Where do we start? The place of prototypicality in FLT

Over the last few years, mainly as a result of the advent of computerised corpora, frequency has been established as one of the most important criteria in selecting the words and structures to be taught to foreign language learners (see e.g. Sinclair & Renouf 1988, Römer 2004). The idea is that, because they represent the type of usage that a learner is most likely to encounter in authentic interactions, the most frequent linguistic items should be given priority in Foreign Language Teaching (FLT). In this presentation, it will be claimed that it is not frequency, but prototypicality that should be used as a selectional criterion in FLT – at least in the first stages. The different senses of the verb 'give' will be used as an illustration to defend this position. While the “frequency approach” would put emphasis on the delexical sense, as in (1), which is the most common one in a spoken and a written corpus of English (Switchboard and FROWN), the “prototype approach”, advocated here, claims that sentences such as (2), where 'give' has its prototypical sense of “handing”, should be favoured when introducing learners to the verb 'give'. (1) He turned to us and gave a big smile. (2) He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and gave it to her. Two arguments will be put forward to support this view, one cognitive and the other contrastive. The cognitive argument, relying on previous experimental studies (e.g. Mervis & Pani 1980), will show that learning of a category is more effective when exposure is through a prototypical, rather than non-prototypical, item. The contrastive argument will demonstrate, on the basis of bilingual data from the PLECI corpus, that the prototype is more likely to have a direct equivalent in the learner’s mother tongue than derived senses, which has the effect of increasing the learnability of the word. The presentation will end with two important caveats. First, the identification of the prototypes should not be based on intuition, but should be the result of careful psycholinguistic experiments, so as to ensure that the prototypes thus established correspond to a cognitive reality. Second, the prototypical linguistic items should be illustrated by means of examples extracted from corpora, so that learners have a chance to see these words used in authentic contexts