Are you trying to learn English but don't know where to begin or what to study? Have you ever learned a new word but forgot it the next day? These two problems can be solved by science. The first science looks at the number of words in a text. There are 300 words in this description. The most common word, THE, has a coverage of 8% because it appears 24 times and covers 8% of the words in the description. The next most common word is the verb BE. Its count of 21 includes all its inflected forms (for example, is, are, was, and were) so it has a coverage of 7%. The combined coverage of THE and BE is 15%. Coverage is important because it tells you two things. First, it tells you if you are likely to understand a text. You need to know at least 95% of the words in a text to be able to read it without a dictionary. Second, it tells you which words you need to study to get to that 95%. Not all words are equal. Some words are more important than others when you begin to learn a second language, and the word's coverage tells us how important it is. The words on the New General Service List are the most important words based on this research into coverage. The second problem can be solved with the science of memory. This research tells us the best way to remember something is to repeat the learning at increasingly longer time intervals. In other words, you need to look at the words many times at different times. This puzzle book uses the same words in different puzzles. As you work your way through the book, you will meet the words many times. This will help you to remember their meanings.

The Side by Side Communication Games book is an innovative teacher resource that provides a wealth of interactive language games designed to serve as enjoyable and motivating reinforcement of key grammatical structures presented in the students texts. All of the games are accompanied by reproducible activity masters for ease of classroom use. Side by Side is a standards-based and grammar-based English language program for adult and young-adult learners, The program builds students' general language proficiency and prepares them for their life-skill roles in the community, family, school, and at work.

Written for researchers and graduate students in the field of vocabulary studies, Researching and Analyzing Vocabulary covers a wide range of vocabulary research topics that include experimental, qualitative, and corpus-based work. The study of vocabulary has direct implications for teaching and learning while enhancing student knowledge of research practices.

This book illustrates the ways that cognitive linguistics, a relatively new paradigm in language studies, can illuminate and facilitate language research and teaching. The first part of the book introduces the basics of cognitive linguistic theory in a way that is geared toward second language teachers and researchers. The second part of the book provides experimental evidence of the usefulness of applying cognitive linguistics to the teaching of English. Included is a thorough review of the existing literature on cognitive linguistic applications to teaching and cognitive linguistic-based experiments. Three chapters report original experiments which focus on teaching modals, prepositions and syntactic constructions, elements of English that learners tend to find challenging. A chapter on “future directions” reports on an innovative analysis of English conditionals. Pedagogical aids such as diagrams and sample exercises round out this pioneering and innovative text.

This Handbook provides a comprehensive treatment of basic and more advanced research methodologies in applied linguistics and offers a state-of-the-art review of methods particular to various domains within the field. Arranged thematically in 4 parts, across 41 chapters, it covers a range of research approaches, presents current perspectives, and addresses key issues in different research methods, such as designing and implementing research instruments and techniques, and analysing different types of applied linguistics data. Innovations, challenges and trends in applied linguistics research are examined throughout the Handbook. As such it offers an up-to-date and highly accessible entry point into both established and emerging approaches that will offer fresh possibilities and perspectives as well as thorough consideration of best practices. This wide-ranging volume will prove an invaluable resource to applied linguists at all levels, including scholars in related fields such as language learning and teaching, multilingualism, corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, discourse analysis and pragmatics, language assessment, language policy and planning, multimodal communication, and translation.

Crystal-clear and comprehensive yet concise, this text describes the steps involved in the curriculum design process, elaborates and justifies these steps, and provides opportunities for practicing and applying them. The description of the steps is done at a general level so that they can be applied in a wide range of particular circumstances. The process comes to life through plentiful examples of actual applications of the steps. Each chapter includes: examples from the authors’ experience and from published research tasks that encourage readers to relate the steps to their own experience case studies and suggestions for further reading that put readers in touch with others’ experience Curriculum, or course, design is largely a 'how-to-do-it' activity that involves the integration of knowledge from many of the areas in the field of Applied Linguistics, such as language acquisition research, teaching methodology, assessment, language description, and materials production. Combining sound research/theory with state-of-the-art practice, Language Curriculum Design is widely applicable for ESL/EFL language education courses around the world.

Research into lexical issues has been one of the most rapidly growing areas of second language acquisition studies in recent years, and understandably so: the importance of vocabulary can hardly be denied. Words are the key to every instance of communication, both spoken and written. This volume concentrates on vocabulary in written language, mostly in academic settings. The writers of the chapters come from different countries and universities, and, naturally, represent their own academic backgrounds, though they all share a common interest in investigating the characteristics of L2 lexis as it manifests itself in the written production of students at various stages of their language learning careers. The target language (L2) in the studies reported in the volume is English, except in one study on the lexical competence of multilingual learners of French. The subjectsâ (TM) native languages include Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hungarian, and Swedish, thus representing several different language families. Each chapter constitutes an independent unit, but together the studies reported in them give the reader a varied and extensive picture of lexical issues in L2 writing. The authors approach their topics from different perspectives and use diverse research methods, adding to the multifaceted nature of the volume. The book will be of interest to researchers, educators and students of second language acquisition and applied linguistics.