That made me think of something else.
The word ‘hay’ apparently appears approximately once in a hundred thousand words. (1108/100,000,000 in British English, but I assume it’s not much different across the pond.)
So, based on ‘usefulness’, wouldn’t it be better to use a word like ‘grass’, which is used almost four times as often as ‘hay’? Or is it a book about the different forms grass can take and their importance in English? Is the book intended to educate young urbanites about the difference between straw, grass, hay, silage, and all the rest of it? Does it include all those cool idioms about grass being greener and what you can do while the sun shines?
Obviously, in this case, I’m just being silly. I know nothing about teaching kids, and not much more about teaching adults, except that kids don’t use a vocabulary that is representative of the whole language. They only talk about things that are interesting for them, and the vocabulary they use is ‘specialised’, for want of a better word.
But the example serves to illustrate a dilemma I have.
If you’re targeting older readers (or listeners) with a book, website, newsletter, podcast, youtube video, or anything else then you have a problem of what kind of language to use. Very few people contemplating an MBA overseas can make sense of CNN or the BBC, even with video to watch. If they’re primed with a simplified version they can understand, and then taught any new vocab they can then usually understand the ‘authentic’ stuff, but they do need to ‘get the sense of it’ first. So authentic native-speaker level material is not much use for them on its own.
In particular, there’s a knowledge gap between what the average young Taiwanese knows about the world and what they are expected to know by potential employers and educational institutions. Getting them to read up in English that will also reinforce their language abilities sounds like a great idea, except that there isn’t any.
So, instead of teaching English, my focus these days is on reading, writing, talking about whatever topics are of interest or useful to my students. I try to either develop their knowledge, or have them share their knowledge with me, through the medium of English. There’s a lot of incidental language-teaching, but most of it is related to how the language works rather than what word means what. It’s an approach that seems to work, but there’s a shortage of suitable material - not many graded readers for adults.
Most of the locally-produced stuff targeted at adults tends to be overly-complex, not very informative, and focused on vocabulary. They get bogged down with the vocabulary, which is all that is explained, and neglect intermediate grammar. I was with a guy last night who was completely foxed by the word “which” appearing in the middle of a sentence, even though we had previously gone through all the detail of the vocabulary. Learning new words isn’t going to help him, he needs to improve his grammar in order to make use of what he knows, which he can do just by reading material of an appropriate nature. But there isn’t any.
My question therefore is, how do you set a standard to work to if you’re producing material in English for the local market that is intended to educate about more than just English? Assuming you can get around the brainwashing so that your customers want your product, what would be a good average level?
I’m thinking that a basic vocabulary of the 2000 or so most common words would be a good place to start, but is that going to be enough? As JD’s example shows, you may need to use uncommon words due to the specialised nature of your audience. For academic purposes you could add the 560(?) words in the academic word list too, but they’re not as useful for more general audiences.
Would it be appropriate to try and keep your grammar simpler than normal? No perfect tenses, for instance? My instinct says no, but I don’t know much.
Limit your sentence length wherever possible? (I did some work a few years back for one of the educational magazines which had some pretty bizarre rules, one of which was that sentences had to be of a certain minimum length for each level of English.)
What think you all?
