which the
presentation and practice stages described above can be called communicative,
because they restrict the freedom to use whatever forms best realise communicative
intent. Learners are not able to choose whatever forms best realise the meanings they
want to realise, but rather have to use the forms that have been identified and
prescribed for them by their teacher.
At the production stage teacher and learner have two options. The purpose of the
stage may be for learners to produce the target form. If this is the case then
communication has been subordinated to the primary goal, which is to rehearse the
use of a particular form. The other option is for them to see this last stage as free.
Learners use whatever language they want in order to achieve the desired
communicative outcome or intention. But if they do this we can
hardly speak of a 'production' stage, because we can no longer say what it is that is to
be produced and we can no longer point to a link between the activity and the
syllabus.
Sometimes a claim to a 'communicative' approach rests on syllabus specification
rather than methodology. Many language teaching programmes take a
notional-functional or 'communicative' syllabus as their starting point. Such a
syllabus, like the Council of Europe Threshold Syllabus, is seen as communicative
because it consists of an inventory of units of communication rather than an inventory
of sentence patterns. It has units entitled 'Making Requests' and 'Cause and Effect', so
it is concerned with what is to be communicated rather than with how it is to be
communicated. In this case one would expect to match the syllabus statement with a
communicative methodology.
But the communicative syllabus based on specified notions and functions does not
really consist of such communicative units. Those units are the abstract categories on
which the syllabus is based, but these categories are realised by a set of sentence
patterns. The real syllabus is an inventory of such patterns. Thus the unit on requests
may cover the models would and could in patterns like:
Could you open the window please.
However, an eclectic approach of this kind skirts around the problem of reconciling a
syllabus specified in linguistic terms with a methodology based on language use.
There is no serious attempt to ensure that there is a real relationship between the
language syllabus, realised by controlled activities, and the communicative activities.
Presumably one would hope that there would be a good chance that in the
communicative activities learners would use at least some of the language that had
been presented and practised, even if one did not judge success simply in terms of
what language was produced and how accurately. But this does not provide more than
a tenuous link between syllabus and fluency activities.
I have argued up to now that there are potential conflicts between the way we
specify a syllabus and the way we realise that syllabus. I have argued that there is a
basic dichotomy in the language classroom between activities which focus on form
and activities which focus on outcome and the exchange of meanings. I have
suggested that we need to be clear about the relationship between syllabus
specification and methodology. I have also suggested that the choices involved are
concerned crucially with the ,way language is used in classrooms - whether the focus
is primarily on language form or on language as a means of communication.
Grammar in the classroom
Rutherford (1987) is highly critical of the view of language enshrined in a
presentqtion methodology. He argues that this approach to language learning regards
the process as one of 'accumulated entities'. According to this view learners gradually
amass a sequence of parts. At intervals their proficiency in the language is measured
by determining what parts and how many parts they have accumulated. Rutherford
argues that most commercially produced foreign language textbooks reflect this view,
an indication that it is a view widely held in the language teaching profession. The
associated methodology is based on:
. . . the discovery of a target language whose structure has been analysed into its putative
constituent parts, the separate parts thus serving as units of pedagogical content, focus,
practice and eventual mastery. (Rutherford 1987)
The danger with an approach of this kind is that it trivialises grammar, and trivialises
language description in general. It does give recipes for the construction of some
clauses and sentences, and for the production of samples of language. But the
grammar of a language is not a set of clauses and sentences. It is the systematic
relationship between meaning and form which underlies the production of
grammatical clauses and sentences. It is useful to acquire samples of language only in
so far as those samples lead us towards insights into the underlying system.
Language behaviour is highly systematic. We produce language in accordance
with a complex system of rules. Most people, even though they are successful
language users, are quite unable to give anything but the most rudimentary statements
about how that system works. They can make statements about whether or not
something 'sounds all right', but find it very difficult to
explain these decisions. Most native speakers would have no doubts that the
sentences:
John is being silly.
and:
John is being careful.
are grammatically acceptable. Equally most native speakers would have doubts about
the sentences:
John is being tall.
and:
John is being handsome.
Silly and careful belong to a class of adjectives often referred to as dynamic. They are
used to describe someone's behaviour rather than their inherent attributes. Dynamic
adjectives, such as awkward, mischievous, kind and cruel, are regularly used with
the present continuous, whereas other adjectives which are stative are not. This is a
rule which all native speakers operate but very few would be able to explain.
There is a difference then, between a user's grammar and a grammatical
description. A user's grammar is an internalised system, the operational system
underlying our language behaviour. We normally operate the system unconsciously
and are quite unable to explain it. A grammatical description is an attempt to
characterise that behaviour, and to identify the categories and concepts on which it
rests (categories like adjective, dynamic and stative).
Prabhu (1987) argues, like Rutherford, that most approaches to language teaching
are based on 'internalisation of the grammatical system through planned progression,
pre-selection and form-focused activity'. In other words there is a description of the
language which is communicated to the learners bit by bit by revealing to them
samples of the language in a predetermined order. Prabhu claims that such an
approach is based on a number of quite false assumptions.
The most basic of these assumptions is that we have a description of grammar
which is adequate to this task. The user's grammar is and always will be, more
complex than any descriptive grammar. Indeed attempts to describe the grammar
simply showed:
. . . that the internal grammatical system operated subconsciously by fluent speak
ers was vastly more complex than was reflected by or could be incorporated into
any grammatical syllabus- so complex and inaccessible to consciousness in fact,
that no grammar yet constructed by linguists was able to account for it fully.
However much we may wish to, we simply cannot give the learner a description of
the language which works. It must follow that if our pedagogic description of the
language is inadequate, then in order to learn the language the learner must operate
learning strategies which do not depend on a grammatical description of the language.
There must be important and subtle insights into the structure of language which
learners are able to make quite unaided.
A look at most coursebooks will confirm that the number of patterns actually
brought directly to the attention of learners does not go very far towards a com-
prehensive grammar of English. Fortunately learners are able to transcend or, perhaps
more accurately, to by-pass the grammar that is presented to them and to go beyond it.
They begin, for example, to use the present perfect tense with reference to future time
in sentences like:
Please let me know as soon as you havefixed your travel plans.
I'll come round later if I've finished what I have to do.
even though this particular use is hardly ever presented in coursebooks. They learn, as
we shall see later, that the word any and its compounds are used in affirmative
sentences like:
Anything you can do I can do better.
Come round any time.
even though they may have been taught quite explicitly that any is used only in
negative and interrogative sentences. We should ask very seriously how it is that
learners are able to go beyond what they are taught in this way. An obvious possibility
is that they learn a good deal for themselves from the language that they read and
hear. They do not need to be taught, because they have an innate ability to generalise
from the language they read and hear in order to build up and refine a workable
grammatical system.
It is also difficult to see how the learner can move from an inventory of discrete
patterns towards important generalisations about the grammar of the language. We
have already pointed out that there is much more to language than a series of
structures which can be presented to a learner. We can present, for example, the
pattern which is commonly, though misleadingly, called the first conditional:
If it rains we will get wet.
The present tense is an option when the future is already fixed or arranged. I recently
had a conversation trying to arrange a meeting involving a number of people. One of
the participants turned down a proposed date saying:
I'm sorry, I'm in Bhutan.
This was obviously not a reference to present time since we were in a British
university at the time. It was a reference to future time and was acknowledged
by another participant:
Oh, yes. When do you go?
Drilling or repeating the first conditional pattern may show a learner that this is an
acceptable pattern of English, and the pattern may eventually be incorporated in the
learner's language. But it tells the learner nothing of great value about the grammar of
the present tense. Indeed, by implying that there is something unusual about this use
of the tense and that this unusual feature is associated with the conditional, it is
actually getting in the way of learners developing a more complete description of the
present tense and realising that 'the present simple tense is neither present nor simple'
(Lewis 1989).
There is also an assumption on the part of those who present language to the
learner that the learner is actually in a position to receive what is presented, that we
can specify what will be learned and in what order. This again flies in the face of our
experience as teachers. We know very well that it will be a long long time before
learners distinguish consistently between, for example, the present perfect and past
simple forms of the verb. We may 'present' some version of this distinction but it will
not immediately become part of the learner's language behaviour. A learner may
ignore the distinction altogether or may operate it only in a few instances. It will be a
long time before the learner has any control of this part of the verb system of English.
We cannot realistically hope to present the learner with usable information in this
way. All we can realistically do is attempt to make the learner aware that these
concepts and these distinctions are a part of the grammar of English. Whether and at
what point the learner will be able to act on that information is beyond our control.
If we are to help learners to acquire the grammar of the language in the sense of
an operating system, we must begin by acknowledging that we can only do this
indirectly. We may be able to offer useful hints, but we cannot begin to offer a full
description of the language. We may be able to devise activities which will help
learners internalise the grammar of the language for themselves, but we cannot
present them with usable chunks of language. A methodology should take account of
the fact that any pedagogic grammar will be inadequate, that what is presented will
not necessarily be received and, most important of all, that the crucial participant in
the attempt to internalise a grammar is not the teacher or the materials but the learner.
Use and usage
Even if we were able to teach the grammatical system effectively, there is no
guarantee that this would be translated into an ability to use the target language.
Widdowson (1978) argues that a methodology which focuses simply on language
form is deficient in that it is concerned simply with enabling students to produce
correct sentences. He feels that the ability to use language involves more than just the
ability to produce grammatical sentences.
Someone knowing a language knows more than how to understand, speak, read
and write sentences. He also knows how sentences are used to communicative
effect. (Widdowson 1978)
At first sight this may seem to be a highly artificial distinction. How can someone
know how to 'understand, speak, read and write sentences' without being able to use
these sentences to communicative effect?
It seems to me that there are two ways in which this can happen. The first is
probably familiar to very many of us who have learned a foreign language. We can
work out the meaning of a spoken sentence and perhaps reply to that sentence, but
only if we are given time to process the language involved. Given time we can do a
lot with the language, but under the kind of time pressure which usually accompanies
language use we just cannot get things together. There is a sense in which we know
the language in that we know what the forms mean and we know what forms we want
to produce. But there is another sense in which we do not know the language. We
cannot get things together with sufficient speed and confidence to use the language
when we are required to do so. We have a knowledge of the forms, but we do not
have the kind of fluent control demanded in real communication.
There is a second sense in which we may be said to 'know' the language and at the
same time not to know it. We can produce and understand acceptable sentences in the
target language, but we are not sure in what circumstances these sentences would be
appropriate as tokens of communication, and we are not sure how we would deploy
them in communicative discourse. This is what Widdowson has in mind.
Take, for example, an English speaker who has a good knowledge of French
grammar and lexis and who then tries to put this knowledge to use in writing a
business letter in French. The letter would be unlikely to create a favourable
impression in a French reader. The conventions of letter writing in French are quite
different from those in English, and if the words and phrases are translated directly
into English they sound elaborate and ornate to an English ear. Similarly, the direct
equivalent of an English letter might sound abrupt and dismissive to a French speaker.
We all have to learn the conventions of certain types of communication in our own
language, even though we have a sophisticated knowledge of the grammar and lexis.
We have to do the same in a foreign language.
We must also learn how to deploy sentences in discourse. There is a phrase in
English which seems to have become very common in recent years. The phrase is
'Having said that...', and it is used to introduce some modification or something which
partly contradicts what has just been said. There is nothing in the meaning of the
phrase 'Having said that. ..' which can be gleaned from its Iexis and grammar to give
us any indication of its use. We have to know what value it has in discourse, how it is
used to structure what follows.
Widdowson develops a distinction between language as a lexico-grammatical
system, which he refers to as language usage, and language as used for
communication, which he refers to as language use. One of his conclusions is that we
need to take much more account in our teaching strategies of language use. But the
problem here is that we know very little about language use. We do not, he argues,
have any adequate description of language use. We do not know enough about the
conventions of communication and about the way phrases, clauses and sentences
come to have a value quite separate from that of their component parts.
This is true in the sense that we do not have an accepted model for the analysis and
description of discourse or for the classification and characterisation of rhetorical
activities. But we can still look at language in use and encourage learners to make
generalisations about it. One thing, however, is sure. If we are to study language in
use, then what we must study is language in use. This is a tautology, but it is one
which is often brushed aside:
. . . there has been for many years in English teaching a loss of respect for the natural patterns
of a language. Because of the difficulty of analysing language that occurs in everyday
contexts, teachers have got in the way of accepting all sorts of invented or adapted texts.
These are grimly defended by some, but there is no virtue in them; they were only made up
because it was not practicable to harness real language. (Sinclair 1988)
is not seen as expressing how she feels about fatherhood. Presentation and practice are
concerned purely and simply with usage.
The production stage following presentation and practice is also concerned
primarily with usage. When learners produce the present continuous with future
reference, their decision to use this form is not based on criteria of use. They do not
choose this form because it is the form which best expresses the meaning they want to
express. They produce the form to demonstrate their familiarity with the aspect of
usage which is the focus of that particular lesson. Once learning targets have been
specified in terms of form learners are predisposed to usage rather than use.
Use and usage in the classroom context
To a large extent the presentation methodology I have described above has replaced
the old grammar-translation approach. Grammar-translation was characterised by a
good deal of explanatory talk in the learner's first language,
with relatively little production of the target language on the part of either teacher or
learners. One of the features of presentation, practice and production is that there is a
great deal of the target language produced in the classroom, and perhaps this is the
reason for its relative success.
If you observe very carefully a lesson based on presentation, or, even better, if you
look at transcripts of such lessons, you will probably notice two rather surprising
things. You will probably see that there is a lot of language produced in addition to
the language that presents and practises the target form. One reason is that teachers
use a lot of language to organise the lesson. They are constantly giving instructions
and explanations to give structure to the lesson and make sure that learners know what
is expected of them. Another reason is that a language lesson is a social event. There
is more to it than simply learning a language. Teachers and learners greet each other,
tell stories, make jokes, get to know one another and do all the other things that
contribute to an easy social atmosphere.
Another thing you will notice about the language in a classroom, particularly in an
elementary classroom, is that teachers produce a lot of language which is beyond the
level the learners are supposed to have reached. They do not, indeed they cannot,
restrict themselves to the very limited language which has already been presented. A
teacher might well begin a lesson, even at the elementary stage, by saying:
Okay, Unit 6. Could you turn to Unit 6? Right, Andreas, what about the first
picture? What's in the first picture?
This would be quite unremarkable teacher behaviour even if learners have not yet
'done' the modal could or the phrase 'What about . . . ?'
By the same token, learners manage to get across meanings which are beyond
their target language resources. In the lesson featuring Socoop (see page 1) one of
Socoop's classmates wanted to make the point that women often do jobs which are
traditionally regarded as a man's prerogative:
Victoria: (A woman) . . . He works, he . . . she works . . .
Teacher: Yes.
Victoria: in sever(?) for her husband.
Teacher: Mm?
Victoria: He works teacher or, er engineering or many jobs, er, the sever in a man.
Teacher: The same.
Victoria: The same
Teacher: As a man. (J R Willis 1981 )
One of the important things about the way a presentation methodology is realised by a
sensitive teacher is that it is language rich. Learners are involved in a lot of language
use. But, paradoxically, this is not a deliberate part of the methodology. It is very
much a by-product of the methodology. But it would help to explain how learners
learn a lot of language which has not been presented to them. It would also help to
explain how in some cases, as in the case of any cited above (page 9), they may learn
something very different from what has been presented to them.
It is also important to remember that presentation and practice are only part of what
happens in a language teaching programme. The eclectic approach referred to earlier
(page 6) brings into the classroom activities involving listening and reading skills
which give much more, and much more varied, exposure to language than does a well
organised and controlled presentation-based lesson. It is also the case that such
activities are much less likely to have an overt language focus in the sense of being
targeted at a particular language form. In recent years such lessons have often been
referred to as 'skills-based' lessons. Perhaps this is an acknowledgement of the fact
that language use is a skill rather than a body of knowledge, and that the best way of
acquiring a skill is by practising that skill. This is, in fact, another way of asserting the
basic principle behind communicative methodology, that the best way to learn a
language is by using it to communicate.
It is certainly true that language use in its various manifestations involves the
application of skills. But those skills operate on language. If, for example, learners are
being encouraged to predict the development of a text, they can, in the final event, do
this only on the basis of their knowledge and experience of what words and phrases in
texts are predictive and how they are predictive. To take an example quoted earlier,
when they hear a speaker produce the phrase 'Having said that . . . ', they are alerted to
the fact that what follows is likely to introduce some contradiction or modification of
what has been established so far.
It is likely, therefore, that the effectiveness of a skills-based approach to learning
would be considerably enhanced if we could identify the linguistic knowledge on
which particular skills operate. This takes us back to the need for a linguistic syllabus,
and back to the contradiction that a linguistic syllabus is likely to lead to a focus on
form rather than use, whereas the strength of skills-based activities is that they are
based firmly in use.
I am arguing that the presentation of language forms does not provide sufficient
input for learning a language. The grammatical system is much more complicated
than we can possibly reflect in a methodology which claims to rely on the
presentation of a very limited set of discrete patterns. In spite of this, a presentation
methodology seems to work tolerably well. I am suggesting that this is partly because
it is language rich. In spite of the fact that the methodology is based on presentation of
samples of usage, the methodology succeeds because it provides a context in which
there is a great deal of language use.
This brings us back to the uneasy relationship between syllabus specification and
methodology. The syllabus specification must, directly or indirectly, consist of an
inventory of language forms. I have suggested, however, that a successful
methodology must rest on language use. The problem for a materials writer is to
produce a specification of those language items which a learner is likely to need and
then to match this with a methodology which involves a predominance of language
use. We must look for a methodology which aims quite deliberately at language use
rather than a methodology which offers language use as a by-product. We should try
to devise a methodology which is based on using language in the classroom to
exchange meanings and which also offers a focus on language form, rather than a
methodology which focuses on language form and which only incidentally focuses on
use.
15
reported speech, particularly tense in reported speech. The consensus seems to be that
these items are of central importance, and that they cause learners particular
difficulties, and therefore justify the expenditure of a good deal of time in the
classroom and a good deal of space in coursebooks. There are further indications that
the passive voice, the conditionals and reported speech are seen as difficult. They all
tend to come relative! late in the teaching sequence. They are not usually 'presented'
until well into an intermediate course.
But why should these patterns be regarded as difficult?
The passive
The uses of the past participle are illustrated in these five examples:
1 I would be interested to hear an account of your experience.
2 Thank you very much for your detailed letter.
3 I think they must have got mixed up.
4 A van equipped with a loudspeaker . . . toured the reservoir.
5 He was rescued by one of his companions.
Four of the patterns in which it occurs are closely paralleled by patterns with
adjectives:
6 I would be happy to hear an account of your experience.
7 Thank you very much for your newsy letter.
8 He must have got very angry.
9 One man, happy with the results of his efforts, was able to take home a large sum of
money.
Sentences 1 and 6 are examples of an adjective as complement after the verb be.
Sentences 2 and 7 show an adjective qualifying a noun. Sentences 3 and 8 have an
adjective after get. Several other verbs like look, grow and become display this same
pattern. Sentences 4 and 9 show an adjective followed by a prepositional phrase.
There seems, therefore, to be a good case for treating the past participle as an
adjective. If we do this, it need no longer be seen as presenting any special difficulty.
Some teachers, however, may baulk at regarding 5 as an adjective. In 1 the past
participle interested is descriptive and tells us how the recipient of the letter felt. In 5,
however, rescued tells us what happened to someone. Semantically the past participle
interested is stative and the past participle rescued in 5 is dynamic.
This is certainly true. There is a large class of past participles which are stative in
meaning- delighted, tired, worried, broken etc. - and which are therefore better
regarded as adjectives. But the distinction is not as clear cut as that. In a sentence like:
10 The windows were broken.
or dynamic:
12 The windows were broken by the force of the explosion.
Similarly frightened:
13 He was frightened of snakes.
is dynamic.
But it is not only past participles that can be either stative or dynamic, with some
having the potential to be either. As we have already seen, the same is true of
adjectives:
Stative and dynamic adjectives differ in a number of ways. For example, a stative
adjective such as tall cannot be used with the progressive aspect or with the imperative: *He's
being tall, *Be tall. On the other hand we can use careful as a
dynamic adjective: He's being careful, Be careful. (Quirk et al. 1972)
A Grammar of Contemporary English goes on to list well over fifty adjectives some
of them such as kind and nice extremely common - which can be used dynamically.
It seems, therefore~that the only real distinguishing feature of the passive is the
use of by with a noun phrase to mark an agent. Rather than pick out the passive for
special treatment, an economical teaching strategy will allow the past participle to be
treated adjectivally. One of the consequences of this is that the collocation of be with
-ed forms is noted but not given undue prominence:
5 + -ed / -en
Your father's called John? and your mother's called Pat? (19)
It was built in 1890. (55)
It was built for William Randolph Hearst. (55)
This street is called Montague Street Precinct. (67)
. . .teenage girls who are interested in fashion. . . (95)
Are you tired?
Wally is awakened by the phone ringing. (91)
. . .so that I can make sure that you are properly looked after. (193)
Listen for the words that are stressed. (103)
the learner has all that is needed to produce the passive. But the greatest prob
lem with the passive is not form but use. Again, the teaching strategy proposed here
seems more likely to be effective than a transformational approach which relates the
passive closely to the active. If the participle is treated adjectivally it will quite
naturally be used when the focus of attention is on the subject of the passive verb. The
difficulty is not with the sentence structure. This is no different from sentence
structure with adjectives. The difficulty lies in understanding that the past participle is
passive in meaning.
The second conditional
The COBUILD main corpus which was analysed to produce the Collins COBUILD
English Language Dictionary contains just under 15,000 occurrences of the word
would. It is the forty-fourth most frequent word in the COBUILD corpus, more
frequent than will, for example, which has 8,800 occurrences. In around half of its
15,000 occurrences would is described as 'used to talk of events which are of a
hypothetical nature at the time of being mentioned, either because they are in the
future or because they depend on other events which may or may not occur'.
Examples include:
The people of South Vietnam would receive their conquerors with relief / I think The Tempest
would make a wonderful film / I suspect that the West Germans would still be a little bit
cautious.
In these examples a condition has been established earlier in the text, or is implied in
the word would. This use accounts for around 7,500 of the occurrences in the
COBUILD corpus. A sub-category of this, accounting for a further 1,200 occurrences,
is would used in explicitly conditional sentences:
It would surprise me very much if sterling strengthened. / If he wasn't such a reactionary
I'd feel sorry for him.
In fact although many ELT grammars and coursebooks talk about the three
conditionals:
1 If it rains we'll get wet.
2 If it rained we would get wet.
3 If it had rained we would have got wet.
everyone is well aware that there are actually a very large number of possible
conditional patterns:
4 You can always explore the neighbourhood if you have half an hour to spare.
5. Even if I had the time I feel too tired.
6 If it got out it might kill someone.
7 If it's all right by you we could start now.
Why then does ELT practice isolate three patterns for special treatment?
All of the models, not only will and would, are common in conditional sentences.
Most of these models are taught lexically. Students learn that might and could, for
example, are used for possibility. It is not thought necessary to teach a fourth and fifth
conditional like 6 and 7 above. Provided learners know what if means and they know
what might and could mean, it is assumed that they are capable of creating for
themselves sentences like 6 and 7. In exactly the same
way, if would is taught lexically with its main meaning of hypothesis, learners will be
well able to generate for themselves sentences like 2.
The strategy of highlighting word meanings is a much more productive one than
the strategy of teaching structural patterns. If the second conditional is taught as a
means of introducing learners to the most important meaning of would this seems to
me to be an economical teaching strategy. Learners may then be led to the
generalisation that would also occurs in all kinds of environments without if. But this
is not what generally happens. The second conditional is taught as though it had some
life of its own, as if there was something unique about this combination of the past
tense and the modal would. But both these elements carry the meaning of hypothesis
quite independently of the second conditional. In fact would in conditionals is no
more difficult than might or could in conditionals. It is simply more common. This
again stems from its meaning, since conditional sentences are very much concerned
with hypotheses.
The Collins COBUILD English Course (CCEC) Level 2 includes a section
entitled 'Your favourite cheap meal'.
This Language Study exercise simply draws learners' attention to the use of the
past tense and of would to express a hypothesis. It also makes the point that would is
preferred to will for an unreal hypothesis. Knowing the second conditional is not a
matter of being able to recite a particular pattern of words: it is a matter of knowing
the meaning of would and the meaning of this use of the past simple tense.
89 Your favourite cheap meal
90 Language study
Would
a Look at the verbs in colour. What tense are they
in? Do they refer to past time?
JV: Are we ready? Yes. Erm now what would each of you cook
if someone dropped in unexpectedly and stayed for a meal in
the evening?
JV: What would you cook David? DF: Whatever vegetables
happened to be there.
JV: Supposing they arrived after the restaurants had shut.
JV: But er and if youd made it at home. . .
Reported statements
It is a fact of the English language that the tense we select is liable to change if we
take a different standpoint in time. If George says'l'm tired' end I report this as 'George
said he was tired' I can choose the past tense because George's being tired occurred in
the past, rather than because the verb said is past tense. Even if George is still tired, I
may nevertheless choose to say 'George said he was tired.' But if George is still tired
and I want to make this clear I can choose to report what he said by saying 'George
said he's tired' or even 'George says he's tired.' So the choice between past and present
does not simply indicate when something happened. It may also indicate whether or
not I think the happening is still relevant.
The fact that we sometimes have a choice between past and present tenses is not
simply a feature of reported speech. I might talk about something which happened in
the past by saying 'We stayed in the Grand Hotel. It was an awful place.' If the hotel
still exists and is still awful I can nevertheless choose to use the past tense if I do not
think my statement has any relevance to the present. On the other hand I can choose
to give my assessment some present relevance by selecting the present tense: 'We
stayed in the Grand Hotel. It's an awful place. You certainly shouldn't stay there.'
While preparing the CCEC materials we asked someone to rewrite a story as a
radio script. The story included this passage:
'What part of London are you headed for?' I asked him.
'I'm going right through London and out the other side,' he said. 'I'm going to
Epsom, for the races. It's Derby Day today.'
'So it is,' l said. 'I wish I were going with you. I love betting on horses.'
'I never bet on horses,' he said. 'I don't even watch them run. That's a stupid silly
business.'
'Then why do you go?' I asked.
He didn't seem to like that question. His little ratty face went absolutely blank and
he sat there staring straight ahead at the road saying nothing.
'I expect you help to work the betting machines or something like that,' I said.
'That's even sillier,' he answered . . . (Roald Dahl, The Hitch-hiker)
The interesting thing about this is that although the second version reports what was
said there are no verbs of saying. There is no past tense verb like said to trigger a
tense change. The report is in the past tense because the reported events happened in
the past.
There is nothing difficult about tense in reported speech in English. The logic it
follows is the same as for the rest of the language. In spite of this, many coursebooks
insist on regarding reported statement as a structure of some kind which has a system
of rules to itself. Instead of looking for broad generalisations about the language, there
is an attempt to cordon off sections and treat
them as if they were in some way unique. Reported speech, particularly the use of
tense, is treated in this way and is seen as creating great difficulties for learners, even
at quite an advanced level.
One practice book for the Cambridge First Certificate, for example, solemnly lists
the 'rules' for reported speech. It explains that changes have to be made to certain
items with the result that this becomes the .. . or that, today becomes that day and I
becomes he or she. To complicate the issue further, it is explained that if the reporting
verb is in the past tense then all the senses 'go one step backwards in time'. These
backwards steps are then listed. Present simple becomes past simple, present perfect
and past simple become past perfect and so on.
This is all totally unnecessary. These differences in person and in phrases of time
and place occur because we are taking a different standpoint from the original writer
or speaker. It would be stupid to refer to something as happening today if I am well
aware that it happened several days ago. Similarly it would be silly if someone asked
me the question:
Do you think I'll be late?
to reply by saying:
Yes I probably will.
We are constantly changing reference to person, time and place to accommodate the
standpoint of a different speaker at a different time. This is a feature of language as a
whole, not simply a feature of reported speech. It is a confusing and uneconomical
teaching strategy to single out reported statements and treat them as if they were
unique in some way.
In fact it is difficult to sustain the argument that reported statement is a useful
grammatical category at all. An analysis of noun clauses introduced by that in the
texts for CCEC Level 3 produced examples like these:
1 Cecil Sharp felt that the old songs of England might disappear for ever.
2 If it's a job interview try to show that you're interested in the job.
3 The government brought in a rule that children under thirteen werentt allowed to work.
4 The unsuccessful artist decided that his prayer had been answered.
5 The monkey said that there was no such thing as food, only fruit.
6 A long time ago there was this theory that women always passed first time.
Altogether in the texts which make up CCEC Level 3 there were 212 occurrences of
that used to introduce a noun clause. Of these 212 occurrences:
87 are introduced by verbs of thinking: think, feel, assume, decide, realise, understand, conclude,
believe, know, wish, recall, remember.
40 by verbs of saying:
say, tell, demand, report, explain, suggest, point out, assure, argue.
38 by nouns: rule, fact, idea, theory, problem, situation, thing, information, implication, promise,
belief, impression, assurance, grounds, speculation, claim, announcement, signs, concern,
conclusion, feeling, case, background.
This tells us a number of things. First of all, comparatively few of the 212 occurrences
could accurately be described as reported speech. Reported thought is much more
common than reported speech. But reported thought does not figure in pedagogic
grammars with anything like the same inevitability as does reported speech. Secondly,
a large number of the occurrences, such as 2, 3 and 6 above, could not be described as
reports at all. Thirdly, noun clauses are by no means always dependent on a verb.
What, then, does the learner need to know about noun clauses of this kind? As I
have pointed out, many pedagogic grammars imply that the difficulty lies particularly
with tense, and with the changes in time and place reference. But I have argued that
there is nothing unique about tense or about time and place in these noun clauses. I
would suggest that, as with the passive the most important thing about noun clauses is
not how they are formed but how they are used. They are used, for example, in the
way I have used them earlier in this paragraph with words like argue and suggest to
help develop an argument. They are used with nouns like thing, problem, situation
and theory to help define and develop ideas. In particular they have an important
function in identifying and highlighting a notion that is going to be developed in the
text:
The
thing . . .
problem . . .
situation
theory . . .
difficulty . . .
is(that)
Once we begin to look at the uses of noun clauses, we begin to look at the words with
which they are associated, and to ask how those words function in text. In asking what
it is that the learner needs to know, and what it is that should be highlighted, we
acknowledge the importance of the noun clause, but we also come back to the
importance of the word as a unit of syllabus design.
English as a lexical language
I have suggested that three of the items traditionally regarded as difficult for the
learner are not in fact difficult in the way they are generally believed to be. They are
generally regarded as being difficult structures. I have argued in effect that the
passive and the conditionals do not need to be presented as 'structures', since they can
readily be created by learners for themselves, provided they have an understanding of
word meaning. This does not mean that they will necessarily be easily acquired by
learners. Even a rule as straightforward as the subject-verb concord in 'he rues' is not
easily acquired. It is a long time before it becomes a consistent part of the learner's
production. We do not know why this should be. Perhaps because it is heavily
redundant. We can never be sure when, or even whether, input will become part of the
learners behaviour.
Indeed the very concept of input is a misleading one. Input implies intake, and there
can never be any guarantee that learners will take in the language that they hear.
A structurally based approach which is linked to input will be more diffuse than a
lexically based approach in two ways. In the first place it does not offer such powerful
generalisations. Once the learners are aware of the potential of the past tense and
would to encode hypothesis, they are in principle capable of producing:
I think the Tempest would make a wonderful film.
and:
I wish I lived in a caravan.
They are also in a much better position to make sense of further input. They will be
more likely to identify the general hypothetical use of the past tense and would if they
are able to abstract them from the second conditional pattern. Similarly, once they
identify the past participle as adjectival, a range of uses is open to them. It may be
some time before they take advantage of this, but they are more likely to do this if this
is the starting point than if the passive is treated transformationally, or in some other
way~vhich associates it very closely with verb forms.
In the second place, the fact that a lexical description depends on a more powerful
generalisation means that the learner will have more evidence on which to base useful
generalisations about the language. I have shown, for example, that would expressing
hypothesis is much more common than the second conditional. The learner will
therefore have many more opportunities to reinforce the meaning of would than the
structure of the second conditional.
A similar lesson can be drawn from our look at the noun clauses which realise,
among other things, reported statements. Noun clauses of this kind are ubiquitous.
There are three examples in the paragraph above, none of them strictly speaking a
reported statement. This noun clause, therefore, is likely to be a much more useful
concept than reported statement. It is not linguistically complex, since it follows the
general rules governing English tense and adverbials of time and place. Once learners
become aware of this, they can begin to work on the variety of uses of such clauses,
and in particular the words that introduce them.
A focus on words, therefore, as well as providing the raw material to make more
powerful generalisations, seems to offer learners the potential to create structures for
themselves. Word forms are also easily recognisable and easily retrievable. This is not
always the case with structures.
Learners can find words for themselves and begin to make useful generalisations
about them. As we shall see later, it is possible to build on this accessibility to devise
exercises which encourage learners to speculate usefully about the meanings and
functions of words - a process which leads to greater awareness of language use. If we
are to adopt a strategy which aims at awareness raising, therefore, there are good
arguments for highlighting meaning; and if we are to do this, the most effective unit is
likely to be the word rather than the structure.
This may or may not be the case with other languages, but it certainly seems to be
the case with English. It is perhaps particularly unfortunate that English has for so
long been described in terms of a Latinate grammar derived from a highly inflected
language, when English itself is quite different, a minimally inflected language.
Obviously I would not claim that there is nothing more to English than word meaning,
but it does seem that word meaning and word order are central to English in a way
that may not hold true for other languages.
Difficulty in EFL - a re-assessment
Some of the grammatical systems of the language seem to operate a logic to which it
is very difficult for the learner to gain access. Perfective and progressive aspect in
English are notoriously difficult. A lot of time in elementary and intermediate courses
is spent contrasting the present and past simple, and the present and past continuous
tenses, and equally on contrasting the present perfect and the past simple. Another
notorious area of difficulty in English is the system of determiners, particularly the
definite and indefinite article. This again is an area which receives a good deal of
attention in most courses. But the vexing thing about grammatical systems like these
is that they are conspicuously resistant to teaching. However hard teacher and learners
may try, some language systems take a long, long time to learn.
A number of theories have been put forward to account for this. It may be that
there is a fixed order of acquisition which is broadly speaking common to all learners.
There is some, though not conclusive, evidence for this view. Prabhu (1987) argues
that any relationship between the grammatical systems as we describe them and
grammatical systems as they are subconsciously conceptualised by the learner
(between descriptive and operational systems) is purely accidental. If this is so, it is
meaningless to look to our description of grammatical systems for an index of the
learner's progress. Interlanguage theorists like Selinker and Corder describe language
learning as a process of continually forming, testing and revising hypotheses about the
grammar of the language. If they are right, then learners will need a lot of evidence in
the form of exposure to the language before they are able reach stable conclusions
about the grammar.
Whatever the reasons for these difficulties, they are certainly an observable and
sometimes worrying fact of life in the EFL classroom. It is simply a fact of life that
some systems are not immediately accessible to teaching. They take time, often a long
time, to assimilate. Indeed perhaps the only real answer to the question 'What systems
of English are difficult to learn?' would be 'Those systems that take a long time to
learn.' This is not objective or demonstrable in any straightforward way. I have
already given subject-verb concord as an example of something which is easy to
understand but very difficult to assimilate. It may be that teaching helps learning. It
may well be the case that some teaching procedures hinder progress in the
development of some grammatical systems. What is sure is that learners need time to
assimilate language. Strategies that aim to help assimilation by awareness raising are
more tolerant of the learner's position and more likely to be successful than strategies
which aim to
incorporate the target language into the learner's repertoire more or less immediately.
It can be argued that the attempt to reduce language to presentable patterns
actually adds to the difficulties faced by the learner, and compounds this by confusing
the learner as to the true nature of language. Language patterns are often presented to
learners contrastively so that they are required to distinguish between, say, the present
perfect and past simple tenses. Many coursebooks tell us, for example, that the present
perfect is used for events which happened in the recent past, particularly if the effects
of the action can still be seen or felt. Very often pictures are used to illustrate
sentences like:
I've broken my arm.
But in spite of appearances, the 'recent past' has nothing to do with how much time
has elapsed since something happened. There is nothing ungrammatical
about:
1 I broke my arm this morning.
or about:
2 I'm afraid I've broken my arm. I broke it last week.
Similarly if the present perfect is used because the effects of what happened can still
be seen or felt, how could we account for:
3 A: I've broken my arm.
B: Oh dear. How did you break it?
as opposed to:
4 A: I've broken my arm.
B: ?Oh dear. How have you broken it?
We may make useful generalisations about the present perfect and the past simple,
and we may be able to point to a few cases in which the contrast is absolute. We may
advise learners, for example, that the past simple rather than the present perfect is
used when the time at which an event took place is made explicit:
5. I broke my arm yesterday.
as opposed to:
6. *I've broken my arm yesterday.
and:
8 Did you go to church this week?
This leads us to two important points. The first is that it is meaning that determines
what is and is not acceptable in terms of sentence structure. The sentence:
is unacceptable not because there is some abstract rule which tells us that we cannot
have the present perfect tense together with a past time adverbial, but because there is
a contradiction between the meaning of the present perfect tense and the meaning of
yesterday. By selecting the present perfect tense the speaker is asserting the present
relevance of his utterance. By adding yesterday he is denying this present relevance.
Learners make mistakes of this kind not because they have not grasped the rule, but
because they do not understand the meaning and use of the present perfect tense. If
the teaching strategy we adopt illuminates that meaning, it may be a useful strategy. If
it simply asserts the incompatibility between the tense and the adverbial, it is unlikely
to be successful.
The second point elaborates Widdowson's distinction between usage and use. The
essence of language use is choice. Restrictive rules such as the one stating that the
past simple is preferred to the present perfect when the time of an event is made
explicit, tell us something about when not to use the present perfect tense. They may
help us to avoid some instances of faulty usage. But they do not tell us when or why
the present perfect is to be preferred to the past simple. They do not give us insights
into use. They do not afford us criteria to choose between formulations such as 7 and
8 above. Again this points to the need for exposure. Learners need experience of the
present perfect in use if they are to grasp its meaning. Only when they have this will
they be able not only to avoid the contradiction inherent in:
6 *I have broken my arm yesterday.
but also to select the present perfect tense when it is appropriate to the meaning they
wish to convey.
This is also an argument in favour of the use of authentic text in language learning
rather than text specially written to illustrate some aspect of language. Such specially
written text is usually constructed to focus on contrived contexts in which there is a
clear cut distinction between the present perfect and the past simple. Learners are
asked to engage in such exchanges as:
A: Have you read War and Peace'?
B: Yes I have. I read it last year.
The only reason for selecting one tense or the other is that that is what they have been
told to select. The exchange is meaningful in that it consists of three acceptable
sentences of English for which we can readily imagine a meaningful context. But the
selection of one tense as opposed to the other is not meaningful. It is a teacher-led
contrivance. The system which is presented to learners involves conformity to
superficial rules, often of a restrictive kind, under careful teacher control. If learners
are to create appropriate meanings, they need to become aware of the choices realised
in genuine language use.
27
The first stage in the project was to gather together a corpus of language on j computer
ready for analysis. Since a corpus represents a sample of the language under study it is
obviously important to obtain as representative a sample as possible.
Our aim was to identify those aspects of the English language which were relevant to the needs of the
international user. We therefore defined these for ourselves as follows:
- written and spoken modes
- broadly general rather than technical language
- current usage, from 1960, and preferably very recent
- naturally occurring text, not drama
- prose, including fiction and excluding poetry
- adult language, 16 years or over
- standard English, no regional dialects
- predominantly British English, with some American and other varieties.
(Renouf 1987)
Renouf goes on to explain how texts were selected to give the right coverage and gives a
broad description of the corpus. A complete list of texts can be found in the corpus
acknowledgements in the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary.
The next important feature of the corpus is simply its size. Obviously, the larger the
corpus the more likely it is to be representative of the language as a
whole, or of that part of the language researchers are aiming to describe. This need for size
has to be balanced against the aims of the study and also against rapidly diminishing
returns to scale beyond a certain point. By mid-1983 a Main Corpus of 7.3 million words
had been built up by the COBUILD team, and this was large enough for a study of the
commonly occurring words of English. The most frequent 700 words of English all occur
at least 650 times in the Main Corpus. All of the 2,500 most frequent words of English,
which were eventually to form the basis of the lexical syllabus for the Collins COBUILD
English Course, occurred at least 120 times in the corpus. For the study of less frequent
words, those occurring less than fifty times in the Main Corpus, a Reserve Corpus of a
further 13 million words was added by the end of 1985. In producing the dictionary this
Reserve Corpus played a vital role as about ninety per cent of the word forms in the Main
Corpus occurred with a frequency of 50 or less.
The first stage in processing the corpus was to run a computer programme to produce
concordances for each of the words under study. Let us look at the word way. This comes
after time and people as the third most common noun in English, with around 7,000
occurrences in the Main Corpus. Here is a sample from the concordances:
fluctuated. It is not, I su
ing on; fewer still had premises in any way
suitable; some turned out to be sch
assertively un-urban that we affected a way
of dressing quite unsuited to Unive
attention if he became too excitable, a way
whose success was, I think, due to
hanged, and a manned craft was the best way
of preserving flexibility. Photogra
ed to the idea very gradually. The best way
to do this. I decided, was to intro
burn and the island beaches. I went by
way
of my family home in the south of S
ts, but not in the seemingly calculated way
that is born of deprivation. The spa
le lifeless, and I began in a desultory way
to review in my mind various animal
the bath; it had become an established
way
of quieting him when he was obstrep
nd the retaliatory strategy had to give way
to the flexible response, with its
o be thrown. Such pebbles that came his way
seem mainly to have been on the que
h strip of garden from the road. On his way
home, but never on his way out, Mij
road. On his way home, but never on his way
out, Mij would tug me in the direct
ed in his small body. He would work his way
under them and execute a series of
converse with them.<p 124> It was his
way
for the most part to wander in thos
uch panic that he could hardly make his way
home, tottering on us feet; and ear
that he could not even turn to make his way
back, and with a fifty-foot sheer d
bearings if he were trying to make his
way
homeward through ii. I put a light
upstart. But I soon found an infallible way
to distract his attention if he bec
e Fleet as and when it had to fight its way
against Soviet sea and air oppositi
e chick while he went on in a leisurely way
with its underwater exploration. It
d on the rocks wets of Canna, by a long way
the nearest to me of their colonies
ozen occasions, and most of them a long way
off. No doubt they have often been
e had to be. Camusfearna is a very long way
from a vet.; the nearest, in fact,
No strange sea monster has ever come my way
since I have been here, though in t
was as it had been before. I was on my
way
back to the scullery when I stopped
I had the impression that he was in no
way
taxing his powers, and could greatl
ess. Once Morag asked me, in an offhand way
behind which I sensed a tentative p
nd chittered at it in a pettish sort of way,
and then, convinced of its now per
en the water is low, one may pick ones way
precariously along the rock at the
of mackerel fishers; there was only one way
of extraction, and a very painful o
the copious use of telegrams. The only
way
in which a telegram can be delivere
did he cower and tug his lead the other way;
a memory, perhaps, of his native m
life to which he was accustomed. On our way
back to the aircraft an Egyptian of
xpression. Otters usually get their own way
in the end; they are not dogs, and
ritation. In turn each of us in our own way
depended, as gods do, upon his wors
een fortunate to turn the tap the right way;
on subsequent occasions he would a
viated to Calum the Road( in the same way
I have known else- where a John the
at secretive expression that is in some way
akin to a young girls face during
the near skyline, and they were in some way
important to me, as were the big fo
all over and I was beaten I had in some way
come to terms with the Highlandso
uss, round a cygnet that seemed in some way
to be captive at the margin of the
hese subjective images one were in some way
cheating the objective fact. It is,
in Seal Morning, if one may put it that way,
and found them delicious. So the f
and begin, very slowly, to squirm their way
upwards, forming a vertical, closeamusfearna, where they would pick their way
delicately along the top of the cro
to the rituals of children who on their way
to and from school must place their
prompt the researcher and to hold information in a form suitable for computer input to the
dictionary database. The outcome of this process, then, was a database which recorded all
the relevant information about way to be incorporated in the final dictionary entry.
From concordances to database and dictionary entry
The database for way lists the main semantic fields covered by the word. It runs to over 40
typewritten pages, but can be summarised as follows:
1 method, means:
behaviour
2 manner, style,
3 what happens,
what is the case
4 degree,
extent, respect
5 location,
movement,
direction,
space
6 distance,
extent
7 time
8 miscellaneous
In addition to these semantic areas, a number of discourse uses are listed, such as:
by the way
By the way, that visit of Muller's is strictly secret. (used to add
something to what you are saying)
by way of
Well, that's really by way of introduction. (used to explain the
function of something you are about to say, for example whether it is intended as an introduction an
example, an apology etc.)
The computer input slips used to build up the description of each of these uses of way,
drew attention to a number of relevant features associated with each example. An expanded
entry for:
The cheapest way is to hire a van.
This description relates the use of way to a particular meaning, gives us a syntactic
environment showing that this use of way is associated with the infinitive with to, and adds
the comment that this particular use is anaphoric - that the example refers back to 'ways of
moving house'.
If we look at the syntactic environments associated with this use of way, (meaning
means or method) we find:
N + INF-TO
as in the example given,
N + PREP/OF + -ING
as in:
The different ways of cooking fish.
N + WHICH:XP
as in:
They kill animals in a way which would disturb the ordinary town boy.
PREP/IN + DET/THIS + N
as in:
In this way the energy in the pile is controlled.
If we look at the pragmatics of this meaning of way we find that it is used anaphorically as
in the example given above; cataphorically as in:
You can qualify for a pension in two ways.
In this way we begin to build up a picture of the word way - not only of its meaning, but
also of the syntactic patterns with which it is associated and its use in discourse.
Also annotated in the database are common phrases with way which are found so
frequently that they function almost like lexical items in their own right:
By the way this visit of Muller's is strictly secret. . . . by way of introduction.
Little in the way of strategic thinking was needed.
He's not on board. No two ways about it.
In a way these officers were prisoners themselves;
Eventually all these insights are incorporated in a dictionary entry. The entry for an
important word like way in the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary runs to
two full pages and, if we include fixed phrases, runs to 36 categories, some of them
subdivided. Typical sections from the entry are:
N COUNT, OR N
COUNT + toINF/A
= means, method
PHR: USED
AS ADV SEN
= incidentally
PHR: USED
AS AN A
= incidental
PREP
PREP
= via
33
I drove the wrong way ROUND a roundabout/British gilr secretaries who work their way ROUND the
States/it's got pretty embroidery all the way ROUND the bottom/they walked down the stairs and on the way
OUT I heard him say his first words / having addressed the troop ship on the way OUT to South Africa / it
does not matter WHICH way the vectors go / what sort of ship it is and WHICH way the thing is going / more
of transit flying, and of fighting their way THROUGH defences / hold a tray aloft as he weaves his way
THROUGH the crowd in his new role of barman / and then barge your way THROUGH and shout at the
back of the queue / quite a LONG way past them was the greenhouse with the vine / it certainly was a LONG
way FROM Cape Town / she keeps gaining on me all the way DOWN the long hill to the bottom of the lane /
after giving him minute directions of the way. They could see the whole ridge of Wirral Hill / he led the way
over the rocks / a time when we got lost - right out Dennington way. But we found our path eventually / with
no fear this time of losing the way/ended up as far out of their way as Pleiku, fifty miles to the south /
Phrases and misc:
I IN/OUT OF THE WAY (5 occs. in sample):
he had kept out of DeMille's way / we constantly get in the way of and interfere
with /
ii BY THE WAY (4 occs. in sample):
By the way, Castle, you might get me the name of his dentist / By the way, do you
keep cats here? /
Notes:
i WAY is a sub-technical word with all the expected features e.g. its dummy role in
some of the examples in Category 1. e.g. bird must have flown in a direct and purposeful way /
ii It was too difficult to sub-divide Category 1 further in the time available, although
there seems to be some basis for doing that.
iii WAYS: this word functions as the plural of WAY, and generally follows the same
usage except that almost all instances of use fall into Category 1 and Category 1.1
e.g. some babies become so set in their ways during this period/this will add
another to the many ways in which the rich can buy youth / I examine various ways
in which the ills of this society can be tackled / the old ways are the best ways /
iv WAYS is also characterised by the frequency of occurrence for particular left
hand collocates. The most common of these are MANY, OTHER, SEPARATE,
SOME and other expressions of quantity.
e.g. we improved the paper in a number of OTHER ways / there are MANY such
ways in which we~ehave as if we were two people / in MANY ways it was a bad
bargain / we look at various ways in which over the years Britain has / China is in
MANY ways a developing country too /
Further information on right-hand collocates.
WAY
WAYS
OF
637 occs.
209 occs.
TO
637
59
IN
272
80
THAT
255
24
AND
188
57
THE
180
44
I
175
17
OUT
125
THEY
120
HE
111
AS
108
IT
107
13
THROUGH
96
Each of the two main categories of meaning for the word way is the focus of an exercise in
CCEC Level 1:
78
22
0
1989
3.14
748
22756
10.12
021 337 0452
and:
How many different ways can you find
a recording of native speakers doing the task contrasts the American way of
saying dates with the British way. Inevitably the word way will feature a good
deal in the exchanges in the classroom between teacher and learners, and
among learners.
How many ways did you think of?
Yes that's another way.
We got three ways.
etc.
This use is highlighted again in a summary of the useful words and phrases from
this unit, Unit 6:
a) way
There are different ways of writing 'colour'- the American way (color) or the English
way (colour).
How many ways are there of saying this number?
Practice these ways of agreeing and disagreeing.
I like the way he sings.
Do it this way. Look.
Here again it is likely that in addition to the forms occurring in the coursebook and its
accompanying recordings, the word way will feature in classroom discussion.
Two other examples which occur later in Level 1 are picked up in a review section:
I may be able to stop off on my way to the USA.
He went all the way back.
These are sentences which have been contextualised earlier in Level 1 and are later
highlighted.
Unit 7 looks in detail at the uses of the word to and category 7 draws attention to the
pattern: N + INF- TO
101 Grammar words
to
Do you have the same word for all these uses of to in your
language?
1 where
I've come to Liverpool to stay with my parents.
2 who (with give, offer, present etc.)
I gave it to David.
3 listen or speak to someone/something
Listen to Bridget
Talk to your partner about . . .
4 purpose .
I went to see my sister.
I've come to Liverpool to stay with my parents.
5 after ask, want, plan etc.
We asked people to write about .
It's for people who want to take better photographs.
6 after it (see it 2, section 8 8 )
It was nice to see you
When is it possible to phone your partner?
7 after place, way, thing etc.
What's the best way to travel?
London is a good place to live.
8 from _ to_
It was reduced from 2s to 5.
Our lesson lasts from_ to _
9 used to, have (got) to, going to
We've got to get seven differences.
David used to share a flat.
I had to come downstairs as the phone was ringing.
Which categories do these sentences belong to?
a We only have to do seven.
b Say these words to your partner.
c Work m groups to do these puzzles.
d A man dressed as Napoleon went to see a
psychiatrist.
e We'regoing to seea film after class
f The cheapest thing to do is take a bus.
g Bridget works from Monday to Friday.
h I'd like to come back here.
i The psychiatrist asked her to sit down.
j Read these phrases to your partner.
k It's difficult to see the tree.
I He wants to go to Britain to learn more English.
Compare the examples in each category with examples
in the Grammar Book.
This use is given again in a grammar reference section at the back of the Level 1
coursebook.
Level 2 reviews the uses of way which are highlighted in Level 1 and goes on to show
the pattern:
N + PREP/OF + -ING
in Unit 6 which is entitled What's the best way of travelling to Paris? A Wordpower
exercise in the same unit offers another summary of the meanings of way:
74 Wordpower
way
Look up way in the Lexicon.
Which meanings does way have in
these examples?
a) This word can be used in many
different ways
b) I like the way he sings that son.
Its really good
c)
d)
e)
f)
g)
h)
i)
(NB the above exercise was accompanied by cartoon pictures to illustrate some of the
examples.)
Way is also one of the words selected for inclusion in a lexicon at the back of the Level 2
coursebook:
way 6
1 Way refers to the manner In which a person or thing behaves or acts, or the certain style
someone or something has, or feeling or attitude of a person. EG Just look at the way he eats! It's
horrible!
2 Way refers to the means or method by which something is done, or how it happens.
EG The best way of getting to Paris is by train and boat. (64)
3 Used with reference to a direction, distance, route, road, path or journey somewhere.
EG Which way do I go?' 'Turn right at the shops, and go all the way down that road.'
By the time learners reach Level 3 they have had ample opportunity to become familiar
with the main meanings and patterns associated with the word way. In Level 3 the word
occurs 87 times. There is also a grammar section in
This is another way of talking about ideas and actions. You could rewrite sentence 4 like
this:
. . . he gave up the idea that he would commit suicide.
and so on. And these phrases provide a very typical environment for the phrases 'of -ing . . .
', 'by _ing . . . ', and of the use of the infinitive with to followed by part of the verb be as in:
The idea is to score as many points as you can.
One possibility would be to start from the beginning again.
The commonest patterns in English occur again and again with the commonest words in
English. If we are to provide learners with language experience which offers exposure to
the most useful patterns of the language, we might well begin by researching the most
useful words in the language.
39
We probably carry in our minds chunks of language incorporating the word thing in these
grammatical frames:
The (adjective) thing is that
The (adjective) thing is to
Its one thing to X, and quite another to Y.
We also carry around chunks with thing like one thing after another and the shape of things
to come. We know that the word thing can be used in ways which carry attitudinal overtones.
3 How do you drive this thing?
The first of these signals quite clearly that there is something about the vehicle which I find
annoying. Similarly the sentence:
5 So thats George. Ive heard about him.
To a native speaker, the second of these implies that what I know about George is not to his
credit.
We also know that the word thing can be used in fixed phrases in specific contexts:
7 Eating with your fingers is not quite the done thing.
The important thing here is that thing cannot be replaced by another word or phrase, even one
which seems to make perfectly good sense as:
8 *Eating with your fingers is not quite the done way.
l Similarly, the phrase 'All things being equal' comes to the tongue much more readily than 'All
opportunities being equal'. So there are a lot of things to know about thing. This brief summary
represents just a few of them. All of this must be involved in learning the language.
Collocational patterns in language
Hanks (1987) elaborates the point that knowledge of a language includes a vast amount of
collocational knowledge - a knowledge of which words combine with which other words or
categories of word:
The words of English simply do not, typically, combine and recombine freely and randomly.
Not only can typical grammatical structures and form classes be observed, but also typical
collocates. The distinction between the possible and the typical is of the greatest importance. It
is possible given a reasonably lively imagination, to use a particular word in any number of
different ways. But when we ask how the word is typically used, rather than how it might
possibly be used, we can generally discover a relatively small number of distinct patterns.
(Hanks 1987)
In this way Hanks argues for the notion of 'selection preference' underlying our language
behaviour. He exemplifies this by looking at the words wide and broad, suggesting that it is
unhelpful to look for a subtle semantic distinction between the two.
The important thing to say about BROAD is that it means wide and it co-occurs with words of
a certain type. (Hanks 1987)
Part of the native speaker's language knowledge is an awareness of these probable
co-occurrences - the knowledge, for example, that broad is used not only with physical entities
such as roads and rivers, but also with more abstract notions:
This takeover bid has broader implications.
in which wide is not an acceptable substitute. This is not because broad is preferred to wide
with an abstract noun.
The library had a wide variety of books.
?The library had a broad variety of books.
It is simply because some nouns collocate with wide and some with broad - that is, some have
a selection preference for wide and some for broad.
Collocations of this kind are features of naturalness in language, and in looking at syllabus
content we need to take deliberate account of such features. Unfortunately in doing so we run
very seriously into the problem of proliferation: the fact that language knowledge is so vast and
detailed. One way of limiting this proliferation is by taking note of Hanks' distinction between
the typical and the possible. We should take care that the language to which the
Syllabus Content 41
learner is exposed is typical of the language as a whole. This can only be done by research. We
need to look seriously at the language and make principled decisions about what patterns and
uses are to be regarded as typical and to be highlighted for the learner.
The uses of common words like thing and way are so frequent that the learner is unlikely to
get very far without the need to encode these meanings. Unfortunately there are no rules by
which learners can create or retrieve these forms for themselves. It is important, therefore, that
they are included in the language to which learners are exposed and that their attention is drawn
to them.
Of course, this wealth of knowledge which is part of 'knowing a language' is largely
unconscious. It is revealed in use, and although it is called up very readily in response to some
need to communicate, it is only with great difficulty that we can summon up such knowledge
by an effort of will. Ask someone who is linguistically unsophisticated what they know about
the word point, for example, and then look the word up in a good dictionary. The Collins
COBUILD English Language Dictionary devotes almost two whole pages to the word point. It
identifies 30 categories of meaning for the headword point together with such fixed phrases as
'I take your point', 'beside the point', 'the finer points' and 'in point of fact'. It then goes on to
treat derived forms like pointer, pointed and pointless together with phrases like point out,
point up, point of view and point of reference. All of this is information that the competent
user of the language acts on on appropriate occasions, but it is unlikely that even the most
sophisticated native speaker would be able to recall more than a fraction of it at will.
Indeed even sophisticated language users like lexicographers have to undertake a long and
complicated research programme to make explicit what all of us already know about point - in
the sense that all the meanings and phrases are likely to be instantly understood by an adult
native speaker and most of them will be readily produced. It is not an easy task to make
comprehensive explicit statements about all the other words we use so easily and automatically.
But the appropriate forms are readily called to mind when there is an occasion for use. It is the
occasion for use that activates our language knowledge.
Structural syllabuses and synthetic approaches
Language learners face three tasks. They must acquire an enormous body of knowledge, they
must store it in such a way that they can act on it automatically, and they must use the language
with which they are familiar as a basis for exploring the further possibilities which exist in the
language. In order to help learners achieve this, the syllabus designer must first specify syllabus
content as economically as possible. Almost any language course specifies what the designers
believe that learners at a certain stage of language development need to learn and know, even
though they cannot guarantee when and if learners will acquire what is presented to them. Good
coursebooks which have been carefully worked out provide an inventory of words, patterns and
meanings that learners are to acquire as a result of their course. Normally this is a list of words,
structures and language functions in both their written and spoken form with both orthography
and phonology as part of the learning task. But the major problem is in deciding what items to
include. This is particularly important in designing material for beginners or near beginners.
Language teaching in its broadest sense - syllabus specification, syllabus design,
methodology, classroom interaction - always involves choices between control and exposure,
form and outcome, fluency and accuracy. Wilkins (1976), reviewing the work of the Council of
Europe on Notional Syllabuses, highlights a choice between what he calls synthetic and
analytic-approaches to language teaching. A synthetic teaching strategy:
is one in which the different parts of the language are taught separately and step by step so that
acquisition is a process of gradual accumulation of the parts until the whole structure of the language
has been built up. (Wilkins 1976)
This strategy breaks language down into small units and arranges these in a particular order.
The learner's task is to re-synthesise the language that has been broken down into a large number of
pieces with the aim of making his learning easier. It is only in the final stages of language learning that
the global language is re-established in all its diversity. (ibid.)
Wilkins quotes Corder (1973) who suggests that such approaches, which specify the syllabus in
terms of language patterns, have 'low surrender value'. This is a term taken from the world of
insurance. A life insurance policy which has low surrender value is one which you must pay
into for a very long time before it acquires a reasonable value. If you cash it in early, either by
choice or by necessity, you do not get much of a return on the money you have invested Corder
argued that grammatically based language courses have the same problem. If you give up such
a course after say one hundred hours, you will have learned very little that is likely to be of real
use to you. Your grammar will be very limited and may be missing major categories like the
passive, and many of the models. If you have been well taught you may have good control over
the limited grammar you have learned, but it will almost certainly be very limited and, as we
have already seen, there is no guarantee that this control will be reflected in your use of the
language.
A second problem with synthetic approaches is that they assume grammatical items can be
ordered in a way which is logical, not only from the course writer's point of view, but also from
the learner's. It may well be that there are criteria for ordering which are reasonable in the
course writer's terms, but that is not the same as saying that the ordering is logical. It will
depend very much on what model of grammar the course writer is working from. But even
writers working from the same model may quite reasonably reach different conclusions about
ordering. What about ways of referring to the future, for example? Should going to come
before or after the present continuous as future? What about the modal will? Different course
writers and teachers make different decisions on this, and there is no objective way of saying
that one way is right and another wrong.
There is therefore no compelling logic to the ordering of items in a syllabus.
Syllabus Content 43
Of course learners must and will make generalisations about the target system. But in the
absence of any overriding logic, how can they make generalisations about a whole system on
the basis of evidence from an artificially constrained system which is built up piece by piece? If
we can point to no logic in the ordering of the syllabus, then we must either deny the learners'
capacity to generate from the language they have been exposed to or we must agree with
Prabhu (1987) that it is 'unlikely that any planned progression in a grammatical syllabus could
accurately reflect or regulate the development of the internal system being aimed at'.
Another problem with synthetic approaches is that syllabus specification and ordering
place far too much emphasis on production of language and relatively little on comprehension.
In an extreme form this means that the only language to which learners will be exposed is
language they themselves will be expected to produce. There will be a successive series of
models of the language as more and more parts are added, until finally learners are able to
make generalisations from what Wilkins calls 'the global language'.
Yet another problem with synthetic approaches comes, paradoxically, from the fact that
they are so well established. It is not surprising that one manifestation of a particular approach
draws heavily on others. This means that the virtues of such approaches are solidly reinforced.
Imaginative exercises designed for one coursebook are developed and improved by others. As
an approach becomes established, teacher training begins to work on and develop
methodological procedures for teaching particular items. A metalanguage is developed which
enables practitioners to exchange and develop ideas. In this way an established approach
becomes even more strongly established.
Unfortunately, this strength can also be a source of weakness. As manifestations of an
approach draw on one another without questioning basic assumptions, so the weaknesses of one
manifestation reappear in another, until they become an essential part of the approach, no
longer subject to questioning. Almost all synthetic approaches to ELT seem to cover with some
thoroughness those grammatical systems which are relatively closed. On the other hand, more
open-ended and therefore more problematic systems are largely ignored. Clause structure and
the verb group figure massively, but apart from the relative clause comparatively little account
is taken of, for example, the way in which the complex noun phrase is built up. Sentences like:
Detectives hunting for the man believed to be responsible for the disappearance
of sixteen year old schoolgirl Angela James have been forced to abandon their
search.
simply do not feature in most pedagogic grammars, even though research suggests that roughly
one noun phrase in eight has this kind of multiple modification. A proportion of one in eight
certainly justifies thorough pedagogic treatment. Other complex phrases such as the adverbial:
On my way home from a recent holiday in France, I stayed overnight in a small
hotel just south of Calais.
Part of this weakness is the almost universal tendency to borrow systems and categories from
other courses, irrespective of whether these systems and categories have any pedagogic
usefulness, whether they are likely to cause serious learning difficulties, and in some cases
irrespective of whether they have any grammatical validity. I have shown that some items such
as the passive and the second conditional have been elevated to an undeserved level of
importance, and that artificial and uneconomical categories such as reported speech have been
created in the name of pedagogy. It is a strange teaching strategy indeed which allocates a large
proportion of time to relatively straightforward grammatical systems and very little time to the
most problematic systems. It is stranger still if, in the interests of grading, we deny learners
exposure to the language which might enable them to draw conclusions for themselves about
such problematic systems.
Analytic strategies and syllabus content
Wilkins contrasts synthetic approaches to language teaching with what he calls 'analytic
strategies'. These analytic strategies form the basis of the methodology which realises the
notional-functional syllabus. This methodology does not present carefully selected samples of
language in an attempt to build up a gradual picture of the grammar of the language. Instead, it
identifies phrases which have high utility and presents these as whole phrases. Analytic
strategies, then, do not control the language presented to the learner by means of careful
grading:
Components of the language are not seen as building blocks which have to be progressively
accumulated. Much greater variety of linguistic structure is permitted from the start and the learner's
task is to approximate his own linguistic behaviour more and more closely to the global language.
Significant linguistic forms can be isolated from the structurally heterogeneous context in which they
occur, so that learning can be focused on important aspects of the language structure. It is this process
which is referred to as analytic. (Wilkins 1976)
Wilkins and his Council of Europe colleagues recommended that instead of looking at
words, patterns and meanings we should begin by identifying meanings. In answer to the
question 'What forms of the language does the learner need to be familiar with?' they no longer
started by attempting to identify basic patterns of English. Instead they interposed a second
rather different question 'What does the learner need to mean in English?' The idea was that we
should first identify the basic meanings or 'notions' which learners would need to realise. We
should also identify what it was that learners wanted to do with the language, what 'functions'
they would need to carry out. Having established this inventory of notions and functions we
could then ask the question 'How are these meanings realised in English?' The outcome of this
would be not a structural, but a notional syllabus.
In drawing up a Notional Syllabus instead of asking how speakers of the language express themselves or
when and where they use the language we ask what it is they communicate through the language. We
are then able to organise language teach-
Syllabus Content 45
ing in terms of the content rather than the form of the language . . . A general language course will
concern itself with those concepts and functions that are likely to be of the widest value. (Wilkins 1976)
In theory this would be a highly efficient way of designing a syllabus and of ensuring that
learners acquired the language that would be of most need to them. It would avoid the charge of
low surrender value. A great many applied linguists and course designers worked hard to
produce complex inventories of semantico-grammatical notions, spatio-temporal notions,
socio-cultural notions and so on and so on. This was certainly a useful exercise. It brought
home very starkly the fact that learning a language means learning to encode meanings and to
do things with the language rather than simply learning to produce the forms of the language.
The Council of Europe Threshold and Waystage syllabuses, which are based to a large extent
on a specification of notions and functions have informed syllabus design ever since. But in the
final event, the problem of specifying notions and functions created as many problems as it
solved.
We simply had no way of specifying with any objectivity the semantic content of a
syllabus, let alone of going on to specify how that content might best be realised. But the pipe
dream of the notional syllabus stayed with us. If only we could specify the basic meanings of
English, the meanings which even the most elementary users of the language would need to
encode, how efficient it would be. But Wilkins himself acknowledged the enormous
complexity of this task:
I do not wish to suggest that it is in principle impossible to plan the conceptual content of language
syllabuses in this way. However, it does seem to me clear that it would in practice prove to be an
extremely complex task; the more so if we are simultaneously trying to introduce language functions
which have been contextualised by suitable notions. (Wilkins 1976)
The arguments were compelling and convincing. The achievement, however, was as good as
impossible.
It also transpired that exemplars of the notional-functional syllabus when it is used to
teach English for general purposes are subject to one of the criticisms laid against synthetic
approaches. They are concerned with specifying and ordering what it is that the learner will be
expected to produce, rather than with helping the learner to build up a picture of the language.
Wilkins himself is well aware of the problems of going beyond this producer-based
specification:
If, however, we focus first on the receiver and then on the process of interaction we shall see that our
model implies more radical changes in the teaching of languages than would be necessary simply to
'semanticise' existing forms of exercise or drill. The needs of the receiver will lead us to consideration of
the place of authentic language materials. (Wilkins, 1976)
This echoes to some extent the distinction we have been making, following Widdowson,
between use and usage. Artificially restricting the language to which learners are exposed in the
interests of simplified production distorts the language in specific ways, and it is unlikely that
when learners finally come face to face with the language in use they will meet the same
distortions. By attempting to make things simple for the learner as producer, we are making
things
difficult for the learner as receiver, unless of course we are to accept low surrender value and
postpone contact with language use for a considerable time.
But how could we possibly predict the needs of the receiver? How can we select, out of
the vast range of linguistic knowledge, those items which are likely to benefit the learner as
receiver in communicative situations over which there are no controls? And even if we could,
how could we make this language accessible to the learner? It is one thing to prescribe
artificially the language the learner will be exposed to and exemplify this simplified language.
It is quite another thing to accept that learners are likely to be exposed to a bewildering range of
language, and to enable them to draw useful conclusions and generalisations from exposure to
authentic language materials.
Specifying the lexical syllabus
As so often happens, however, the solutions to the enormously complex problem of syllabus
specification proved to be disarmingly simple. The commonest and most important, most basic
meanings in English are those meanings expressed by the most frequent words in English. If we
could identify the commonest words in English and identify their meanings, we would have the
solution to the whole problem. This very simple, yet highly significant insight was put forward
by John Sinclair, editor-in-chief of the COBUILD project. He proposed a return to the idea first
suggested by people like H E Palmer and Michael West in the 1930s and 1950s - of a syllabus
based not on structures or on notions, but on words. This proposal is based on the observation
that a relatively small number of English words accounts for a very high proportion of English
text. Nation (1983) reports that Bongers (1947) produced a list of 3,000, words which would,
he claimed, account for 97% of all written English text. Caroll et al. (1971) estimate that 1,000
words account for 74% of all text; 2,000 for 81% and 3,000 for 85%. The figures based on a
computer analysis of the COBUILD corpus are slightly different, but point to the same basic
conclusions:
The most frequent 700 words of English constitute 70% of English text.
The most frequent 1,500 words constitute 76% of text.
The most frequent 2,s00 words constitute 80% of text.
This tells us two things. First, it shows the enormous power of the common words of English. It
means that, even though we have a vocabulary of tens of thousands of words, on average seven
out of every ten words we hear, read, speak or write come from the 700 most frequent words of
English. In some texts, of course, the incidence is much lower. But in others it is very much
higher. In a highly specialised text on nuclear physics, for example, there will be a high
incidence of unusual words. But in many texts, even if they are highly specialised, the
incidence of words outside the 2,500 frequency band is surprisingly low.
For example, in this section 'Specifying the lexical syllabus', there are so far only 11 words
not in the top 2,500: corpus, dictionary, disarmingly, incidence, insight, lexical, specification,
specialised, specify, syllabus, vocabulary. Of these words, three (specify, specification,
specialised) have the same base form
Syllabus Content 47
as words that are in the top 2,500, and would therefore be easily guessable. This leaves eight
words, most of which are to do with the specialist nature of the topic concerned. As such, these
are used repeatedly in the text, and so will be quickly assimilated by the specialist reader. In
general, therefore, the lexis in these paragraphs will be quite accessible to a learner who has
been systematically exposed to the commonest words in English, and who has an interest and
grounding in the specialist subject.
Secondly, the figures illustrate dramatically the importance of careful selection in
identifying the lexical content of the syllabus. The 700 most frequent words cover 70% of text,
but coverage begins to drop rapidly thereafter. The next 800 words cover a further 6% of text
and the next 1,000 words cover 4%. The way in which utility begins to fall off at an
accelerating rate shows the paramount importance of identifying the right words to give us the
right sort of coverage. It is true that general frequency is not the sole criterion. As we move
down the frequency band we need to take more and more account of the needs of specific
learners. Particular vocations, cultures, and sections of society will have specific needs which
are obscured in a general count. If we are talking about the 2,500 most frequent words in
English, however, no learner is likely to get very far without needing to express and understand
notions and functions carried by words at this level of frequency.
As I have already pointed out, frequency counts are not new. Michael West's General
Service List (1953) is still widely used by course writers today, not as a basis of a syllabus but
as a check to see they have a reasonable coverage of the most frequent words of the language.
Tickoo (1988) pays tribute to the pioneering work of West and adds:
Although 35 years old and in many ways outdated, GSL continues to serve ELT practitioners in their
search for the commonest uses of many common words. It is only in the last few years that
computer-based studies of word values, concordances, and collocations (Sinclair, 1985) have begun to
offer deeper insights into the behaviour of ordinary words. (Tickoo 1988)
We have already seen some evidence of the power and rigour of such computer-based studies,
and how they can offer a more detailed study of larger and larger samples of language. The
speed at which large corpora can be handled means that a description of today's language can
be not merely produced but regularly updated.
The 700 most frequent words in current English were identified in the COBUILD study.
With a few exceptions and additions (see page 77) these words make up the content of the
remedial beginners course, the Collins COBUILD English Course, Level 1, as listed in the back
of the Student's Book.
From words to meanings
This takes us as far as identifying the words, but we are looking for meanings. We began with
the assertion that 'the commonest and most important, most basic meanings in English are those
meanings expressed by the most frequent
words in English'. The COBUILD project worked, as we have seen in Chapter 2, from a corpus
to concordances, from concordances to a database and from a database to the final dictionary
entries. These entries summarised an array of information from the database which included
syntactic and pragmatic information as well semantic.
Often the information on a given word derived from such a study is very much in line with
the picture of that same word given in most EFL coursebooks. In the 7.3 million word Main
Corpus the 22,000 occurrences of the word by, for example, reveal four major categories of
meaning, leading to this picture of the word in the Collins COBUILD English Course, Level 1:
by (111)
1 who / what did it
Wally is awakened by the phone ringing. (91)
Handicrafts made by people in the Third World. (104)
Is that a magazine published by Macmillan? (146)
2 how
You solve it by elimination. (158)
English by Radio. (146)
London is only 55 minutes away by train. (179)
Find out by talking to people.
3 when
Everyone helps to clear away after dinner. By then it's about7.15 or7.30p.m. (113)
Even though the Forth River is only 66 miles long, by the time it reaches Edinburgh it is
over 4 miles wide. (179)
4 where
Behind the chair? Of the person sitting by the desk? (72)
Just by the bus stop. (122)
On the wall by the entrance was a notice. (173)
The commonest of these meanings is the first, which accounts for just over 50% of occurrences
of by. It occurs most commonly with a passive verb, but there are around 1,000 occurrences
with a noun of some sort:
1 . . . an investment of 12 million pounds by Courtaulds . . .
2 . . . attacks on EEC ministers by a commission member . . .
Possibly underrated in many courses is the second use, particularly the pattern by + . . . ing.
This accounts for almost 2,500 occurrences in the corpus with other expressions of manner
making up a further 2,200 occurrences. The third use, on the other hand, may well receive more
attention than it merits, although it is certainly important, with some 300 occurrences in the
corpus. The fourth category is roughly twice as common as this, with around 600 occurrences.
In spite of these weightings, however, the picture of by shown by the
Syllabus Content 49
COBUILD research accords pretty well with that traditionally given in EFL courses. It is not
always the case, however, that the research bears out our intuitions so neatly.
Some surprises
As one looks more closely at the evidence, surprises begin to emerge. A common EFL view of
the words some and any, which is enshrined in many pedagogic grammars, suggests that where
some is used in affirmative sentences its counterpart any is used in negative and interrogative
sentences. But look at the concordances for the word any taken from the texts which make up
the first 13 units of Level 2 of CCEC. (see p.53)
Look particularly to see how many of the occurrences are in negative sentences, how many
in interrogative and how many in affirmative sentences. These concordances show a very
different picture from that shown above, which is the picture presented to many language
learners. Of the 38 concordance lines shown here, 23 are in affirmative sentences, 11 in
negative and only 4 in interrogatives. At first sight one might think that the data is restricted
and therefore the picture is a false one. But the description of any derived from the corpus
shows this picture: (see p.53)
Far from being an aberration, the use of any in an affirmative sentence is in fact much
commoner than its use in interrogatives. In this particular instance the information given to
learners by some coursebooks and grammars is simply wrong.
Fortunately there were comparatively few findings which stood in outright contradiction to
the traditional picture. There were, however, a large number of findings which suggest that the
traditional picture is somewhat skewed. A study of the word would presents the picture: (see
p.55)
There are two things of particular interest to the EFL teacher here. First there is the
frequency of Category 2: 'used to'- indicates past habits. At 21 % of 14,687 this represents some
3,100 occurrences. The conventional EFL wisdom is that this use of would is rather informal,
even old-fashioned. The commonest way of expressing this notion is used to. A look at used to
shows 1,100 occurrences with this meaning. In spite of the conventional wisdom would (or 'd,
as in I'd) meaning 'used to' is almost three times as common as used to meaning 'used to'. This
is not to say that we should teach would to the exclusion of used to. They are both common
forms and should both feature in an intermediate course. Used to also has a less restricted use
than would since it can be used with stative verbs such as know, understand, notice and
believe- those not commonly found in the progressive tenses:
1 'I used to know,' Mary said.
2 I don't notice things as much as I used to.
whereas there are no occurrences of would with these verbs. But the fact remains that would
with this meaning is extremely common and must be
included. It is surprising how many teachers reject this recommendation, preferring to hold to
their intuitions. A common reaction is to query the validity of the corpus. Is it predominantly
made up of written texts? Is it out of date? But no amount of doubt and suspicion can gainsay
figures as stark as these. It is not just that this use of would is more common than used to, it is
three times as common. A syllabus which ignores this fact is deficient. It ignores the fact that
outside the classroom setting the learner is at least three times as likely to come across the form
would or 'd as the form used to.
The second interesting thing about the word would has already been highlighted in our
discussion of the second conditional in Chapter 2. That is the predominance of Category 1.1,
the use of would 'to talk of events which are of a hypothetical nature':
3 I suspect the Germans would still be a little bit cautious.
4 I think The Tempest would make a wonderful film.
This makes up almost half of the 14,687 occurrences. As a sub-category of this we have would
used in conditional sentences:
5 It would surprise me very much if sterling strengthened.
6 You would be surprised if I told you what my credit is.
As we have seen the usual strategy in EFL courses is to present would as a part of the second
conditional. We have argued, however, that it would be more effectively taught lexically.
Perhaps one of the most pervasive findings of the COBUILD study when used as the basis
for a syllabus, however, is the recognition that we use language in a much more abstract way
than most elementary courses would lead us to believe. We have already looked at the word
thing and noted that it refers much more commonly to an abstract entity, such as a proposition
or argument, than to a physical object. The same is true of many other words. The pronouns
this and that behave in the same way:
7 Is that why you had a few days off?
8 Is that clear, Sergeant?
9 This is why I'm opposed to the plan.
10 The law says he can't be evicted. Is this right?
Similarly the word see is much more common with the meaning 'understand':
11 I see what you mean.
12 I don't really see how I can.
Verbs of motion are used to describe progress through time and through discourse as well as
through space:
15 We'll come back to that point shortly.
16 Most children stay at home until they reach school age.
17 We finally arrived at a situation where we were making a small profit.
Syllabus Content 51
All of this suggests that there may be a considerable gulf between the language used in
elementary and intermediate courses and the language used in the world outside. The language
of the classroom largely handles a world of concrete objects and observable events. The
language needed outside the classroom is needed much more to create an abstract world of
propositions, arguments, hypotheses and discourses. It may be that in learning our first
language we move from concrete to abstract, but mature learners of a foreign language already
have these abstract concepts as part of their knowledge of their first language. As mature
language users they will want to understand and create similar concepts in the target language.
We should provide them with experience of the kind of language they need in order to do this.
A fresh look at the meanings of common words, therefore, brings to light a number of
failings in the traditional EFL view of language. Occasionally it is simply mistaken, as when it
asserts that any is rarely used in affirmative sentences. Sometimes it is wrongly weighted, as
when it includes used to for past habit but ignores the much commoner would. Sometimes it is
uneconomical, looking at specific uses of words rather than making broad generalisations about
them. Thus it restricts would to the context of a conditional clause without recognising
explicitly that the hypothetical meaning of would has a much wider currency than this.
Finally I have suggested that unless we look with an open mind at the commonest uses of
the common words of English and try to reproduce those uses in the classroom, then we are in
danger of using language in the classroom in a very restricted way to create a material world of
objects and events, ignoring the commonest and most typical uses of language which create a
world of abstract ideas. There is certainly enough evidence in the research to show that the use
of language in the classroom is far from typical of language use in the world outside.
Patterns in language
Clearly there are recurrent patterns in language. Some of these patterns are so common and so
salient that we actually have names for them:
Noun phrase + am/are/is + . . . ing = the present continuous tense.
Noun phrase + be + past participle (+ by + noun phrase) = the passive.
Course writers and teachers also identify more informally such patterns as the going to future',
'the second conditional' and 'reported statements'. These are certainly items which need to be
covered in an English course up to the elementary level. The matter at issue is how they are best
covered. There are, however, a number of important patterns which are in danger of being
overlooked altogether unless once again we go back to the research and make sure that we have
a reasonable coverage of the language.
I showed in Chapter 3 that the word way occurs with a variety of patterns:
1 The most effective way of countering the Soviet air threat . . .
2 I believe this is the only way that an ordinary person can inspire others.
3 Life isnt the way it ought to be.
I suggested at the beginning of this chapter that the same applies to the word thing. There is a
large class of nouns like way, thing, idea, wish, notion, hope, intention, all of them very
common, which pattern with of, that or to. It is worth emphasising that these words all play an
important part in structuring discourse, and that they are not generally highlighted in
intermediate coursebooks. If we look at language we will discover these patterns and recognise
their importance. If we rely on intuition - even, or perhaps especially, intuition informed by
years of ELT practice - we may overlook them.
We shall also look later (Chapter 5) at the level of detail required if we are to offer learners
reasonable exposure to the common patterns of the language. The CCEC elementary syllabus
covers, with a few exceptions, the 700 most frequent words in English. For each of these words
we worked with data sheets similar to those for way shown in Chapter 3, and those for would
and any shown above detailing meanings and recurrent patterns. This elementary syllabus,
therefore, consists of many hundreds of pages. If we are to attempt to list realistically the
content of a syllabus it seems to me to be necessary to go into at least this level of detail. It is
not enough to offer a list of structural frames without indicating which words are likely to fill
them and also how the words which fill the frames are likely to behave. If one starts by listing
words and their behaviour, one generates automatically the structural environments and the
words which are likely to occur within them.
Syllabus Content 53
SAMPLE CONCORDANCES FOR THE WORD F0RM ANY
mmm no I " e never broken
Certainly not me! I dont really get
that allows me to cope with almost
are the most paid. Do you think
secretarys desk to see if there were
But when it happened, I never had
their
and healthy. I didnt really have
close friends or relatives ever won
one of these passe, you can travel
the attached form and take it to
your Travelcard can be renewed at
arent there? CF: Mm, Do you know
the microwaves stop being produced.
serviced regularly, and if you have
happened to you: Can you think of
TO YOU? 1.1 Have you ever done
every done any of these things? Has
you?
condition of your policy. (a) Report
made at the scene of the accident by
machines and selling tickets to mugs.
I decided not to question him
What makes you think that Im
is liars, he said. You can buy
think of anything else? Is there
M; Mm, red and yellow. JM: Mm,
well, if you look at, um, say, amy,
there right now. I dont want
SB: Okay. You havent given me
It one bit. Dont talk to im
penalty goes with which offence.
tyres down. I wouldnt have done
nished with you. You wont be driving
he said. You dont. And you aint.
door closed and locked and secure
out proper authority. If you are in
Make certain you do not part with
house
Pay for. 8 Report to the Police
Contact
any
any
any
any
any
any
any
any
any
any
any
any
any
Any
any
any
any
any
any
any
Any
any
any
any
any
any
any
any
any
any
Any
any
any
Any
any
any
any
any
I doN'T know any Russian / I caN'T even remember any English /There'd be a big to-do that couldN'T
do anybody any GOOD/They had NOT dared to strike any MORE matches / we haveN'T any paper / in
Hong Kong's slum there is NEVER any privacy / I doN'T think there was any rain all summer long /
There was NEVER any TIME for . . . / In this job I didN'T have to do any writing / this state of affairs
could NOT go on any LONGER/the Conservative Government's lack of any overall transport policy/to
play as often as you can and to get rid of any inhibitions/'Did you, may I ask, get any results?'/ Have we
any stain remover? /
Phrases and misc:
i ANY MORE e.g.: There wasn't much to do any more / I wasn't going to the house
any more /
ii AT ANY RATE e.g.: she was undeniably attractive, at any rate to judge from the
newspaper photographs /
iii IN ANY WAY e.g.: Was he linked in any way to men in other countries? /
iv IN ANY CASE e.g.: it was NOT written for a specific woman and in any case a
woman's circumstances constantly change /
Notes:
i In Category 1 most of the occs. are adj / det. Pronouns and adverbs are much less
frequent, occurring in particular collocational patterns (see examples above).
ii In Category 2 'any' occurs with negatives, and verbs or clauses with negative
overtones e.g. Mr Habib's statement omitted any mention of the parties / it was
very hard to find anyone with any previous experience /.
iii Where 'any' occurs with an actual negative in a statement it seems to have the
effect of strengthening the negation e.g.: 'A picnic wouldN'T be any fun,' Sarah
said, 'without you.'/
iv Teaching wisdom has it that 'any' in questions implies that the expected answer
will be 'no'. Without knowing the answers to the questions asked in the example
above I can't shed any light on this.
v 38% of sample occs. are preceded by not' or 'never'.
vi Only 5% of sample occs. Are recognisable as questions.
vii In 2% of sammple occs., ANY is followed by a comparative adj/adv., e.g.: /Right, is that any clearer
now? /Why should you want to go any faster? /, where ANY means at all/ to some extent.
Further information on right-hand collocates:
OF
391 occs.
OTHER
361
MORE
340
CASE
129
RATE
111
TIME
111
KIND
104
ONE
98
WAY
89
Syllabus Content 55
Thatcher rather ringingly SAID that all this would BE sorted out very quickly / that's what he SAID, he
would eat at his hotel/he was going to perform a story that she SAID I would NEVER have heard of
before / Ford SAID the company would NOT comment on the claim before the October meeting / But I
think he secretly HOPED I would one day change my mind/Bar had promised them that he would send
her home every summer/I thought I would wait until something went wrong with his machine / there
was no hurry, he told himself. He would return here later / I TOLD him I'd BE right back / Lynn had
TOLD Derek she wouldn't BE long /
Category 4: USED TO MAKE REQUESTS, QUESTIONS, OFFERS, SUGGESTIONS, ETC. POLITE
[2% of sample occs.]
'The devil take me if I can get my car to start. Would YOU be so good as to give me a push . . .'/Would
YOU kindly send me your autograph?/Would YOU switch the light on, please? /Would YOU please
remove your glasses? /'Would YOU LIKE some coffee?' 'No, thank you'/'Would YOU do me a favour?'
'Of course!'/'Would YOU LIKE me to sing you a song?' I asked / Would YOU LIKE to see the house.
Rudolph? / Wouldn't YOU LIKE to come with me . . . / Would YOU LIKE to come and read Proust
with me? /'Would YOU LIKE to go to Ernie's for dinnef? /'You'd better tell me all about it.' 'Would
YOU mind very much if I did?'/'After what you've been through, Mr Gerran, I'd advise you to give it a
miss'/
Phrases and misc:
i WOULD YOU SAY (THAT) e.g.:/Would YOU say that this method can be
used widely /
Notes:
i The percentage counts given in the entry are based only on non-sentence-initial
occs of WOULD. Examples are taken, however, from 'would', 'Would', and
'I'd'.
ii There are two problems with the frequency figures given above. First, Category 1
is very large and may contain occs. which should have gone in 1.1. The IF may
well have been in an earlier or later part of a line which was not shown. Some of
the occs. also implied IF, but does that make them conditionals?
iii Second, Category 4 accounts for only 2% of non-sentence initial occs. In sentence initial occs. it
accounts for about 65%.
iv Sentence initial occs. only account for about 3% of total occs.
v WOULD is frequently preceded by a pronoun.
vi In contracted form - I'd, It'd, wouldn't, etc. - there were a higher proportion of
more obviously conditional sentences.
vii WOULD can also be used instead of 'do' in some instances where it has the effect
of making something sound more tentative or polite, or acts as an intensifier
e.g.:/I wouldn't agree with you that it takes an . . ./How my English friends
would rag me! /
Further information on left-hand
collocates:
I
1,399 occs.
IT
1,312
HE
1,032
SHE 562
57
was rejected by the teacher because it did not display the form the teacher wanted, a
verb with a gerund as object. Any of the following would have been acceptable:
love
like
enjoy.
hate
can't stand
being a father
language is being used rather than simply manipulated. There is even talk of
'communicative drills'. But such a concept is contradictory, since the essence of
communication is choice and a basic requirement of drilling is the restriction of
choice. The advocates of 'communicative drills' argue that provided the learner is
required to produce a true statement, then whatever they say is meaningful. They
would argue, for example, that in the sequence quoted in Chapter 1, Socoop's
utterance of the form:
I like being a father.
I do not take it that the lexicographer is advising me not to waste my time by copying
down definitions. I know that the sentence is being used simply to illustrate the
meaning of should. In the same way, were Socoop to say:
I like being a father.
he would be uttering a 'true' sentence. But he would not be using it to inform the
teacher about his attitude to parenthood. He would be doing it to demonstrate his
control of the target pattern. The intention behind his utterance would be to show
control of language form, not to convey information.
Some classroom activities have a more elaborate similarity with acts of
communication. When, for example, students are asked to write an essay on 'The
Happiest Day of My Life' most of them know very well that the purpose of this
activity is not to inform, amuse or entertain the teacher. It is to display control over
the forms of the language. Sophisticated students will aim quite specifically to avoid
errors or to display particular language forms in the guise of informing the teacher
what happened on a particularly happy day. I call activities of this kind simulation
activities, because although there is an appearance of communication, the real purpose
is to display control of language form. The same is true of role play activities in which
the learner is expected to display forms of the language which have just been
presented and practised. The role play is simply a device to enable the learner to
display particular forms. Students adopt, for example, the roles of doctor and patient
simply in order to show that they have 'learned' expressions like:
What's the problem?
and:
I've got a pain in my back.
Simulation activities, therefore, are constrained in the same way as citation activities.
Learners know that they are expected not necessarily to tell the truth or play a
convincing role, but to display control of language form.
Classroom activities of the third type, which focus on outcome, are called
replication activities because they replicate within the classroom aspects of
In other words learners, like native speakers, have a number of different language
systems. There are times when they are careful about how they express themselves
and times when they are not so careful. This is a process that the teacher can usefully
exploit in the classroom. Before looking at the pedagogical implications, however,
there are three ways in which I would like to reformulate Ellis's position.
First of all the learner's switch from one variety to another is developmental in a
way that the native speaker's is not. New Yorkers vary their style according
to social context. But all the styles they use have a real value. Unless they have some
social motivation for doing so, they are not going to eliminate /dis/ and /daet/ from
their repertoire. Learners, on the other hand, do want to eliminate features of their
repertoire and replace them with a different variety. They know that their 'vernacular'
style, an unstable interlanguage, has a limited value outside the classroom and they
want (assuming of course that they are reasonably motivated) to transcend this style
and replace it with another.
Secondly, learners are operating within a restricted environment. The classroom
does not immediately create the variety of social contexts to which the native speaker
responds in the outside world. At an early stage the learners' first concern is with
some kind of propositional/functional adequacy. Provided they can get the basic
content of their message across they are not concerned with much beyond that - and
even that limited objective may be achieved only with some effort. If learners have
been set purely pragmatic goals there is no reason for them to go beyond that limited
propositional/functional adequacy. Unfortunately, many teachers have a similarly
restricted view of what is meant by communication. They cast doubt on the value of
pair and group work in which learners communicate with one another unsupervised
by the teacher on the grounds that 'My students can communicate all right, but they
keep on making a lot of mistakes'. And unless teachers work to create an environment
in which learners will be moved to look for more than propositional/functional
adequacy, that is exactly what will happen. Unless teachers manipulate the social
context within the classroom, there is no reason why learners should look to a prestige
variety of the language - one which in their case is as far as possible formally
accurate.
Finally, we need to question the nature of the structures that are restricted and
need to be made more widely available. Ellis's formulation may suggest that a
'structure' is a linguistic unit. It might be better conceived of as a mental construct
relating to the way the learner's internalised grammar conceptualises the language,
rather than as a form of words or even the kind of abstract patterning described in
formal grammars. Certainly if we understand the word 'structure' to refer almost
exclusively to clause or sentence structure in the way it seems to be understood by
proponents of a presentation methodology, we shall have a very restricted view of the
learning process.
Considering the position of the learner in the classroom, let us say for the time
being that all learners have a variety of English which they regard as adequate for
certain restricted communicative purposes in the classroom. They also have
knowledge about the forms of the language which they may be able to deploy to move
towards a more universally acceptable variety. They also have the motivation to
develop this restricted variety towards something which has a wider currency outside
the classroom. Most important of all, they will be subject to the same kind of social
pressures in using the target language as in using the native language. Given the right
classroom environment they will attempt to refine the language which is immediately
available to them. The teacher's task, then, is to create an environment in which the
learners will respond to familiar social pressures and adjust their language
accordingly.
This can be done by manipulating the communicative context. When students are
working in pairs or small groups to solve a problem or to exchange
information, they will tend to use what to them is a natural variety, the language that
comes easily to them, in the way that /dis/ and /daet/ come easily to many New
Yorkers. The circumstances of their communication are:
Private: Students are working in a small group, all the members of which are working as a
unit towards the achievement of a common goal.
Spontaneous: They are producing language in real time in response to their changing
perceptions of the problem they are tackling and of the way a solution is best achieved.
Exploratory: The responsibility for a successful outcome is shared. There is some tolerance of
imprecision. Meanings can be overtly negotiated by continuous feedback. Useful meanings
are built up by trial and error, by hint and counterhint.
If, on the other hand, a student is asked to stand up in front of the class as a whole and
offer a considered report of the results of his or her group's deliberations, the
circumstances of the communication are quite different. They are:
Public: The student is speaking to a wider group. This group does not have the solidarity of a
common purpose. The setting is different. It is a classroom rather than a secluded corner of a
classroom. This means that delivery must be more deliberate.
Rehearsed: The student is offering a considered report. He or she is not producing language in
real time but is delivering a performance which has been, at least to some extent, rehearsed.
Final: It is no longer a question of a group of participants working together to reach a
conclusion. What we have now is a monologue in which the speaker carries a
disproportionate responsibility for the success or otherwise of the enterprise. He or she must
be precise or explicit, since the circumstances do not allow for the same kind of negotiation of
meaning as does the group situation.
One would predict, and this is borne out by informal observation, that in the first
set of circumstances students produce the kind of language that comes naturally. In
the second set of circumstances they aim at what they believe to be a prestige form of
the target language. They want to speak well and clearly and above all accurately.
A variable competence methodology
One way of achieving this shift of communicative context is to set up a series of
activities which vary the demands on the learner in a principled way. The components
of such a methodology could be labelled Task, Planning and Report (Willis and
Willis 1987).
The Task phase consists of a task-based activity focusing on outcome - a
replication activity. In an early unit in CCEC, for example, students are asked to
interview one another and then to draw up a family tree for their partner on the basis
of the information gleaned from the interview. The circumstances of the task are
private, spontaneous, and exploratory. Students aim at task-orientated efficiency
rather than formal accuracy. They are seeking to achieve propositional/functional
adequacy. During this phase the teachers are asked to restrict themselves to functional
correction. That is to say, they are to restrict their correction to the resolution of
communicative problems - they are not to
correct students simply for the sake of formal accuracy. In working on functional
correction they are working with the students, helping them to achieve the outcome
that the students themselves are working towards.
In the Report phase of the cycle, students will report to the rest of the class the
results of their work during the task phase. Here the circumstances of communication
are public, rehearsed, and final. In these circumstances theform of the message
assumes great importance. Students will move towards what they believe to be a
prestige form of the target language that prescribes a high level of formal accuracy.
The report phase is still an activity which focuses on outcome, provided of course that
some outcome is built into the report. (In the example we have given, the results of a
family tree exercise are incorporated by the class into a class survey.) But the activity
also sets a premium on formal accuracy. It is, if you like, a fluency activity with a
focus on accuracy.
There are a number of ways that a teacher can make the circumstances of
communication more 'formal', so as to move the learner towards a desire for accuracy.
In general the written form of the language demands a higher level of accuracy than
the spoken form. This is because it is more permanent and therefore more public,
more open to inspection. The same effect can be achieved by making a recording of
students' reports on audio or video cassette. Similarly if learners prepare notes on an
OHP transparency and then come out to the front of the class to make a report, there is
greater formality and greater pressure for acpuracy. It is important to identify
techniques which work within a given teaching situation.
If students are to do themselves justice in the report phase of the cycle, they are
going to need help. That is the purpose of the Planning phase. As students work
together to prepare their report, the teacher works with them, helping them to rephrase
and polish until an acceptable version is realised. This involves correction based on
formal accuracy. But this focus on formal accuracy is not dictated by the teacher's
whim or by the nature of a citation activity. It is the product of the communicative
circumstances which will pertain during the report phase. Once again the teacher is
working with the students, helping them to realise a form of language which they
themselves want to achieve. Of course most students will still make mistakes even in
the most formal contexts. The important thing, however, is that they are trying to
shape their vernacular style towards something more universally acceptable.
Extending the methodology
What we have established so far is a three stage methodology:
Task: In which learners carry out a replication activity. The focus is on the outcome of
language use rather than the display of language form.
Planning: In which learners prepare to present the findings of the previous phase to the class
as a whole. At this stage the teacher helps with correction, rephrasing and so on.
Report: In which learners present their findings. The focus is on outcome, on actually
presenting their findings, but also on achieving the level of accuracy demanded by the
circumstances of communication.
If learners are to gain experience of language in use it is not enough for them
simply to work with tasks for themselves. Ideally they must also be given exposure to
language relevant to the task they have performed or are about to perform, and in
particular they must be given the opportunity to see how competent speakers and
writers use the target language to achieve similar outcomes.
Let us look at a task from CCEC Level 1:
78
22
0
1989
3.14
748
22756
10.12
021 337 0452
Before students do the task for themselves the teacher will probably introduce the
task, focusing attention on the problem and on possible solutions. There will be a
teacher-student exchange of this kind:
T: What about this one? (writes 3.14 on the board)
S: Time is three fourteen.
T: Good. If we were talking about the time we would say three fourteen . . . or?
S: Fourteen past three.
T: Yes fourteen minutes past three. What else could it be?
This preliminary stage provides learners with an introduction to the task they are
about to do. It provides them with some ideas on how to approach the task. It also
provides valuable exposure to language, in particular to the forms could
and would and to the hypothetical or unreal' use of the past tense. But the important thing is the preparation for the task. Language input is inevitable, but it
should be incidental.
Further exposure is provided in the form of native speakers working towards
a similar outcome. We recorded two native speakers doing the task. Here is an
excerpt from the recording we made:
A: Er, ten twelve. That could be the time. You'd just say ten twelve. The date
you'd say B: Mm Or twelve minutes past ten.
A: . . . either the tenth of December or the twelfth of October . . .
B: Mm . . .
A: . . . depending on whether it was English or American. Erm . . . If this was a
telephone number you'd say o two one three three seven o four five two, wouldn't
you?
This recording provides us with a listening stage, which gives further exposure to the
forms could and would, and to the hypothetical use of the past tense.
In addition to this, the recording provides us with an opportunity to study
language use. It provides us with a text for detailed study and analysis. An appropriate
analysis task here would be:
Read through the transcript and find three occurrences of 'd. What does 'd mean? Why is the
past tense used in the transcript? Are they talking about the past?
This analysis is clearly a language focused activity and one which focuses on
accuracy and the relationship between form and meaning. In this case it highlights the
way English handles the notions of hypothesis and possibility.
We now have a six stage methodology:
Introduction: In which the teacher prepares the learners tor tne lasK mey a~
about to perform.
Task - planning - report: The basic task-based cycle.
Listening: In which learners listen to native speakers carrying out a parallel
task.
Analysis: In which learners look critically at aspects of the native speaker language use in the
listening phase.
It is the task stage which is central to the methodology. It is by working at the task
that students grapple with meaning and create a meaningful context for the language
they have heard and are about to hear. In the task we have been looking at they
consider possibilities:
That could be the time.
Of course many learners may not have the right English. They may say:
Maybe time. If is time is ten twelve.
This does not matter at first. The important thing is that they are looking for ways of
expressing possibility and hypothesis. They are searching the English they have and
making it do the work. This is a creative and useful process. One of the most valuable
skills learners can acquire is that of making a little go a long way, of doing a lot with
the limited language they have at their disposal. Often this involves them in extending
their language in a way which is not strictly acceptable. They make mistakes. But if
they make mistakes by manipulating language to achieve the meanings they want to
achieve teachers should learn to recognise this as a sign of useful creativity and
ingenuity.
It may be that learners will pick up some of the language they want at the
introduction stage. If not, they will have another opportunity at the planning stage
when the teacher offers help and correction. There will be a further opportunity at the
report stage, either because they hear their classmates use the appropriate forms or
because the teacher follows up and reformulates using those forms. Next, during the
listening stage, they will hear fluent speakers of English using the forms. Finally, the
analysis stage will focus in detail on some target forms (in the example given above
on 'd meaning would and on the hypothetical past tense). The most important thing is
that by using their own language in the attempt to get these meanings across, the
learners have created a precise context. They are already looking for the language to
express these notions, they know that they need the language, and they are likely to
accept it readily when it is offered. The paramount function of the task, then, is to
provide a context and a need for target language forms.
Working with written language
The same methodology can be used for exposure to and analysis of the written
language. (see p.66-67)
In this sequence learners begin with an introduction in the form of a teacherled
discussion about the kind of arrangements that need to be made in setting up an
overseas tour. They go on from this to do a task in groups or pairs. Having done this,
they are given time to prepare a report to the class of their findings. Finally there is an
analysis exercise based on some authentic written correspondence which focuses on
ways of referring to the future in English. Again we have focus shifting to and from
outcome and form.
The learner's corpus
We now have a methodological cycle which gives plenty of opportunity for focus on
language form within the context of a task-based methodology. But we still have no
way of specifying syllabus content. The spoken and written texts, however, do
provide us with raw material. They provide a corpus of language which learners will
have processed for meaning and which therefore consists of, to adapt Krashen's
terminology, not only comprehensible input but comprehended input. These texts
therefore represent an important part of the learner's experience of English.
96 Preposition spot
by
1 showing who or what does something
The microwaves are absorbed by the food. ( 91 )
B & B -in most cases it will be run by the owner.
(39)
2 answering the question 'How?'
Microwaves work by using a device called a
magnetron... (91)
They only deal with enquiries by letter.
3 answering the question 'When?'
(Note: cartoon picture omitted)
By the time we got downstairs they were already
halfway down the street. (178)
4 meaning 'near' or 'next to'
I would probably wait by the car. (150)
All of the examples in these exercises are taken from the learner corpus. They are
all utterances taken from the course materials, which learners have processed or will
process for meaning during the course of their study. We looked at similar examples
in Chapter 3 to show how the uses of the word way were extended and recycled over
three levels of CCEC. Just as the computer enables lexicographers to retrieve
concordances from a large corpus of language under study, so the same computer
techniques enable course writers to retrieve concordances for learners to study from
the corpus of language contained in a language course. The effect of this procedure is
to enable learners to examine their experience of English and to learn from it. In a
presentation methodology, the teacher and course writer in effect say to the learner il
am an experienced user of English and as such am able to present you with these
acceptable samples of the language organised in such a way that from them you will
be able to make useful generalisations for the future.' In enabling learners to examine
their own experience of the language, teachers and course writers are saying 'You, the
learner, have valuable experience of English. We will help you draw that experience
together and see how it fits with a description of the way words are used and patterned
to create meanings.' They no longer simply preser~t language to the learner for the
purpose of illustrating language form. Instead they encourage learners to examine
their own experience of the language and make generalisations from it.
There is no way of knowing for sure what language items will be assimilated by
the learner at a given stage of his or her language development. We are therefore
obliged to recycle the typical patterns of the language so that learners will be exposed
to them time and time again. At the same time we help learners develop a curiosity
about language and an analytical capacity so that they will gain maximum benefit
from exposure. Finally we recycle language items not only by offering them to
learners in new contexts, but also by retrieving earlier
occurrences so that we can exploit the learner's corpus, their experience of the the
language in use.
Syllabus specification
Once we think in terms of the learner's corpus, we no longer need to illustrate the
language for the learner piece by piece. We can begin by specifying what it is that
learners need to know about the language. We then go on to assemble a corpus which
incorporates these 'items'. If we are committed to a task-based methodology, we will
begin with an inventory of tasks and will go on to collect a set of texts arising from
these tasks. If we are committed to a lexical syllabus we analyse our texts taking lexis
as a starting point and check to see that we have the coverage we want. As we shall
see in the next chapter, ensuring that we have the right coverage is by no means a
straightforward process. Once this is done, however, we know that we have a corpus
with which the learner will become familiar, and frorh which we can retrieve all the
language we want to cover. We can realistically specify 700 of the most frequent
words together with their main meanings and patterns as syllabus content. This is
because we now know that we have a corpus of language which includes these words,
meanings and patterns. The learner will be exposed to a carefully constructed sample
of the language which contains the most common important features of the language
as a whole, and all of these features can be highlighted for the learner.
The syllabus from which we as course designers for CCEC worked is hundreds
of pages long. It consists of data sheets for around 700 words of the kind shown for
way on page 32 and for any and would on pages 53 and 55. In the Collins COBUILD
English Course the syllabus from which the teacher works is contained in the teaching
materials and is specified in teachers' notes. Unit 3, for example, lists learning
objectives under the headings of Crammar and Discourse, Tasks and Social
Language:
OBJECTIVES
Tasks
Social language
a Offering things to people (47)
b Asking for and giving explanations about language
(41 )
Remind students tro look out for the title in the Unit It
comes in recording 36b
It also lists under Lexical Objectives over 80 words which are introduced in the unit,
for example:
him 1 object pronoun The woman next
to him. Do you know him?
See also them, us, you.
hold 1 holding his arm/hand
lady 1 a very polite word for woman
language 1
large 1 a large blue book
left 1 on the left, to the left of
light 1 Shall we have the lights on?
Switch the lights off. Traffic lights
Headlights
1.2 It'sgetting light/dark
2 Shall I light the gas? A lighted
cigarette
3 not heavy. Her bag was very light
4 not dark She had light brown hair
middle 1 in the middle (of)
It further lists the items as they occur with each section. A task involving identifying
differences, for example, covers this language:
38 Find the differences
Aims: I To describe and identify people using new language from this unit and any
other English students know.
2 To listen for relevant information in a more extended stretch of conversation.
Lexis: arms, carry, group, hat, holding, lady, mine, second, show. so, with. yours
Understanding only: Don't show..., each, Get into pairs - , someone, so has mine,
stand Revision: but, talk to
The syllabus is, then, enormously detailed. It needs to be so if we are to provide good
coverage of 700 words and their meanings and patterns.
We have, then, in Level 1 of CCEC a corpus of language which illustrates the
meanings and uses of almost all of the 700 most frequent words in English. Learners
are exposed to this corpus as language in use in that they listen to it or read it and
understand and process the language. They are given the opportunity to focus on
usage through a series of exercises, most of them involving language they have
already processed for meaning. In terms of language production they are asked to
encode meanings similar to those encoded by native speakers in using language to
perform a series of tasks.
The methodology which exploits this corpus now has six components:
Introduction: This gives students initial exposure to target forms within a communicative
context.
Task: This provides an opportunity to focus on and realise target meanings. Students may
begin to approximate to the target language form or they may use quite different, even
ungrammatical forms.
Planning: The teacher helps students to move towards accurate production, often by
modelling the target forms for them.
Report: Students have another opportunity to use target forms. Again, however, there is a
focus on fluency as well as accuracy.
Listening/Reading: Students have a chance to hear or read the target forms used in a context
which has become familiar to them through their own attempts to perform and report the task.
(This stage may come immediately after Introduction, but normally comes just before
Analysis.)
Analysis: This is an awareness raising exercise which gives the learners a chance to formulate
generalisations about the language they have heard.
Controlled practice
Finally, what about controlled practice? Does it have a place? In order to answer this
question we should first consider the aim of controlled practice activities. I think the
first thing here is to dispel the notion that practice of this kind teaches grammar. It
highlights acceptable patterns in English, but it does little more than that. You can
repeat passive sentences as long as you like, and that may help you to see how they
are formed. But it will not help you with the important and difficult thing about the
passive which is not 'How is it formed?' but 'How is it used?' This question can only
be answered by exposure and by analysis. The passive is learned by seeing and
hearing passive forms in use, not once but many many times, by focusing attention on
how they are used and by providing learners with opportunities to use the same forms
for themselves. The same applies to any other pattern. The important and difficult
things are to do with use rather than form.
The role of pattern practice, then, should be to enhance the learner's familiarity
and fluency with holophrastic units whose meaning and grammar have already been
highlighted and exemplified in use. At first sight this takes us back to Wilkins'
analytic strategy, by which the learners' attention was focused on functional
realisations in the hope that these would become part of the learners' repertoire.
CCEC focuses on the common patterns of English as identified by the COBUILD
research in the hope that an analysis of these patterns will help learners benefit from
exposure to the corpus of which they are a part. The difference is that instead of
presenting items to the learner and drilling them in the hope that they become part of
the learner's repertoire, we are identifying those items which are already part of the
learner's corpus and building on the learner's familiarity to promote fluent production.
We might therefore usefully drill such 'chunks' as:
easiest
the
easiest
best
simplest
way
solution
is to
But this will not be an attempt to teach grammar. It will be an attempt to consolidate
such units so that they are easily retrievable. It is an attempt to consolidate the
familiar rather than to present the unfamiliar. The rationale for this type of pattern
practice rests first on the belief that learners do accumulate language form, often
phrases. Secondly it rests on the belief that an important part of the native speaker's
repertoire is in the form of prefabricated chunks of language which are retrieved and
deployed in use. We are, of course, far from sure what these chunks are. What we are
sure of, however, is that we are more likely to find them by looking empirically at the
patterns which occur with great frequency in the speech and writing of native
speakers than by starting from an abstract grammatical description.
It certainly seems to be the case that learners (particularly in the early stages)
want controlled practice, but I do not believe that it should be central to a
methodology. First of all I suggest that this kind of practice should be little and often.
A short sharp burst of practice can be a useful confidence builder, but if you spend too
long at it students soon begin to parrot the repetition without thinking about what they
are doing. This may be useful if the aim is to consolidate a holophrase. It does not,
however, help to teach grammatical form. That can only be done by looking at
language in use so that learners can become aware not only of the phrases but also of
their meaning and use.
Secondly I think this kind of practice should come when learners have some
familiarity with the item to be drilled, and that it should come at the end of the
methodological cycle, not at the beginning. The danger with focusing mechanically
on form too early in the cycle is that students see what follows not as an opportunity
to use language for communication, but rather as an opportunity to produce the
prescribed form as often as possible. The focus on form gets in the way of fluency
practice and all we have are a series of activities designed to elicit a particular
language form.
We should first create a context and demonstrate language in use. We do this
during the Listening/reading, Planning and Analysis stages. Students may begin to
approximate to the target during the Task and will certainly be aware of it during
Planning. This awareness becomes explicit during the Analysis when it is set
alongside similar occurrences from the learner's corpus. When students are aware of
the form and have seen and heard how it is used, when they have a context and a
meaning for the target form, that is the time to do a quick burst of controlled practice.
Controlled practice should be the final stage which helps build confidence and
reinforces familiarity with form.
74
Syllabus Organisation 75
158 Puzzle
a How good are you at logical thinking? Can you work out this puzzle?
Peter, Mary and John all went away last weekend. One of them went to Birmingham one to
Manchester, and one to London. One of them went to the theatre, one went to see a relative, and
one went to buy a computer. Who did what?
Here are two clues to help you.
This does not feature the neat turn-taking of scripted dialogues with each turn virtually
complete in itself, replying predictably to or commenting explicitly on what has gone before.
There are two participants but the text is very much a joint product, and if the text were not laid
out neatly with each turn attributed to a particular participant it would be very difficult to
separate out the contributions:
So its Mary and mother. John bought a computer but not in Manchester, therefore it must be John must have gone to Birmingham. Birmingham. Computer. And, er, who's the other one?
Peter? . . . must have gone to Manchester.
It is indeed true that we have no precise description of language in use. But as I argued in
Chapter 1, learners need to find out as much as possible about language in use, and this cannot
be done unless they are exposed to language in use. The form of language we use is determined
critically by the purpose for which it is used. It is essential therefore to provide learners with
language which is genuinely informed with some communicative purpose. This is difficult,
expensive and incredibly time consuming, which may explain why there is so little
authentic/spontaneous language in coursebooks. If it can be done, however, it brings enormous
benefits. It means the language that learners hear and read in the classroom is exactly the kind
of language they will be exposed to outside. This brings great advantages not only of economy
but also of motivation. The
satisfaction learners gain from being able to process spontaneous native speaker speech at
normal speed constantly enhances and reinforces motivation.
Input - from topics to tasks and texts
The process of writing the coursebooks was inevitably a complex one. The particular syllabus
design procedures and the methodology which was to carry the syllabus had never before been
incorporated in a published course. There were a number of different strands in the research,
design, writing and piloting of the course. All of these processes impinged on one another and a
hold-up or failure in one process had repercussions throughout. Things were not made simpler
by the fact that the authors of the course were working in Singapore, while most of the research
was being carried out in Britain, particularly at the University of Birmingham. What follows,
therefore, is a streamlined report of the whole process. It omits false starts, unexpected failures,
conference phone calls linking Singapore, Birmingham and London, problems with computers,
the difficulties of storing diskettes in a tropical climate, and a host of minor problems which are
a part of any major publishing venture.
A good deal of research was undertaken before we began to assemble Level 1. We were
provided with the raw material of the syllabus in the form of some 700 data sheets of the kind
exemplified by would and any in Chapter 3. We wrote to a large number of ELT institutions in
Britain and overseas in order to build up a list of topics which were felt to be of value and of
interest to students. On the basis of this information and of our own experience as teachers, we
then identified a series of topics to form the basis of the course and devised a number of tasks
based on each of these topics. These tasks were then recorded in a studio using educated native
speakers. The recordings were transcribed and concordanced to enable us to define the learner's
corpus more easily. At the same time we set about identifying a bank of written text which
could be made accessible to remedial beginner learners and which would integrate without too
much difficulty with the topics we had identified.
Meanwhile the COBUILD team in Birmingham was assembling the TEFL Side Corpus
made up of over twenty of the most widely used ELT coursebooks worldwide:
In early 1984, as part of the preparation for the later Collins COBUILD Er~glish Course, the
TEFL Corpus was analysed in detail in order to identify the linguistic structures and speech
functions which were common to most of its books at the lower levels. This analysis could be said
to mirror the 'received' or consensus syllabus for the teaching of English which operates currently .
. . (Renouf 1987)
We believed that our lexical approach would provide adequate coverage of this consensus and
also go well beyond it. We intended to use the TEFL Corpus to make sure that we did indeed
have coverage of the consensus syllabus.
Procedure
Once our bank of texts was assembled, it was ordered according to our
Syllabus Organisation 77
intuitions about the difficulty of the texts and tasks. This intuitive ordering was then subject to a
preliminary pilot, which was designed to test not only the accuracy of our predictions as to
difficulty but also the validity of our task-based methodology. It was also intended to find out
whether elementary students could indeed handle authentic written text and spontaneously
produced spoken discourse. In general we were happy with the results of this pilot, even
though, inevitably, some tasks and texts had to be abandoned and others had to be reordered.
The remaining tasks and texts were ordered, and an outline of the coursebook was put together
which included rubrics for the exercises, but not at this stage any language focused exercises.
Checking the lexical coverage
The texts and rubrics were then concordanced by computer and the concordances checked
against the data sheets to see if we had adequate coverage of the main uses of the 700 target
words. Basically the coverage was satisfactory. We had sufficient data to present a good picture
of almost 650 of the target words. Some of the omissions were words which, though very
frequent in themselves, tend to be restricted in range and to occur in contexts which would
create considerable problems for false beginners. Among these were words like community,
development, trade and energy. Some, like concerned, finally, involved, indeed and unless
were felt to be of high utility and therefore to be serious omissions. In addition to these words
we had also missed a few major meaning categories of some very common words. One of these
casualties was would meaning used to. Nevertheless, since the coverage of frequent words
and patterns was our overriding priority, it is not surprising that we achieved a very much more
comprehensive coverage than is usually found in an elementary coursebook.
We decided that it would be uneconomical to extend our corpus considerably in order to
ensure coverage of the few significant omissions, but we did take careful note of the missing
words and meaning categories to ensure that we included them in Level 2. To replace them in
Level 1 we chose to highlight around fifty other words of particularly high frequency which
happened to be well contextualised in our data. Among these were such words as telephone,
visit, window and station. To these we added two more sets of words. First were those which
were of high utility and occurrence in the classroom situation bearing in mind the methodology
we had decided to adopt - words like teacher, student, group and share. Secondly there were
words which did not qualify for inclusion on the grounds of frequency alone, but which
completed important lexical sets. These included such items as days of the week, and a number
of adjectives of colour and shape. Together with the 650 words already identified, these made
up the target for Level 1. Inevitably a number of other words occurred in the texts, some of
them, like cat, banana, psychiatrist and lining, of low frequency and utility. We had no
intention of highlighting these. The fact that they occurred in the learner's corpus was a
consequence of our decision to work only with authentic and spontaneously produced text.
Similar procedures were applied to specify content for Levels 2 and 3. As
with most language courses, the emphasis and therefore the proportion of text, began to move
from spoken to written. In addition to other written texts, Levels 2 and 3 each included a
complete short story by Roald Dahl and Level 3 also featured a good deal of newspaper text.
When we came to profile the words in Levels 2 and 3, we took account of the fact that profiles
become less complex as one moves down the frequency scale and we were thus able to work
without data sheets. In profiling words for Level 2 we worked from database (see page 32) and
dictionary entries, and for Level 3 we relied on the Collins COBUILD English Language
Dictionary itself. Of the 1,800 words additional to the 700 in Level 1 we managed to
contextualise all but about 200. Texts and rubrics for Levels 2 and 3 were concordanced in the
same way as for Level 1.
Like most coursebooks, all three levels went through several rewrites as a result of
readers' comments or piloting. The information and advice culled from these processes had to
be incorporated, but here again we were presented with particular problems. We could not
respond immediately to adverse comments on or reactions to a particular text or task. It
sometimes happened that the text in question offered a particularly good context for important
words or phrases. Since we were committed to the use of authentic/spontaneous text we could
not simply write something else to give us the same cover. We were reluctant, therefore, to drop
a useful text unless we could find and exploit a good context elsewhere in the materials or in
our text bank. If we did drop the text we had then to identify the items we were losing and go
back to the concordances of our material to find other places where these items were covered. A
single decision of this kind had considerable repercussions. We did not doubt that our
determination to keep the best possible coverage of our target words in the learner's corpus was
justified, but sometimes we paid a high price for it.
Adjusting the learner's corpus
Statistically it was almost inevitable that with some words the picture which emerged from
concordances of our texts differed in important ways from the picture derived from the 7.3
million word COBUILD corpus. The word like provides an example. The main COBUILD
corpus has 11,600 occurrences of like. Of these about 60% mean 'resembling, similar or having
the appearance of something else; in the same way as'. Typical occurrences are:
People with sensitive skins were beginning to look like lepers. The proprietor's word, like Hitler's,
was absolute.
The aim is to run them like nursery schools.
A sub-category of this meaning accounted for around 20% of the remaining uses:
SUCH AS; USED WHEN CITING EXAMPLES OF A PARTICULAR TYPE
OR CLASS.
She lived on lovely clean foods like milk, butter, eggs . . .
A private gardener like myself would never get on in nursery work.
Syllabus Organisation 79
In our text data, however, the proportions were reversed in that the occurrences of like meaning
be fond of and would like meaning went to heavily outnumbered the other categories. We
made sure, however, that we drew attention to the first two categories no less than the third. In
doing this it occurred to us that whereas many coursebooks have whole units dealing with 'likes
and dislikes', relatively few of them highlight the more frequent meanings of like. In all cases
like this we were careful to cover as far as possible all uses which were prominent in the
COBUILD corpus, even if there were relatively few such occurrences in our own texts.
Obviously we would have been happier with a neat match between our mini-corpus and the
main corpus, but the amount of material which would need to have been processed in order to
achieve this put it out of the question.
Language focused work
We felt reasonably confident that at each level, and certainly by the end of Level 3, we had
provided learners with exposure to a highly representative sample of English. But we did not
want to rely simply on exposure. We wanted to enable teachers to highlight the most important
words and phrases as they occurred in the texts to which learners were exposed. For this reason
we itemised learning aims, including lexical aims, for each section of each unit (see page 70),
and summarised lexical aims for each unit (see page 71). Without guidance of this sort, learners
have no way of knowing what is important and needs to be remembered. We were also well
aware from our own previous teaching experience that teachers too need to be prompted if they
are to recognise which items have high utility.
In addition to this we wanted to provide specific language practice of different kinds. We
wanted first to make sure that we covered all items in the consensus syllabus as identified by
the TEFL Side Corpus, unless there was a clear reason to omit them. We did this largely
through special grammar exercises.
200 Grammar words
so
1 marking a summary or a change of subject
A: I wasnt in London last weekend. B: So you
werent in London last weekend?
BG: I havent really got anything else
planned. DF: So what about the shopping?
2 expressing amount
We were so tired that we went straight to bed.
3 meaning therefore
He saw someone he thought he knew, so he called out and
ran after her.
4 pointing back
A: It s very easy. B: Do you really think so?
5 so that used to talk about result or purpose
The British Council helps British participants by
helping to pay their expenses so that they can attend the
Seminar.
6 meaning also
A: Ive got some money. B: So have I.
There is one example below of each of these six
meanings of so. Which is which?
a DF: Will you be going to Nisa this
weekend? BG: Yes. I think so. DF: So will I. So
that's one possibility.
b A : It depends if Ive got a car or not. B: Right, so
you do your shopping by car.
c Please let me know as soon as you have fixed your
travel plans so that I can make sure you are
properly looked after on arrival.
d After so much hassle Im determined to stay at the
top.
The aim was to give a picture of the grammatical behaviour of the very commonest words of
the language. These exercises drew almost entirely on material from the learner's corpus as
described in Chapter 4, enabling the learners to draw on their own experience of the language.
A reference section which brought together these grammatical generalisations and illustrated
them with further examples was included at the back of the Student's Book Level 1 and Practice
Book Level 3.
So (200)
1 marking a summary or a change of subject
Okay. So we've got the camel in the sunset next. (171)
So what do you do at quarter to eight? (143)
Right. So Mary went to London. (158)
2 expressing amount
There are always so many tourists.
No wonder you look so tired. (142)
3 meaning therefore
The suitcase looked exactly like mine, so I said Excuse me, sir.. .
4 pointing back
JV: Wouldn't you think Cairo was 1500? DL: Yes, out of the ones given, I wouldve
thought so. (90)
5 so that used to talk about result or purpose
It had a thick lining, so that you could practically sleep out in it. (104)
Let me know as soon as you have fixed your travel plans, so that I can make sure that you
are properly looked after. (193)
6 meaning also
JV: The woman next to him has orange trousers. DL: So has mine. (38)
David lives in London and so does Bridget.
__________________________________________________
Look at these examples.
I'm tired.
I've finished.
I'll help.
I like it.
I liked it.
So am I/So is she.
So have I/So has she.
So will I/So will she.
So do I/So does she.
So did I/So did she.
Syllabus Organisation 81
These exercises provided learners with valuable input. Even more important they encouraged
learners to look at language critically to see what patterns words featured in, and to assign
meanings to those patterns.
The grammar was, therefore, organised almost entirely lexically in Level 1. This gave us
some misgivings to begin with, but gradually we became convinced of the value of this
approach. The value of organising things under words is that words are immediately
recognisable. We felt that grammarians, coursebook writers and teachers had become used to
working with abstract categories parts of speech; verb tenses; semantic labels such as
'conditional'; functional labels such as 'reported speech' end so on. When you have the
language, you begin to search for categories to describe it. But learners do not 'have' the
language. They are struggling to learn or acquire it. In doing so they are obliged to work from
surface forms to perceive whatever recurrent patterns they can. In the case of an almost entirely
non-inflected language like English, 'surface forms' means words. In fact we did include in our
grammar morphemes such as -ing, markers of past tense and the past participle -ed and -en
together with -s as a marker of the plural and third person singular, and -'s as an abbreviation
for is and has and marking possession:
213 Grammar words
-ing
1 describing something
There were two girls eating fish and chips.
Write down one or two interesting things about each person.
2 after am, is, be etc.
One girl was carrying a white bag.
The S student will be asking you questions about things that you
usually do during the day.
3 after see, look at, hear, listen to etc.
Listen to them talking about when they go to bed.
4 before am, is etc.
Dialling 999 is free.
5 after stop, start, remember, like etc.
I remember going to London many years ago.
She likes watching television.
6 after when, before, instead of etc.
Remember that when dialling a number from within the same
area, you do not need the prefix.
Before attempting to break down the door, the man tried. . .
Once this groundwork was laid in Level 1, we allowed ourselves to reference grammar in
other ways. In Level 2 we organised some grammatical entries under functional headings such
as Cause and Effect:
76 Grammar
Cause and result
In the first examples, the part expressing cause is
coloured. The other part expresses the result.
1 a sentence
consequently He was very tired. Consequently he fell
asleep.
as a result Britain is quite a small country. As a result
travel is quick and easy.
thats whybut theyre ever so small. That's why rain
is thin. .
2 a clause
because I don't have a journey to work because I work
at home. (80)
and John is trying to get a new job, and is busy sending
application forms all over the place. (2)
as We chose to go by plane as it meant we had more
time in Paris.
so Theres no chance of a promotion there, so Im
going to move on. (2)
so . . . that I was so proud (that) I jumped up and down.
since I suppose that would come out the same way since
people seem to prefer cats and dogs to snakes and
spiders .(25)
3 a phrase
as a result of As a result of this postcard I think Becky
will write back.(33)
because of A: Why can't you starve in the desert?
B: You can't starve in the desert because of the sand
which is there. (Can you explain this joke?)
But this language was still indexed lexically and therefore retrievable by the students using the
word as a starting point.
The approach in these grammar exercises, therefore, was to present learners with the raw
material of language (almost always language which was already familiar), and to provide
prompts of different kinds to encourage learners to analyse and categorise language forms.
Other exercises were devised to highlight other features of language.
Language Study exercises were used to lead in to detailed study of specific texts,
particularly where the immediate context was an important aid in clarifying a point about
language:
70 Language study
a Giving advice
Read the transcripts for section 69 carefully. Pick out seven useful phrases you might use if you
were starting to give advice to someone.
e.g. Well, I actually did that last year. We . . .
Syllabus Organisation 83
We included Wordpower exercises which focused on important words and showed how the
frequent words in the language often have a number of meanings. This again led learners to
think analytically about words, and often made the point that abstract meanings are by far the
most frequent:
195 Wordpower
Look at these phrases using the word thing.
Do they belong to category 1, 2 or 3?
thing
1 replacing another word or phrase
She likes to eat sweet things.
Think of three things the driver might ask the hitch-hiker
next. (97)
fact
The point
trouble
problem
The question
trouble
problem
At Level 3 we incorporated exercises of a similar type and went on to develop exercises which
would draw attention to the structure of such common text patterns as situation - problem solution evaluation:
78 Looking at adverts
a Look carefully at these items from the New
Horizons catalogue. Which things:
are ideal for people who travel a lot?
could be classified as containers?
are made of the same material?
would be the best gift for an absent-minded
person?
might be useful for a person who lives in or travels
to a cold climate?
Leather Jackets
Keyminder
79 Language study
SITUATIONPROBLEMSOLUTIONEVALUATION
Notice the structure of these adverts. Read the notes in the table carefully, then suggest what words or phrases from the
texts could go into the empty spaces. Then continue building up the table with notes from the other adverts.
Situation
General topic
The problem is
that
The solution is
to
Evaluation
Leather jackets
popular and
comfortable
In winter, dont
keep cold out (too
thin)
line jacket with
sheepskin
Car keys
(people lose
them)(difficult to
use in dark)
Bleeper device
when you whistle
light
Warmth and
comfort combined
with style
All of the exercises reinforced the same methodological approach. They encouraged learners to
look critically at the corpus, and to make generalisations about the language to which they had
been exposed. We also encouraged learners to refer back to the language they had experienced
earlier. All of the target words at each level were listed alphabetically in the coursebook with
references to the sections in which they occurred. Levels 1 and 3 contained a grammar section
referenced to items in the corpus. Levels 2 and 3 incorporated lexicon or dictionary entries to
encourage the development of reference skills, with exercises to reinforce this. The aim
throughout was to develop familiarity with a carefully selected and weighted corpus of
language, and to enable learners to exploit that corpus to good effect. While the basic
methodology was taskbased with a focus very much on outcome, the language associated with
those
Syllabus Organisation 85
tasks was examined in great detail in the light of a precisely specified syllabus. The problem of
ordering was solved partly by recycling. This recycling is naturally built into a corpus which
relies on natural language. It was reinforced by the way we selected items from the corpus for
illustration and analysis. Finally, learners were able to use indexes and reference sections to
recycle for themselves.
Grading and ordering
It is clear, therefore, that our decision to adopt a task-based methodology and to restrict
ourselves almost entirely to authentic/spontaneous text had implications for grading and
ordering language material. We wanted first to build up a learner's corpus, and then gradually to
increase the learner's familiarity with and conceptual understanding of significant parts of that
corpus. In order to achieve this, we began by ordering not language items but tasks At first this
was done intuitively by identifying those tasks which we thought would present relatively few
problems for elementary learners, usually because the outcome was highly predictable. We then
checked our intuitions during our own piloting, and then against feedback from other pilot runs.
This led to some reordering, until we had a sequence of tasks which the learners could
reasonably be expected to handle both receptively and productively.
The very commonest forms of English occurred not only in the earliest tasks, but again and
again right through the corpus. We were able, therefore, to draw attention to the present tense of
the verb be and to common question forms in the very first unit:
8 Language study
s, is, re, are
Read these examples. They am all from Unit 1. Find all these words: s, is, re, are.
1 What does s mean?
2 When do we say is (or s) and when do we say are (or re)?
Who's that?
Do you know where they're from ?
Tell him or her where you're from.
This is -. She's from-.
Where's David from?
Who's Chris? What's his surname?
Who are these people? What are their surnames?
11 Language study
Asking for addresses and phone numbers
11 First read the questions below and then listen.
David, Bridget, Chris and Philip use eight of these questions. Which questions do they use?
What's your phone number?
Have you got a phone number?
And your phone number?
Have you got a phone? What's your number, then?
Can you give me your address?
Could you give me your address?
Can I have your address?
What's the postcode?
Sorry, could you repeat that?
Sorry, how do you spell that?
Can you spell your name for me?
Can you tell me how you spell your name?
We did not believe that in Unit 1 these would be learned in the sense that learners would be able
to produce them with consistent accuracy. The first stage was simple awareness raising. We
knew that these items would occur again and again until they were finally incorporated in the
learner's repertoire. Unit 2 built on questions marked by intonation, and drew attention to
inversion:
20 Language study
a have got
Look at these examples from the recordings of Bridget and David.
There are no full stops ( . ) or question marks ( ? ).
1 Which examples are questions?
2 What is the word ve?
3 Which words come before and after got? :
DF: Have you got any brothers and sisters
BG: Yes, I've got one sister called Rosemary
DF: Okay
BG: And have they got any children
DF: Mhm. Two children, two girls
BG: Yes
BG: and you've got one sister called Felicity
DF: Mhm
BG: And they've got two daughters called . . . Emma :
and...
Syllabus Organisation 87
DF: Sarah
BG: Sarah
DF: Mm
20 b Listen and repeat each phrase. Then practise saying some of these phrases with your partner.
Listen for two stresses in each group of words.
Have you got any brothers and sisters?
I've got one sister called Rosemary.
Two children.
Two girls.
Question forms occurred again when the models and auxiliaries were treated:
132 Grammar words
do
What is the difference between sets 1 and 2?
Set 1
Ask your teacher if you don't understand.
How do you know?
It doesn't matter.
What does Chris say?
I didn't get up until 8.30, so l was late.
Did Chris give good directions?
Set 2
I usually do the cooking and cleaning in the morning.
My husband does the gardening at weekends
He did the meals when I was ill.
What are you doing?
All right. You do it first, then it's my turn.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------These examples are a mixture of sets 1 and 2.
Sometimes both types appear in the same sentence. Which is which?
a What does your brother do?
b Did you do your homework?
c No, I didn't, because I had a lot of other things to do.
d Who's going to do the dishes?
e Which bus? A 62 or 63 will do just as well.
f Is this yours? No, it's nothing to do with me.
g Have you done your homework?
h It doesn't matter.
Look at the Grammar Book. Which categories do the last eight examples go into?
and again with wh- words. Finally, certain sections in the Grammar Book reference section
summarised the use of questions:
can, could (93,138)
1 ability/possibility
What things could you describe as sort of reddish? (37)
What other questions could I have asked?
Can you explain the answers? (46)
How much can you remember? (48)
She ran awe' as fast as she could. (198)
Ten twelve. That could be the time. (78)
Oriental definitely. It could be Thailand. (171)
_______________________________________________________________
What can you see?
I couldn't hear what he was saying.
_______________________________________________________________
Look at the picture on page 58.
Make three sentences starting:
I can see
_______________________________________________________________
1.1 could for suggestions
You could look in the newspaper.
_______________________________________________________________
2 permission
You can go out now, but come back in ten minutes.
Could I do it tomorrow instead of today?
3 offer / request
Can you give me your address? (11)
Can you spell your name for me? (11)
Can I speak to Dr Brown please? (89)
Can I take a message? (89)
Can you tell me the time, please? (94)
Can you tell me how long it takes?
Could you give me your phone number please? (11)
Could you look after the children for me? (97)
There was, then, massive coverage of question forms. But generally they were treated
from a lexical starting point. This not only gave the opportunity for recycling, but also
highlighted holophrastic forms such as Can I . . . ?, Can you . . . ?, Could you . . . ?. The
Grammar Book also gave learners an opportunity to retrieve items from their corpus and (as
they were referenced to sections of the text) to go back and retrieve the original contexts in
which they occurred.
Some forms were more difficult to retrieve. The word by, for example, was not highlighted
until Unit 8, because it was not until then that we had a context
Syllabus Organisation 89
This strategy affords the teacher and the learner a great deal of flexibility. First Df all an
item is not highlighted until they are able to refer to examples of use. Secondly, most of these
items will occur again and again. If they continue to cause problems they can be located in text
either by referring to the Grammar Book or by looking at an index which references some of the
sections in which the items occur and further exposure or practice is given. Finally, the
commonest items are summarised in the Review pages and in the Grammar Book. The
Grammar Book entries can be used for intensive practice and pattern drills if the teacher or
learners feel this to be necessary. The stage at which this might best be done can be determined
by teacher and learner rather than imposed by the coursebook writer. What is offered is a
learner's corpus together with the wherewithal to exploit that corpus to the maximum
advantage.
Problems of grading were obviously less acute in Levels 2 and 3. But here again the same
strategy was employed. Learners were given the opportunity to familiarise themselves with the
corpus in a principled way. To enable them to do this it was necessary to use the word as the
reference point. The lexical basis on which the course was built became a valuable part of the
methodology. At first this caused some concern. We were reluctant to lose well known and
loved structural labels such as the passive, the second conditional and reported speech. As we
worked with our lexically based grammar, however, we became mole and more convinced that
this outcome, too, was more than justified.
91
phrase for example. They set up categories like reported speech which are uneconomical and
potentially confusing. In a few cases, such as some and any, they may perpetuate false beliefs and
assumptions about the language.
We wanted, however, to take full account of approaches which had served the teaching
profession, and many would say had served it well, for many years. We were anxious to compare our
findings and our coverage of language against a consensus derived from coursebooks which were
widely used and presumably, therefore, accepted by teachers and students as providing a useful
description of the language. We would then need to identify omissions and departures highlighted by
the COBUILD research or by what we were prepared to defend as a more pedagogically satisfying
description of the language. The consensus syllabus was provided by our analysis of the TEFL Side
Corpus which provided an inventory of the linguistic structures and speech functions commonly
covered at the elementary and intermediate levels. We were able to check the coverage offered in our
lexical syllabus against this consensus syllabus and to look critically at ways in which we had
departed from the consensus. This chapter goes on to describe how the lexical approach is different in
its treatment of some grammatical features.
The verb phrase - tense, aspect, mood and voice
Most formal grammars describe the verb phrase in English under four headings:
Tense Present or past.
Aspect Simple or progressive/continuous and/or perfective.
Mood - as realised by the models can/could, may/might, must, will/would and (according to some
descriptions) going to, have/had to, need to, ought to.
Voice active or passive.
Strictly speaking there are only two tenses in English, present and past. Together with the other
components these generate all the verb forms in English, from the simplest:
1 We test the machines every week.
This last example, at first sight an almost impossible occurrence, is attested by Halliday (1976) as
being recorded from conversation.
Pedagogical grammars handle the verb phrase quite differently. The label tense in a pedagogic
grammar normally covers the formal grammarian's tense and aspect together with the modal will. The
tenses in a pedagogic grammar include:
Present simple
Future
Future continuous
Past Simple
Past simple Past continuous
Present perfect
Present perfect continuous
Past perfect
etc.
Voice is combined with these forms to produce, for example, the past perfect passive:
3 The machines had already been tested.
The models are usually taught lexically alongside concepts like ability:
5 I can speak a little Spanish.
possibility:
6 You can learn Spanish at evening school.
In addition to this, certain verb forms are taught within a particular structural context, such as
the second conditional with the past tense and would marking a hypothesis:
8 You would soon learn Spanish if you went to evening classes.
and the third conditional with would have and the past perfect:
9 You would have learned Spanish if you had gone to evening school.
Our own treatment of the verb phrase came somewhere between the formal grammar approach,
and that of the pedagogical grammar. In many ways it followed the traditional pedagogic description,
but there were significant differences. We did not, as most pedagogic grammars do, identify a future
tense with the modal will. Instead we identified ways of referring to the future. We treated all
models lexically. Although we took conditional sentences as our starting point for the description of
would we were careful to remove the dependence on if at an early stage. Although we used the terms
present continuous and past continuous we did not teach these forms as such. Instead we
encouraged learners to build them from their component parts, the verb be and the present participle
ending in -ing, which was treated as an adjective. The past participle, too, was treated as an adjective,
and from this we derived the passive voice. Finally our exploitation of the learner's corpus meant that
we did not have to rely on sentence level citations to illustrate the use of verb forms, or indeed of any
other forms.
Tense
Our treatment of the past and present tenses was similar to that found in most pedagogic grammars,
but learners were exposed to both tenses right from the beginning. Specific exercises draw attention
to the two tenses throughout Level 1. They are contrasted in Unit 4 of Level 1:
58 Beckys homes
The authors' teenage daughter, Becky, wrote this.
We live in a four-bedroom semi-detached house in a town called
Hemel Hempstead, about twenty miles from London. It was built
in about 1960.
When we lived in Birmingham, from 1979 to 1981, we lived in an
old house in a district called Harborne. It was a large
semi-detached house built in the 1 890s with five bedrooms and
nice big rooms downstairs. It had a big garden at the back but no
front garden. It was a really nice house, much nicer than our house
in Hemel Hempstead.
BW
Cartoon
picture
omitted
said
was
heard
had
is
see
go
say
has
hear
ask
think
Units 9 and 11 give practice in the use of the past tense in narrative. By the end of Level 1 students
have had ample exposure to both tenses and their basic
uses.
The negative and interrogative forms also occur right from the beginning of Level 1. In line with
our lexical approach they are brought together in an analysis exercise on the words do and did in Unit
9:
95
96 Lexical syllabus
do
does
did
you
Myf
start work?
finish work?
get up?
go to bed?
have lunch?
get home in the evening?
if (209)
1
in conditions
to see the
Discuss briefly what you would do if you were in one of these situations.
-if you heard the fire alarm in the building you are in now
-if the electricity went off in your home, and you thought it might be a power cut
-if you were by the sea and you heard someone shouting for help
Together with your partner, plan what you would say. If you were with a friend, what would you tell them to do?
Act out the situation in front of the class. Dont say which of these three situations it is. Can the others guess what has
happened?
a Look at the verbs in colour. What tense are they in? Do they refer tp past time?
JV: Are we ready: Yes, erm, now what would each of you cook if someone dropped in unexpectedly and stayed for a meal
in the evening?
JV: What would you cook, David?
DF: Whatever vegetables happened to be there.
JV: Supposing they arrived after the restaurants had shut.
JV: But, er, and if youd made it at home
Why are they in past tense?
b Look at these sentences. What does would mean? Why is it would, not will?
We asked Jenny, Bridget, David and Danny what they would cook for an unexpected guest.
JV: What would you do, Danny?
DL: Would I have to cook them something, because Id prefer to take them out for a meal.
JV: It says here What would you do if each of you cook?
DL: Erm
JV: So, to summarise, Bridget would cook sausage and beans, Danny would cook an omelette, David would cook
something exotic that hed rustled up from bits in the fridge, and I would cook a cheese flan.
and Level 3:
115 Grammar
Past forms and past participles
a Say when the underlined words refer to past time.
1
2
3
4
5
A future tense is not identified but attention is drawn to ways of referring to the future:
THE OPEN UNIVERSITY
Dr. Markham L. Tickoo
Chairman,
Seminar Planning Committee,
REGIONAL Planning Committee,
30 Orange Grove Road,
Singapore 1025
J. F. Morritt
Professor of Teacher education
These uses are highlighted separately under the modals and under have:
6.2 for something that will have happened at some time in the future
Hell be home
Tell me
(We can also use the present tense.
Hell be home when he finishes work.
Tell me when you finish.)
The decision no to treat will as the future tense was a deliberate one which was taken for a number of
reasons. First, there seemed to be no good reason for treating will as being different from any of the
other modals. It can be treated lexically, and we could see no reason why it should not be treated in
this way. Secondly, treating will as the future tense implies that this use is in some way neutral in
terms of modality. But this does not seem to be the case. The closest it comes to a neutral form is
when it is used to express certainty or prediction:
12 If its midday in London Chicago will be 7 a.m.
13 In some areas you will find green cardphones.
But the fact that will is not normally found in clauses with if and when:
14 *If it will rain well get wet.
15 *When you will finish you can go home.
shows that it is not neutral. It cannot be used in these clauses with its casual meaning of certainty or
prediction, because the words if and when are selected in order to avoid the notions of certainty and
prediction. Will is not acceptable in such clauses precisely because it carries a modal meaning. It is,
of course, acceptable after if or when when it is used to express volition and to realise a request or
offer:
16 If you will agree to the price we can sign the contract.
Treating will as the future tense actually draws learners into the kind of error exemplified in 14 and
15 above. Probably the closest thing we have in English to a future tense is the present simple, which
many formal grammars treat not as present but as not-past, descr ibing English as a system which
has a marked tenese form for the past and realises other time references, present and future, through
this unmarked form unless some modal meaning is carried in addition. This accounts for uses like:
17 Give it to the first person you see.
18 I can't come next week. I'm on holiday.
Progressive aspect
A description which conflates tense and aspect means that the concepts of progressive and
perfective aspect are not taught as such. In the case of progressive aspect, this omission means
that the description is highly uneconomical. For example many coursebooks identify a use which
is labelled the 'interrupted past'. This is realised by a pattern with the verb in one clause in the
past simple tense and the verb in the other clause, usually a temporal clause, in the past
continuous:
The postman called while I was cooking breakfast.
But the notion of 'interruptedness' is a feature of progressive aspect, not simply of the past
continuous tense'. The sentences:
The postman usually calls while I'm cooking breakfast.
and:
I'll probably be cooking breakfast when the postman calls.
1 describing something :
There were two girls eating fish and chips. Write down one
or two interesting things about eacb person.
2 after am, is, be etc.
One girl was carrying a white bag. The S student will be
asking you questions about things that you usually do
during the day.
3 after see, look at hear, listen to etc.
Listen to them talking about when they go to bed.
4 before am, is etc.
Dialling 999 is free.
5 after stop, start, remember, like etc.
I remember going to London many years ago. She likes
watching television.
6 after when, before, instead of etc.
Remember that when dialling a number from within the
same area, you do not need the prefix.
Before attempting to break down the door, the man tried
Grammar revision
1 Who or what
It's a very pleasant school.
I was an insurance broker.
3 Where
It's near Birmingham, isn't it'
That was in Warrington.
2 Describing
He's about fifteen months.
She's quite small.
4 With -ing
He's getting to the more interesting stage isn't he?
At the moment I'm looking for jobs.
we can enable students to produce for themselves the verb forms which carry progressive aspect.
The fact that the present participle -ing is treated as an adjectival form gives learners a powerful
indication of its use. The sentence:
A man was carrying a brown bag.
is descriptive in exactly the same way as:
There was a man carrying a brown bag.
or:
I saw a man carrying a brown bag.
To bring out this feature of English, it is important not to treat the present continuous as a
"tense', but rather to make a broader generalisation by treating the ring form as adjectival, with
the collocation with be as one of its common uses. As we shall see below there are other
important reasons for treating the present participle with -ing as adjectival.
Perfective aspect
The treatment of the present and past perfect tenses is very similar to that found in most
pedagogic grammars, with two important exceptions. One of the consequences of working from
research data and working with authentic text was that we identified the use of the present
perfect tense with reference to the future:
I'll let you know as soon as I've heard from him.
Let me know as soon as you have fixed your travel plans.
Answer the questions after you have read the passage.
The second difference is methodological. The examples which illustrate the use of perfective
aspect are taken from the learner's corpus:
173 Language study
had
a In each example below there are two or more
things that happened. Which thing took place first?
1 One evening the wife, white as a sheet, called me over
to her flat saying that it had been burgled.
2 Her husband had dropped in briefly while she was out
(before she got back), to look for his driving licence.
Now what aboue these sentences from other units?
3 The assistant sold more ice-cream in the interval than
anyone had ever done before. (55)
4 And I won the next year but not as much as I'd won the
first year.
5 . . . they arrived after the restaurants had shut. (86)
6 The pilot then discovered the cockpit door had locked
itself and he'd mislaid the key. (104)
7 One morning he found that someone had parked in
front of his garage door. (150)
This helps the learners to build up a picture of the use of perfective aspect in real contexts of use,
and also encourages them to look critically at the texts to which they are exposed.
The modals
As we have seen from looking at will and would all the modals were treated lexically in CCEC.
2 permission
You can go out now, but come back in ten minutes.
Could I do it tomorrow instead of today?
3 offer / request
Can you give me your address? (11)
Can you spell your name for me? (11)
Can I speak to Dr Brown please? (89)
Can I take a message? (89)
Can you tell me the time, please? (94)
Can you tell me how long it takes?
Could you give me your phone number please? (11)
Could you look after the children for me? (97)
Make six sentences from this table (two offers and four requests).
Can
Could
I
you
help you
tell me the time
help me
go home early
give me a lift
carry that for you
(please)
4 can/could be
That could be John . . . but I thought he was at work.
(92)
It could be China or Thailand. (171)
Bring lots of jumpers as it can be quite cold. (176)
Imagine you are woken up by a loud noise at night. What
could it be?
. . . the cat? . . . a burglar? . . . someone coming home late?
. . . someone in the kitchen? . . . someone falling out of bed?
. . . the neighbours? . . . the traffic?
Imagine you are telling someone about it the next day. Say:
It could have been . . .
Say which of these things can be:
dangerous / interesting / fun / funny / exciting / boring
driving fast
visiting relatives
TV programmes
travelling by plane
parties
ski-ing
This is very much in line with other approaches, which also tend to treat modality lexically. The
lexical research did, however, add certain insights. For example about 15% of the occurrences of
can and could are followed by the word be. This is so common that we took special account of it
in category 4.
The passive voice
I have already argued that the passive is best treated by regarding the past participle as
adjectival. It is introduced in Unit 2:
DF: Yes, my brother's married.
BG: And what's his wife called?
by (111)
1 who / what did it
Wally is awakened by the phone ringing. (91 )
Handicrafts made by people in the Third World. (104)
Is that a magazine published by Macmillan? (146)
This work is brought together and reviewed half way through Level 3:
by 16
1 (l50a, 163a ) issued by the Home Office/might be asked
questions by the programme presenter
A note on methodology
One point which has emerged strongly in the discussion of the verb phrase above is the
importance of retrieving examples of language in use from the learner's own language
experience. We have several times made the point that language use involves choice and that
learners must learn to exercise that choice. At the beginning of a lesson a teacher may choose to
announce:
Last lesson we looked at the present perfect tense.
Or:
Okay, we've had a look at the present perfect tense.
Why does a teacher on a specific occasion choose one rather than the other? Learners need to
acquire the ability to select the appropriate form to encode the desired meaning. They cannot
learn to do this by working with decontextualised examples at the level of the sentence. They
must have as many opportunities as possible to see and hear these forms in use.
A second important feature is a refusal to resort to a contrastive methodology. There is little real
gain in contrasting, say, the present simple and the present continuous tenses. Even if this
strategy is successful, all it does is contrast uses in which the choice between the two seems to be
clear cut. The present continuous and the present simple, for example, are often contrasted to
show that the simple tense is used for an action which happens frequently, the continuous for an
action which is happening at the time of speaking. The presentation may be made with a picture
with the legend:
John is going to school. He usually goes to school on his bike.
But this ignores some important features of English. First, it ignores the convention in English
that the simple tense is normally used to caption pictures.
Johnny goes to school.
would be a more likely caption. Secondly, it ignores the fact that the present continuous with
adverbs of frequency is not uncommon. We have a recording in which native speakers
repeatedly produce sentences like:
Oh, I'm usually leaving for work at around that ~me.
One of the dangers with contrastive teaching of this kind is that teachers spend a good deal of
time making a straightforward contrast between two forms which holds true for most of the
occurrences of those forms, but which does not create any learning difficulty. It is a time
consuming process which achieves very little. Adult learners are very quickly aware of the 'rule',
although they will take some time to incorporate it in their language use, no matter how long is
spent drilling and contrasting at this particular stage. A more insidious danger is that once these
contrasts have been made, they become institutionalised. What I mean by this is that materials
writers often
redraw the language to make very specific contrasts between certain forms. Once they have done
this, they allow learners to see only those forms which exhibit this contrast. They begin by doing
for the learners what is easy, and then leave them to make for themselves the subtler more
difficult inferences about language use. They compound this by concealing from the learner any
text which runs counter to the 'rule' they have set up. Simplistic choices are dictated, subtler
choices are avoided. This is a process which protects learners from language in the classroom, by
preventing them from coming to terms with language choice. Choice operates in conformity to a
simple set of rules, not as a response to the need to encode precise meanings.
The noun phrase.
One of the texts we selected for Level 3 threw up this sentence:
So, during the winter months, a van equipped with a loudspeaker and tape bearing the agonised squawks of
a captured seagull held upside down slowly toured the reservoirs for two hours after dusk.
According to some grammars this is a simple sentence - the only finite verb it contains is toured.
By any reasonable criteria, however, it is an extremely complex sentence. Given a context and
appropriate introductory activities, the sentence did not cause too many comprehension problems
and it was not difficult to devise an exercise to draw attention to the structure of the complex
noun phrase:
81 Language Study
Understanding a complex sentence
Practise reading these sentences quickly. After each
one, say what the new information is about.
A van toured the reservoir.
A van equipped with a loudspeaker and tape
. toured the reservoir.
A van equipped with a loudspeaker and tape bearing
the agonised squawks of a seagull
. toured the reservoir.
A van equipped with a loudspeaker and tape bearing
the agonised squawks of a captured seagull held
upside down slowly toured the reservoir.
Look at paragraph 5 of the newspaper article; how
many additional phrases are there? Now work out
how to read the whole paragraph out loud.
81: Listen to it being read on tape.
But how could learners begin to produce sentences of this type? The example given may be an
extreme example, but a look at any written text will show that complex phrases of this kind are a
common feature of the language. The first sentence of the article from which this sentence is
taken reads:
Tape-recorded squawks of a seagull in distress have enabled water authorities in
Strathclyde to cleanse two reservoirs at Milngavie, near Glasgow, by frightening
away an estimated 5,000 seagulls which were polluting the water.
The main clause in this sentence, in italics, consists of 28 words. But most coursebooks offer
learners virtually no help with the kind of complex phrases involved in a clause of this kind.
One feature of the first example given above is the use of participles - equipped, bearing,
agonised, held. The recognition that participles play such an important part in the construction
of noun phrases was a vindication of our decision to treat participles as adjectival. This
participial use of the -ing form is, in fact, much commoner than its use in the continuous tenses.
Similarly, the adjectival use of the past participle is much commoner than its use in the
traditional passive.
Another common feature of complex phrases is the use of prepositions, particularly with
and of. But again we rarely find a principled treatment of these uses of prepositions in traditional
coursebooks based on an inventory of structures or functions. This is hardly surprising since,
almost by definition, such approaches are concerned with clause and sentence structure and pay
relatively little attention to phrase structure. A lexically based syllabus, however, cannot fail to
recognise the importance of prepositional phrases in building more complex phrases. The
prepositions of, to, in, for, on, with, at, by, from, about and up all feature among the fifty
commonest words of English. Any approach which recognises the importance of lexis, therefore,
is bound to analyse carefully the uses of these words and to make sure that they are highlighted
for the learner. Both with and of are comprehensively covered in Level 1:
of (17, 139)
1 used in expressions of quantity, size etc.
I've got
those. (25)
your brothers. (26)
Where's that
(107)
the yellow shapes are squares. (35)
He talked to
other people. (107)
I did
work last weekend.
Bring jumpers. (176)
1.2 containing / consisting of something
Here are two
Let's find a place to have
1.3 'part of, some of etc.
the morning. (84)
Tell
the class. (106)
Tell each other your
the story. (115)
Saint Laurence Road. (125)
2 belonging to
Do you know the names of the students in your class? (2)
David tried to remember the names of Brigids family. (19)
The number of a house. (77)
Whats the name of the college? (109)
3 sort of etc.
3.1 spoken only used to show the speaker doesnt want to sound very exact; or used
instead of a pause or hesitation
The watch is sort of next to the glass of water. (42)
We sort of get on well. (53)
3.2
That sort of roof? (171)
Three types of telephone. (206)
4 dates, times, ages
My father is the first of May. (81)
It has something to do
the rhythms of the language.
Do you have anything in common
any other students?
. . . wait a moment and I'll be you.
In which sentences does the missing word mean 'and has'?
Yet another feature of English which is often incorporated in the complex noun phrase is the use
of one noun to modify another. There are two examples above - winter months and water
authorities. It is impossible to treat these noun + noun combinations systematically, let alone
exhaustively, because the relationships which can exist between the two or more nouns are
almost infinite. Nevertheless it is important to draw the attention of learners to this feature of
English:
50 Grammar
Noun plus noun
In English we often put two nouns together to express quite complex
meanings:
1 Have a one minute conversation.
(a conversation lasting one minute)
2 I have had a Saturday job. . . (24)
(a job on Saturdays)
3 What were your childhood fears? (34)
(fears when you were a child)
4 . . . a back page summary of this news report. (38)
(summary of a report containing news on the back page of a newspaper)
EMPLOYER STATUS
government
hospital
prison
school
trade union
spokesman
official
representative
165 Grammar
Fronting information
In Unit 15 we saw how newspaper articles pack a lot of
information into descriptions of people:
Handsome smiling forty-five year-old London
policeman... (155)
They do the same with events. Opening sentences
particularly highlight a lot of information to set the
scene for what follows:
Police investigating the mysterious disappearance in
Dorset of Mrs. Etty, a local farmer's wife . . . (161)
Opposition party spokesmen, who have been calling for
government action to bring piped water into the centre
of the town . . . (161)
Rearrange the following phrases to make opening
sentences which you have seen before:
Again most of these exercises are consciousness-raising activities. The complexity and
unpredictability of these phrases are such that we can offer no prescriptions. All we can do is
outline the elements, and encourage learners to examine their experience of the language. It is,
however, most important that we do this. It is difficult to see how anyone could become a
competent speaker or writer of English without recourse to the kind of complex phrase structure
which is too often overlooked in course design.
Discourse structure
In the past it has been very difficult for syllabus designers to offer learners systematic insights
into the structure of discourse. The work of Hoey (1983) building on Winter (1977) suggested
that a lexical approach might offer the most promising starting point. I have shown above the
importance of words like thing, fact and idea in structuring discourse. In Level 3 we took a
lexical starting point to look at a number of common discourse patterns.
In Level 3 we used advertisements to illustrate a common discourse structure incorporating
situation - problem - solution - evaluation:
Leather Jackets
Leather jackets have become increasingly popular and fashionable over the last few years, but
in the long winter months they just don't keep the cold out. Here's the solution. These beautiful
XXXXXXXXXXXX jackets from Somerset combine the suppleness and style of real leather
with the unbeatable XXXXXXXXXXXXXX of genuine 100% British sheepskin . . .
79 Language study
SITUATIONPROBLEMSOLUTIONEVALUATION
Notice the structure of these adverts. Read the notes in the table carefully, then suggest what words or phrases from
the texts could go into the empty spaces. Then continue building up the table with notes from the other adverts
Leather jackets
popular and
fashionable
In winter, dont
keep cold out (too
thin)
car keys
The solution is to
bleeper device
when you whistle,
light
Evaluation
warmth and
comfort combined
with style
_____________
____________
Situation
General topic
The problem is
that
Why do you think the boy did this? This was the solution - can you work out what the
problem was? Clue: The boy involved was three years old.
~ Tell the class what you think. ~
This idea was then further developed:
85 Grammar
The problem is that the solution is to . . .
We use that to introduce a situation or problem. We use to to introduce the action you
would take in finding a solution:
My brother's problem was that he couldn't open the door without using both hands, and
he was carrying a slice of bread and peanut butter at the time. His solution was to plaster
the sticky side of the bread to the wall while he opened the door.
What bothered the old man was that he had borrowed his mother's car without asking, so
he begged the police not to tell her.
If you see smoke the obvious thing is to telephone the fire brigade.
Which of these phrases do you think would introduce problems and which would
introduce solutions? Are there any that might do either?
The best thing is . . .
I What worries me is . . .
It was too big . . .
One possibility might be
The answer could be
The trouble is
The only thing is
One difficulty is
One way out would be
The worrying thing is
The disadvantage might be
85 Grammar
Problems and solutions
Look at this example:
Lots of jobs around the house would be simple enough to do yourself, if only
you had the tools the professionals use.
trouble is
The problem is I don't have the right tools.
thing is
answer
The solution is to buy some good tools
best thing
Make sentences using words like TROUBLE, PROBLEM, ANSWER,
SOLUTION and THING based on the following sentences:
a.
b.
Exercises of this kind both highlight patterns in text and also show how lexical items signal
elements in these patterns:
Problem -
What worries me is . . .
It was too big . . .
The trouble is . . .
One diffculty is . ..
The worrying thing is . . .
The disadvantage is . . .
Solution -
All of these items are strongly predictive. A statement of a problem strongly predicts an attempt
to identify a solution. The exercises not only serve to highlight these functions in discourse, but
also provide a structural environment for the predictive items:
What worries me is
The trouble is
One difficulty is
that . . .
to . . .
Unit 6
SOCIAL LANGUAGE
Asking where people are.
Telephoning: getting put through.
Agreeing and disagreeing.
Asking people to wait.
Unit 7
Unit 8
Unit 9
Unit 10
Many of these functions are highlighted when the models are dealt with:
More important is the way native speaker recordings illustrate important language functions:
b Reaching agreement
MS: Well when I see . . . er . . . a windmill I always think of Holland, so I would say Holland, for
that.
PK: Mhm. Yes I think I agree with you.
Have they reached agreement that it is a picture of Holland?
Look what they go on to say. At which point do they actually reach agreement?
PK: Mhm. Yes I think I agree with you. It's flat as well isn't it?
MS: Yes.
PK: So it must be Holland.
MS: The PK: And the third one along the top?
171a How do they reach agreement on the other countries?
This shows that a function like 'reaching agreement' can be socially and linguistically complex,
and is not simply a matter of saying 'Yes, I agree with you':
PK: It's - Yes, yes. We ve got North Africa, so
MS: Right. Okay, let's say North Africa.
PK: I think that's North Africa.
MS: Right.
PK: I don't think it's anywhere else that's on the list, so
MS: No.
PK: North Africa. Mhm. Right, now this one on the left
down here. That looks a bit like the Grand Canyon to
me.
The important thing here is that it shows that the realisation of a particular language function is
very often a cooperative venture. It is certainly the case that such realisations are often, indeed
usually, much more complex than functionally based syllabuses normally acknowledge.
Learners are not likely to acquire the ability to negotiate language functions by acquiring
linguistic realisations such as:
Yes, that's right.
Or:
Yes, I agree with you.
Much more important is experience of the way such functions actually are negotiated and agreed
in authentic discourse.
Summary
When we checked against the TEFL Side Corpus the language coverage we had achieved in
CCEC, we found that we had either covered all the items traditionally covered or, as in the case
of reported speech, had made a deliberate decision to omit them. We found that even with items
like the verb phrase, which are covered with great thoroughness in traditional approaches, we
had achieved comparable coverage. Given lexis as our starting point, there were differences in
our treatment, particularly the decision to treat participles as adjectival and to derive progressive
aspect and passive voice from this description. The lexical approach also led us to treat will, like
other models, as a lexical item, and therefore to deny the notion of a future tense.
We also found that our lexical approach had highlighted many important aspects of language
which are largely ignored in many other courses. I have already mentioned the treatment of
participles as adjectives. These were combined with prepositional phrases and noun modifiers,
all of which assume great importance in structuring complex phrases in English. Similarly, we
were able to identify and highlight for learners lexical items which are important in structuring
discourse and which make up the hidden agenda in many skills lessons. Finally, we were able to
offer good coverage of most language functions. This was a feature of our methodology and our
reliance on authentic or spontaneous material. This led us to look at the negotiation of language
functions, rather than simply to list idealised realisations of target functions.
Central to all of this is the notion of the learner's corpus. What we need to do is provide learners
with a corpus which contains the language potential that they need, and then to enable and
encourage them to look at that corpus in detail. In this way we move from an itemised syllabus
to a dynamic description of language which learners can make their own.
t24
The LexicalSyllabus;
DaveWillis
Originallypublished
by CollinsELT, 1990
CHAPTER 8: A brief review
Real language
The lexical approachas we have describedit so far is firmly basedon real language.It draws
on the COBUILD researchwhich provides an analysisof a corpusof naturallanguageof
twenty million words. The COBUILD corpusprovidedthe contentof the lexical syllabus-the
commonestwords and phrasesin English and their meanings.It alsoprovidedsomeinsights
into that contentwhich modified and shapedthe way we treatedthe languagein the
As aresult,thepicturewe presentedofthe languagewas quitedifferentfrom
coursebooks.
what we might have offeredintuitively. intuition alonewould not have identifiedthe most
frequentwords and phrasesof the language,or recognisedtheir importance.In the past the
coursewriter'srelianceon intuition has led to distortionsin the treatmentof the language.
Pedagogicgrammarshaveplacedgreat emphasison the verb phraseto the detrimentof other
aspectsof language.The basicmeaningsof prepositions,usually to do with spaceand time,
have beenthoroughly treated,but other prepositionalmeaningshavebeenundervalued.Less
than half the usesof the prepositionin, for example,are temporal or spatial.The central
function of lexis in structuringdiscoursehas alsobeenlargely overlooked.Theseand other
failings of establishedapproachesto syllabusspecificationamply justified the decisionto go
back to a descriptionof real language.There were,in addition, many specificinsightsinto
the language- the use of someand any; the use of would for past habit; the collocation
betweencan and be, and so on. The descriptionof languageimplicit in the Collins
COBUILD English Courseis very different from other courses.We would arguethat it is a
more accuratedescription,and that this derivesfrom the fact that it is basedon real language.
The CCEC materialsoffer a corpus of languageto illustrate the insightsderived from
the original research.This corpusis in part naturallanguagedrawn from a numberof sources
(mainly written), and in part spontaneouslyproducedspokenlanguagedrawn mainly from
recordingsof native speakerscarrying out the taskswhich form the basisof the course.This
againis a departurefrom usualpractice.Up to now no other coursebookat the elementary
level offers predominantlyauthenticlanguage.But i do not feel that thereis any needto
justify the decisionto usealmostexclusivelyauthenticlanguage.The onusrestswith those
who provide simplified and contrivedlanguage.They are the oneswho shouldjustify their
procedures.The only real criticism of the use of authenticlanguagewould be if it proved too
demandingfor its targetaudience.That has not turnedout to be the case.
Indeed,it is not difficult to provide justification for the decisionto useauthentic
language.The spontaneous
recordingsprovide listeningmaterial which is very different from
scriptedmaterial.The structureof overtly interactivespokendiscourseis extremelycomplex
and extremelydifficult to simulate.There are a numberof featuresin the CCEC recordings
which are typical of spokendiscourse,but which are often omitted in scripteddialogues:
t26
The LexicctlSvllabus
A Brief Reviex,J2T
tations of naturallanguage.
Thereare also doubtsaboutthe simplificationtechniquesusedin selectingor creating
examplesto demonstratefeaturesof languageform for the learner.A languagedescription
which focuseson sentencestructureis likely to simplify out any featureswhich detractfrom
that focus. Thus the sentence:
Yes I do, I like being a father.
or:
Why don'tyou. . .
or:
One answerwould be to . . .
'
A Brief Review,729
helping leamersto discoverfor themselvesthe best and most effectiveway for them to leam.
Cerlainly thereis a move to a much greaterfocus on the learner,and a greaterrecognitionof
the fact that the most importantvariablein the languageleamingprocessis the individual
learner.
We aremuch more likely to realisethis ideal if we abandonthe idea of the teacheras
oknower'and concentrateinsteadon the notion
of the learneras 'discoverer'.Thereis
nothing new in this notion. It was put forward by interlanguage
theoristslike Corderand
Selinkeralmosttwenty yearsago.But there is an understandable
reluctanceon the part of
teachersto abandonthe role of 'knower'. It is a comfortablerole in a number of ways, not
leastbecause,sincethe role of 'knower' is a high statusrole, it paradoxicallyallows us to
cover up or redefinewhat we do not know. But even whenteacherswish to break away from
the role, it hasnot been easyfor them to do so. Materialswhich are basedon the assumption
that the bestway for leamersto learn is to discoverthe grammarfor themselvesand that the
teacheris a guide to this discoveryprocess,have beenfew and far between.
It is to be hoped that techniqueswhich specify a learner'scorpus,and provide learners
with a frameworkwithin which to examinethat corpus.will enableteachersto place learners
at the centreof the learningprocess.
The way ahead
Most of the things we have tried to do in the Collins COBUILD English Coursehavebeen
done with varying degreesof successby other materialswritersand teachersfor years.
Languagetaskswhich focus on outcomerather than form arepart of the repertoireof most
teachers,and there is a wealth of materialto supportactivitiesof this kind. The promotion of
languageawarenessand the analysisof languageby learnersare also establishedtechniques
but, althoughother materialswriters have used authenticmaterials,to my knowledgenone
have madespontaneousspokeninteractionthe basisfor a courseat the elementarylevel. But
this is not a denial of the desirabilityof using languageof this kind - simply an
acknowledgementof the difficulty of doing so.
The notion of a learner'scorpusand the deliberateattemptto referenceand exploit that
corpusare,I think, innovations.The learner'scorpusis a directconsequenceof taking the
COBUILD corpusas a staftingpoint. lt was this startingpoint which gave us the idea of
enablingthe leamer to work with a corpusjust as a lexicographeror grammarianworks with
a corpus.It was the computationaltechniquesusedin the COBUILD project which enabled
us to exploit the learner'scorpusin this way.
As computersare usedmore and more in the study of largecorporaof text and as aids to
teachersand learnersof languages,so thesetechniqueswill be further developed.In the
Collins COBUILD English Coursewe, as materialswriters,actedas intermediariesbetween
learnersand corpus,taking decisionsas to what was worth highlighting and when. It is now
technicallypossibleto bring decisionsof this kind much closerto the classroom.Teachers
can scana corpusand decidefor themselveswhich featuresare likely to be most useful and
valuablefor their students.Studentsthemselvescan haveaccessto a i'orpus.Using the FIND
commandon a word processingpackagethey can examine
132
Bibliography
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Brumfit, C. J. 1984. Communicative Methodology in Language Teaching, CUP.
Caroll, J. B., P. Davies, and B. Richman 1971. The American Heritage Word Frequency
Book, New York, American Heritage Pub. Co.
Corder, S. P. 1967. The Significance of Learners Errors, IRAL.
Corder, S. P. 1978. Language Learner Language, in Richards, J. C. (ed.).
Ellis, R. 1984. Classroom and Second Language Development, OUP.
Halliday, M. A. K. 1976. Learning How to Mean, Edward Arnold.
Halliday, M. A. K. 1976. The English Verbal Group in System and Function in Language,
(ed.) Gunther Kress OUP.
Halliday, M. A. K. 1978. Language as Social Semiotic, Edward Arnold.
Hanks, P. 1987. Definitions and Explanations, in Looking Up, Collins.
Hoey, M. 1983. On the Surface of Discourse, George Allen and Unwin.
Krashen, S. D. 1981. Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning,
Oxford, Pergamon Press.
Krashen, S. D. 1982. Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition, Oxford,
Pergamon Press.
Krashen, S. D. and T. D. Terrel 1983. The Natural Approach, Oxford, Pergamon Press.
Lewis, M. 1989. Unpublished paper delivered at IATEFL Conference, Warwick.
Littlewood 1981. Communicative Language Teaching, CUP.
Long, M. H. 1982. Does Second Language Instruction Make a Difference? Paper delivered
at TESOL Convention, Honolulu.
Maley, A. and A. Duff 1978. Drama Techniques in Language Learning, CUP.
McTear, M. F. 1975. Structure and Categories of Foreign Language Teaching Sequences,
Unpublished mimeo, University of Essex.
Nation, I. S. P. 1983. Teaching and Learning Vocabulary, Victoria University of Wellington
English Language Institute.
Prabhu, N. S. 1987. Second Language Pedagogy, OUP.
Quirk, R. et al, 1972. A Grammar of Contemporary English, Longman.
Renouf, A. 1987. Corpus Development. Looking Up, Collins.
Rutherford, W. E. 1987. Second Language Grammar: Learning and Teaching, Longman.
Selinker, L. 1972. Interlanguage, IRAL.
Sinclair, J. M. 1987 (ed.). Looking Up, Collins.
Sinclair, J. M. 1988. Foreword to The Collins COBUILD English Course, Collins.
Sinclair, J. M. and R. M. Coulthard 1975. Towards an Analysis of Discourse, OUP.
Tickoo, M. L. 1988. Michael West in India: a Centenary Salute, in ELTJ vol 42 no. 4.
West, M. 1953. A General Service List of English Words, Longman, Green and Company.
Widdowson, H. G. 1978. Teaching Language as Communication, OUP.
Widdowson, H. G. 1979. Explorations in Applied Linguistics, OUP.
Wilkins, D. A. 1976. Notional Syllabuses, OUP.
Willis, J. R. 1981. Spoken Discourse in the ELT Classroom, Birmingham University,
unpublished M.A. thesis.
Willis, J. D. 1983. The Implications of Discourse Analysis for the Teaching of Oral
Communication, Birmingham University, unpublished Ph.D. thesis.
Winter, E. O. 1977. A clause relational approach to English texts; a study of some
predictive lexical items in written discourse, in Instructional Science, vol 6 no. 1.
Index
ability to learn/generalise/activate knowledge iiif, viii, 8ff, 12f, 22ff. 41 ff, 64. 129, 131 see
acquisition; knowing a language; learners role
about 110
abstract use of language 50f
accumulated entities 7, 42ff see structural syllabus; synthetic approaches
accuracy v 495. 42, 60ff 86.124. 128f see form-focused activities
acquisition 22. 24. 41. 5i, 59, 69. 81.108
active voice 18
activities see communicative activities; form-focused activities: tasks
adapted texts see inauthentic texts
adequacy 60f
adjectival relative clauses 91
adjectives 8, 16ff. 23. 93,102f. 105ff, 110, 123
adverbial phrases 43
adverbials 26
adverbs of frequency 108
affirmative sentences 9, 49, 51
again 125
agent 17
analysis of language vii, 12, 68. 72, 82, 85, 106, 123,130f
analysis stage 64f, 68, 72f, 94f see Language Study
analytic approaches 42. 44ff. 72 see synthetic approaches
anv 9,13. 49, 5L 53ff, 70, 76, 92,124
appropriacy see style
are 87
articles 24
aspect 15, 17, 24, 92, 100ff see -ed/-en; -ing; perfective aspect; progressive aspect;
tense
assimilation see acquisition
at llO
authenticity 74ff see language use
authentic language 74ff, 85,123,124,127
authentic materials 26, 45f, 74ff, 85,103.123, 131
auxiliaries 87 95
awareness raising 23f. 86. 101, 107, 115, 129, 131
be v 16f 38 85. 93 102. 105. 124
beginners 42 see false beginners
behaviourism 129
Birmingham University vf
Bongers, H 46 broad 40
Brumfit C J 6 by 17, 48f, 68f, 88ff. 106ff see passive voice
can 88,104. 124
Caroll, J B et al.46
categories 40ff, 48ff. 77fl, 82, 91,102 see description of the language structural
syllabus
cause and effect 6, 81f
choice see communicative purpose; contrastive presentation; language use
chunks of language 39, 72f see collocation; fixed phrases; holophrases
circumstances of communication 59ff, 129
citation 57ff. 93 see controlled pattern practice
classroom see language classroom
classroom talk 12ff, 34f. 63f, 77
clause structure 3, 7. 15, 43
closed grammatical systems 43
COBUILD corpus vii, 18, 27ff, 46, 48ff, 74. 78f, 91,124,131
COBUILD project/research vff, 27ff, 46, 47ff, 72, 76, 92. 105, 124, 131
Collins v, 15
Collins COBUILD English Course (CCEC) vf, 15.17,19ff, 28, 32, 34ff, 47ff, 52, 59.61,
63, 66ff, 74ff, 91ff, 124ff, 129.131 see teacher's notes
Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary 18, 27ff, 41. 52, 78, 91 see dictionary
entries
collocation 40f. 52, 124 see 'chunks'of language; fixed phrases; holophrases
common meanings ivff, 15, 46ff, 70, 74, 79,124,129
common patterns ivff, 15, 38. 51f, 70. 72. 74. 77. 83,129
common phrases 31
common words vff, 15. 28, 38, 39, 46ff. 51. 70f, 74. 77. 80. 83, 85, 91 110 124 see
frequency
communicative ability see skills
communicative activities iii, 1, 495. 57ff see replication
communicative aims iv. 5 see communicative effect; communicative purpose
communicative approach v, viii, 2, 4ff, 57ff, see communicative methodology
communicative context 60, 127, see circumstances of communication
communicative effect 10f see communicative purpose
communicative methodology 6,14,57ff,see communicative approach; methodology;
task-based methodology
Index 135
future 3f. 9f, 12. 42.51, 68, 93. 99,103
future continuous 93
future tense 93, 99. 100, 123
games see communicative activities; replication
General Service List 47
gerund 57 see -ing
going to 4 42 51
grading ivf, 44, 85ff, 128
grammar 70. 79ff, 81, 90, 91ffsee description of the language; formal grammars;
pedagogical grammars: user's grammar
Grammar Book 88ff. 95f, 101f, 107 see reference sections
grammar exercises 35, 37. 68, 79ff, 87. 89. 94f, 98. 101f, 106f, 112ff, 117f. 121
grammar-translation 12f
grammatical behaviour 39. 80
grammatical description see description of the language
grammatical syllabus see structural syllabus
grammatical system 14, 24. 43f, 126 see user's grammar
Halliday, M A K 92. 128
Hanks, P 40f
has 81
have 99
have got 86f
Hoey, M 115
holophrases 72f see chunkst of language; collocation; fixed phrases
hypothesis 1 8f, 23, 50f. 64f. 68, 93, 96f, 119 see would
idealised language 123 see inauthentic texts; simplified language; TEFLese
if 18f. 93. 96ff, 100
imperative 17
in 110 124
inauthentic texts 12, 26, 75.124 see idealised language; simplified language
indefinite articles 24
indexes 82. 90f see reference sections
infinitive vi. 35f, 38 see to
inflection 24, 81
-ing vi If 36f 49 57 81 93.101ff. 107,110
input iii, i4, 22f, 64f, 76. 80.130
instructions 13 see rubrics
interlanguage24, 131
intermediate level 49. 52, 92, 130
interrogative forms 9. 49. 94f
interrupted past 100f
intonation 86
introduction stage 63ff, 72
introspection 27 see intuition
intuition v, 41, 49f, 52. 77, 85,124
is 81
invented texts see inauthentic texts
inversion 86
knowing a language 10f. 41, 51, 60, 70 see ability to learn
Krashen. S D 65
Labov 59
language awareness see awareness raising
language behaviour 7f
language classroom iv, 7, 12ff. 42, 51, 57, 59ff, 75,109
language in use see language use
language lesson as social event 13. 60f
Language Study 19, 67, 82. 84ff, 98, 99. 103. 109, 114, 119 see analysis stage
language system 59
language usage 10ff. 26, 45f. 71,129
language use ivff, 2ff, 10ff. 14,15,18, 22f, 26, 39ff. 45f. 50f, 58f. 63f 68ff. 73, 74f, 90, 91,
103, 10.'f. 126, 127f see possible language use, typical language use
language varieties 59ff
learner's corpus viif. 49, 65ff. 72, 74. 76ff, 84f. 88. 90. 91. 93, 103. 107. 123, 124.
129ff
learner's role 10,13, 90, 128ff
learner's system 129 see user's grammar
learning objectives 70f, 79
learning strategies 8 see learner's role
level of detail 52. 70f see syllabus
Lewis, M 10
lexical items31, 118.123,130 see common words
lexically-based grammar 80ff, 90
lexical objectives 71, 79
lexical research see COBUILD project
lexical sets 77
lexical syllabus vff 15ff 22ff. 27. 32. 46ff, 52. 59ff. 70ff, 76, 81, 88 90, 91ff. 124ff. 129
lexicon entries 36 see dictionary entries; reference sections
like 78f
linguistic syllabus see structural syllabus
listening and repeating see form-focused activities
listening stage 64f, 72f see recordings
Littlewood 5
Index 136
present simple iv, 9f, 24, 92, 108
present tense 9f, 20, 85, 92ff
present time 9
prestige variety 59ff
priority 15f
problem solving 63 see communicative activities; replication
production see presentation methodology
progress 5, 24
progressive aspect 17, 24, 49f, 92f, l00ff, 123
proliferation 40 sec difficulty
propositional adequacy see adequacy
re 85
real English see language use; real language
real language 124ff see language use
real meanings see language use
real outcomes see language use
recordings 34f 62, 64, 74ff, 91,108 sec spontaneous recordings
recycling 69 8Sf 88, 90, 105f, 129
reference sections 80, 84f, 88, 90, 91. 95f
reference skills 84
referencing 81. 90f. 129,131
rehearsing 61f, 74 sec form-focused activities; report; task-based methodology
relative clauses vi. 43, 91
remedial beginners see false beginners
Renouf, A Z7, 76
repetition see controlled pattern practice
replication 58ff, 127
report 61ff, 72. 129
reported speech 16. 20ff, 23,44, 51, 81.90. 91f, 123,130
reported statements see reported speech
reported thought 22
reporting verbs 20ff
requests 6
Review pages 34f, 90
right 125
role of teacher see teacher's role
role play 58 see communicative activities; simulation
rubrics 34. 77f
rules 7f, 20f. 23. 26, 40, 108f, 126
Rutherford, W E iii, 7f
-s 81
s 81, 85
scripted dialogue vii, 75, 124f see inauthentic texts; recordings
scripted recordings see scripted dialogue
second conditional 18f, 23, 44, 50f, 90, 93,130
second language acquisition 59 see acquisition
see 50
selection of syllabus content see syllabus
selection preference 40
Selinker, L iii, 24, 131
semantic distinctions 40
semantic fields 30
semantic labels 81
semantic system 128
sentence structure 3, 6f, 10,15 see structural syllabus
shared knowledge 126
signalling see discourse structure; prediction
simplified language 45f, 74, 124f. 126f see inauthentic texts; TEFLese
simulation 57ff
Sinclair, 3 M v, 12; 46,125
skills 5, lOf, 14,120,123 see reference skills
so 80f
social context see style; language lesson
social language 70, 120ff
social pressures 60f see circumstances of communication
some 49, 92. 124 we any
space 50, 124
specialised text 46f
specially written text 26 see inauthentic text
specific needs 47 see needs of learner
spoken discourse see spontaneous recordings; discourse
spontaneity 74ff see language use
spontaneous language use 61, 74ff, 85,123 see language use
spontaneous recordings vii, 64. 74ff, 85, 124ff, 131
stative adjectives 8.16f
stative verbs 49
structural labels 82 see metalanguage
structural syllabus iii, vi, 2f. 5ff. 14, 1 5ff, 22f, 27, 41ff, 52, 60, 91, 110, 127f, 130
style 59ff
subject 18