As teachers, we never have enough time in class to teach learners all the words they need to know. We can only ever teach a small fraction of all the possible words that there are. Textbooks and materials are not always helpful because they often present all vocabulary as being equally important. Think about the following words:

Most of us will instinctively know that some of this vocabulary is more useful to our students than others (tennis in the UK, basketball in China), but a textbook will often present this vocabulary as if it is all equal. When choosing vocabulary to focus on in class, think about frequency, range and usefulness.

Frequency is how often the word is used. Large scale corpora such as the British National Corpus have allowed us to analyse language and identify which words are the most used. Websites like the Compleat Lexical Tutor have vocabulary profile tools which let you put a text in and see which words are the most frequent.

Range is to do with the types of texts a piece of vocabulary is found in. For example, ‘hereby’ is a relatively frequent word but only in written texts and in these it is often restricted to legal texts.

So, although it is frequent, it does not have good range. This brings us to the final principle of usefulness. Is the word or phrase useful to your learners? ‘Hereby’ is unlikely to be useful to learners unless they are dealing with legal texts.

The key questions to ask yourself when choosing the vocabulary to focus on for teaching is: Will this word be useful to the students for the activities in the lesson? Will these words be useful to the learner in the wider world? By doing this, we can choose to focus on the words in class which will have the most benefit to our learners.