“This is probably one of the most frequently-asked questions in TPRS,” writes Terry Waltz of her TPRS with Chinese Characteristics (2015, p. 73). And the answer to the question depends. Do you have to follow a curriculum? Prepare students for a test? Are you free to teach what you want? In any case, Waltz has some good suggestions: she recommends that you think generically; in other words, select all-purpose language. Another good suggestion is to take a reading that you want students to be able to read and backwards plan from this. This would requiring breaking the text up into manageable chunks for teaching. This has the added benefit of increasing students’ motivation when they realize that they can read something in its entirety. I agree with Waltz completely and would add that in choosing “generic” language, you can consult frequency dictionaries or corpora (searchable databases of language) to make sure you are really prioritizing high-frequency language. If you start using corpora, you start realizing that language really comes in chunks, not usually single lexical items (see “the 100 most common words in spoken Japanese“).
In foreign-language teaching there are many types of syllabi, or ways to organize a course. This is because language is not so easy to package, unlike academic subjects such as history or science which are more easily containerized. As a result, teachers have come up with many different ways to approach the packaging of language. In any case, you (or your program) must make some decisions about how to address something that otherwise students could acquire themselves under the right circumstances. In a nutshell, Graves (2014) identifies nine types of FL syllabi: grammatical, notional-functional, task-based, skills-based, lexical, genre or text-based, project-based, content-based and negotiated. Interestingly, the grammatical syllabus is still in wide usage, despite criticism that it results in students knowing about language, not how to use it. Maybe it is still popular because it is easy to organize language this way. A syllabus based on high-frequency words and phrases would be considered a lexical syllabus. A lexical syllabus is based on a corpus of “common, pragmatically useful language items and language patterns drawn from spoken and written language corpora. The lexical items in the corpus are embedded in authentic language texts and learners work inductively to understand the patterns of usage. This enables them to learn large amounts of useful vocabulary” (Graves, 2014, p. 51). All the syllabus types have pros and cons, but I think that these features of the lexical syllabus are desirable in all foreign-language syllabi. Given the relatively small amount of classroom time typically allocated to a foreign-language program, usually 100-150 hours per year, it makes sense that any targeted language be purposefully chosen.
Fortunately, corpus linguistics makes it possible to know which words are, in fact the most frequently used in speech and writing in a given language. Reppen (2010) writes that “this is an area where corpora can be a valuable language resource, in terms of both knowing what to teach and in providing a rich source of language practice (p. 5). After all, language learning is a gamble. Ellis (2012) puts it this way: “Language, a moving target, can neither be described nor experienced comprehensively, and so, in essence, language learning is estimation from sample. Like other estimation problems, successful determination of the population characteristics is a matter of statistical sampling, description and inference” (p. 139-140). Corpus data allow us to prioritize high-frequency words and then strategically “stack the deck” to take advantage of students’ inherent ability to perceive patterns. Therefore, as a teacher, it makes sense to know what corpus data tell us about the target language. I explore this in the next post.
References
Ellis, N. (2012). Frequency-based accounts of second language acquisition. In S.M. Gass & A. Mackey (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of second language acquisition (193-210). NY, NY: Routledge.
Graves, K. (2014). Syllabus and Curriculum Design for Second Language Teaching. In M. Celce-Muria, D. Brinton & M. Snow (Eds.), Teaching English as a second or foreign language (
Reppen, R. (2010). Using corpora in the language classroom. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Waltz, T. (2015). TPRS with Chinese Characteristics. Squid for Brains Educational Publishing