The idea of a lexical meta-syllabus

Innovation in Curriculum Planning and Program Development

“…Krashen is a particularly prominent advocate of an innovation, but he is not alone; for within the language teaching policy-shaping community, there is no shortage of innovation advocates. At the conceptual level, for instance, the case has been argued for new approaches to syllabus design (e.g., Tripp 1990), for content-based instruction (Irujo 1990, Snow, Met andGenesee 1989), and for task-based instruction (Nunan 1991). At the level of technology and technique, there are extensive surveys of innovations covering such aspects as self-access instruction on the one hand (Sheerin 1991) and video and computer applications on the other (Lonergan 1991).…”

Research in applied linguistics relevant to language teaching: 1990

“…This uses the data-base of English usage compiled for the COBUILD dictionaries to offer a limited learner corpus of authentic language, but also associated it with task-based methodology to develop activities that exploit the semantic potential of lexical items. Tripp (1990) works in a similar direction, proposing an empirically based lexical 'meta-syllabus', though others contributing to the increased interest in vocabulary acquisition (e.g. Nation, 1990) concern themselves more with techniques and only passing references to the curriculum as a whole.…”