Introduction

The words in any given language can be divided in content and function words. Content words include nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs, i.e. words that carry meaning. Function words, on the other hand, are grammatical words that serve structural purposes in a sentence rather than carrying lexical meaning. They help establish relationships between content words and provide grammatical cohesion.

Function words include: articles, prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs, negation words, question words and particles. Table 2 below provides the full list of function words with examples from French and Spanish.

Why Are Function Words SO Important?

Function words are essential because they structure sentences, provide grammatical cohesion, and clarify meaning. Without function words, communication would be disjointed, ambiguous, or even incomprehensible. In other words, they are the glue that holds sentences together and in speech they improve our students’ communication and fluency. They are also very useful for comprehension, as they help language learners predict sentence meaning even if they don’t know all the content words in a sentence.

The following stats will give you an idea of how essential they are to communication and how important it is for our students to learn them:

• although they constitute 1% of the entire lexicon of a language, they make up 55% of any text.
• they dominate the most frequent 200 words in most languages (e.g. English, French and Spanish)
• 50% of the top 1,000 words in any language are function words

With the above statistics in mind it will be immediately clear how important these words are in the context of the new GCSE, whose core vocabulary is based on word-frequency lists: they will consitute a massive chunk of the vocabulary your GCSE students are expected to learn for the new GCSE. A telling example: the definite article ‘le’ is ranked n 1 in French, in terms of frequency, on those lists…

The least focused-on words in language curricula and the most lately acquired ones too!

Although they are so key to communication and fluency, these words are notoriously the most neglected and the least successfully taught words in most MFL curricula! It is not uncommon to find that even our A-level students struggle with these words. At GCSE, the vast majority of our students, including the more able, have problems recalling and using function words in spontaneous speech and writing. In fact, you may be surprised to learn that these words are acquired late in our native language too. But why is it?

The main reason why these words are the least successfully learnt by our students refer to five main issues summarised in the table below:

Points 1, 2 and 3 in Table 3 are key and compound one another. If a word is already not too important for meaning, is weakly stressed in speech and is abstract, it is obvious that the the average language learner is unlikely to notice and learn it. Add to this the fact that these words do not always have a straightforward translation in the students’ L1 and that often the translation varies (e.g. ‘en’ in French can mean in, at, to and whilst).

Many traditional instructional practices make the intrinsic challenges these words pose to the learner even greater. These are a few examples of such practices:

1. Most of the listening and reading activities staged by language teachers do focus the students on comprehension, but rarely do they explicitly target these words.
2. The speed of delivery of aural texts doesn’t often allow the learners, especially at lower levels of proficiency, to notice these words. In EPI, on the other hand, the teacher models the sentences using a slow to moderate pace and uses a number of techniques and tasks to make these words noticeable and learnable, e.g. (1) input enhancement (to make function words stand out), (2) input-flood (to induce repeated processing of these words), (3) gapped dictations or the ‘Spot the missing detail’ task ; (4) gapped and tangled translations (where the focus is on these words); (5) Faulty transcript/Spot the difference; (6) Listen and spot the error (where function words are used incorrectly); etc.
3. Many teachers and published instructional resources teach words in isolation. The Linguascope website is the most flagrant example of this, with lists of ten words to learn on their own completely decontextualised – which, according to research, is the most ineffective way of learning vocabulary for beginners. In EPI, the focus being on learning chunks of language, the students are introduced to and practise function words all the time and repeatedly, in context, and through masses of highly comprehensible input.
4. Teachers rarely deliberately plan for the regular recycling of these words overtime through distributed practice. This is a big shortcoming because function words, by virtue of their abstractness and low saliency, are harder to commit to memory, hence they may require even more recycling than content words.

Implications for teaching

First of all, language teachers may want to use sentence builders or any other modelling tools which present function words in context through highly comprehensible input.

Secondly, when modelling the use of function words orally, they should do so using input enhancement techniques. Modelling through listening-whilst-reading techniques (as we do in EPI) at a slow-to-moderate pace whilst emphasizing these words through vocal and visual input enhancement techniques is very effective in facilitating noticing, especially in the presence of the assimilation phenomenon which causes a function words to blend in with the first syllable in the next word (e.g. in ‘il y a beaucoup de gens’ where ‘de’ is hardly audible in naturalistic speech).

Thirdly, teachers should stage a number of receptive and productive retrieval practice activities which deliberately target function words (as per the examples provided in the previous paragraph). Sentence-combining tasks can also be powerful in practising these words meaningfully, especially when it comes to connectives.

Fourthly, the curriculum should deliberately recycle function words many times over, constantly engaging the students in retrieval practice episodes. Aim at 30 to 40 encounters overall across all four skills.

Fifthly, do raise your students’ awareness of the importance of these words and, by regularly drawing their attention to them when dealing with written and oral texts, sensitize them to their existence. Also, encourage them to experiment with the function words that will enhance their oral and written output, such high-frequency discourse markers, indirect or emphatic pronouns, etc.

Lastly, since these words are notoriously difficult to commit to long-term memory, besides tons of recycling, do endeavour to be as multimodal as possible, employing gestures, images, songs, rhymes, digital, miniwhiteboard as well as paper-based learning, mnemonics, etc. Table 4 below lists a number of possible techniques you could use.