Highly polysemous words in Foreign Language Teaching: How to give learners a flying start
Gaëtanelle Gilquin · Digital Access to Libraries (Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), l'Université de Namur (UNamur) and the Université Saint-Louis (USL-B)) · 2006
Since corpus linguistics has made it possible to approach language from a quantitative perspective and determine the probability of particular linguistic phenomena, several voices have been raised to defend the role of frequency in FLT (e.g. Sinclair & Renouf 1988). The reasoning behind this position is that learners should be taught what is most frequent in language, since it is what is of most use to them. While there is no denying that frequency is a decisive factor when teaching a foreign language, it is worth wondering at what stage the most common use of a word should be introduced. In this paper, it is argued that, when teaching highly polysemous words, it is not the most frequent sense that should be taught first, but the most “prototypical” one. Two arguments will be put forward to support this view, one contrastive and the other cognitive.