Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

1 the
2 of
3 and
4 a
5 in
6 to
7 it
8 is
9 was
10 to (prep)
11 I
12 for
13 you
14 he
15 be
16 with
17 on
18 that (conj)
19 by
20 at
21 are
22 not
23 this
24 but
25 ‘s (poss)
26 they
27 his
28 from
29 had
30 she
31 which
32 or
33 we
34 an
35 n’t
36 ‘s (verb)
37 were
38 that (det)
39 been
40 have
41 their
42 has
43 would
44 what
45 will
46 there
47 if
48 can
49 all
50 her
The first surprise on looking at this list is that most of the words feature in the
discussion of grammar in Chapter 2 since they are structure words, such as articles
‘the’, pronouns ‘it’, auxiliaries ‘would’ and forms of the verb ‘be’. Usually the
teaching of structure words is seen as part of grammar, not vocabulary. Frequency
is taken to apply more to content words. Nevertheless we should not forget that
the most frequent words in the language are mostly structure words: the top 100
words only include three nouns.
The 20 most frequent words in the BNC for three types of content word are
given in Table 3.1 overleaf.
This list also has some surprises for teachers. The nouns ‘government’ and ‘sys-
tem’, the verbs ‘become’ and ‘seem’, and the adjectives ‘social’ and ‘public’ are sel-
dom taught in beginners’ courses, despite their high frequency. Many of the
nouns have vague, general meanings, like ‘people’ and ‘thing’; many words are
abstract, like ‘seem’ or ‘available’, or involve subjective evaluation, ‘think’ and
‘good’. The first lesson of the elementary course Move (Bowler and Parminter,
2007) concentrates on specific concrete nouns like ‘cinema’ and ‘shops’, and verbs
for actions such as ‘study’ or ‘visit’.
While word frequency has some relevance to teaching, other factors are also
important, such as the ease with which the meaning of an item can be demon-
strated (‘blue’ is easier to explain than ‘local’) and its appropriateness for what the
students want to say (‘plane’ is more useful than ‘system’ if you want to travel).
Indeed the frequency-based French course Voix et Images needed to amplify the
list of frequent words with those that were ‘available’ to the speaker, which may
not necessarily be very common. The word ‘surname’ found in lesson 1 of Changes

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Learning and teaching vocabulary