Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1989. 19/3. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 19)

Kovács, Éva: The History of Teaching Vocabulary

- 136 words it means that wtieo forming sentences one pnrt of the. sentence Is a kind of controlling sitmulus on the other. The motto of the exercises we could use here could be: 'I begin and you go on ' The pupil hoars one part of an utterance from the teacher (e. g. ' Can you I think you , I hope it is , If you come, will you ) and this is the stimulus which evokes the linguistic form of the other part of the utterance. What is the methodological importance of the categories of Skinner's verbal behaviour? No doubt, that the principle of the selection of the material is the principle of frequency. The following works were written on the basis of the vocabulary frequency: A General Service List Of English Words by M. West A Teacher's Word Oook of the 20000 Words Found Most Frequently and Widely in General Reading for Young Children and Young People by E. L. Thorndike English Word Lists by C. C. Fries, A. A. Traver The most important and frequent structures were collected by A. S. Hornby in his A Guide to Patterns and Usage in English and by E

. L. Thorndike et al. in Invertory of English Coostructions. It was S. P. Corder, however, who was the first to ask the question: Which categories of verbal behaviour are the most freguent in English? To answer this question Corder used the first five categories of Skinner's verbal behaviour and analysed a play by Galsworthy, the title of which is The Skin Game. The analysis of the play gave the following frequency values: Mandas 33 % Tacts 9 % Intraverbal 50 % Echoic 2,5 h Textual 0,5 % To confirm these results, however, several other plays, or films should be analysed, but it is not likely that there would be significant differences. Referring these results to language teaching we could come to the conclusion that more emphasis should be placed on the categories of mands and tacts. On the basis of Skinner's categories of verbal behaviour and their