|
Introduction A basic assumption underlying this book is that, in addition to the skills of good pronunciation and basic grammaticality, words are the indispensable tools of the language learner. Successful learning of the lexicon of English - and English has a huge lexicon - depends greatly on the words one already knows. If, for example, the learner knows "act," it is easier to learn "action, active, activity," etc. Or, if the learner knows one meaning of "put," it is easier to learn additional meanings, such as, "put away," or "put down." Learning is a process that depends heavily on using what we know to learn something new. Each lesson, then, is crammed with words - on average 70 new words in each of the ten lessons. For speakers of Romance or Germanic languages, many of the words are not especially challenging to learn, but for other learners, the acquisition of 700 individual lexemes can be a slow and arduous process. Therefore, the background of the learner is a key variable in the amount of time required to proceed through the lessons. In fact, there is no designated time frame for covering the ten lessons. Where to start and stop will depend on each teacher's judgement of how fast to proceed with each distinctive class. Words, of course, must be strung together in phrases and sentences following the grammatical rules of English. The grammatical structures covered in this book are outlined in the appendix on pages 135 to 146, but the basic organizing principle is the systematic presentation of English phrase and sentence structure in normal English word order which is: subject noun phrase, verb phrase, object noun phrase, and adverbial phrases and clauses, as diagrammed below. SNP VP ONP ADVL**
|
