When Learning English
Focus On The Glue

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By simply sticking two substances together, glue proves to be highly practical with a huge variety of uses.

Likewise, when learning English. High frequency words make up the figurative 'glue' that binds phrases and sentences together so speech becomes fluent and easy to understand.

What are high frequency words? According to author Robert Hillerich, "Just three words - I, and, the - account for ten percent of all words in printed English." (eduplace dot com)

According to "The Reading Teachers’ Book of Lists", 25 words make up 30% of all written material, and just 100 words account for 50 percent.

Common sense alone therefore dictates that putting an infusion of time and energy into learning these high frequency words will yield rapid results.

Simple But No So Easy!

However, the task is not quite so simple as it appears at first glance. Many of these high frequency words are abstract. Just how can you teach words like, a/an, the, of, in, to, or that?

The key is to include them in the course of each lesson in a natural way. It is best not to teach individual words.

Rather, words should be included in phrases and short sentences. So the student learns a word in context, or sees how a word can be used in relation to other words.

For example, rather than just teaching the word "dog", perhaps showing it on a flash card, or picture, it is better to teach the word in a sentence such as: "This is a dog."

Here, three high frequency words are introduced, "this", "is", and "a", along with the core word.

So a flash card or picture can still be used but a phrase or sentence should appear underneath the graphic rather than a single word.

Following on from this idea, students can be given a printout of a news story or a paragraph or two from an article on an interesting subject.

Four or five high frequency words can be targeted such as: of, this, in, to, and. These words can be written at the top of the sheet of paper, and then replaced by a blank space in the text itself. If the material is prepared on a computer this task is easy.

A printout can then be given to each student who now has to fill in the blanks with the appropriate high frequency word.

A copy of the original text showing the high frequency words in their proper places can then be distributed to the students. They can choose a partner and then exchange each other’s work to mark it by comparing it with the original.

This exercise is helpful in three ways:

• First, each student has to think and fill in the blanks on their own copy, thus attempting to use the high frequency words in the right way.

• Secondly, by marking a fellow student’s work, the student concentrates on the original, and thus sees how the word should be used.

• Thirdly, they learn from the mistakes of a fellow student as they mark the sheet and make corrections. This serves to doubly impress on the mind how the high frequency word should be used within that specific context.

Teaching students how to use the glue of vocabulary, the high frequency linking words, should be a matter of priority and introduced as soon as possible in the lessons, even for beginners when learning English.

As a new student begins to grasp the use of these fundamental, high frequency words, they will sense their own progress which will provide powerful motivation to increase their efforts to learn the new language.