19 categories for lesson one

I decided that for a first lesson 19 categories would suffice, including the I DON'T KNOW THIS WORD category.

Work starts with the assumption that the student has studied basic English up to the level of KET. How they respond to a non communicative beginning will depend on their motivation and learning style. Probably for a lot of people it would be more fun to begin with a text...(Coming soon)

Things to do with lists:

This page divides the list into 38 categories. Note that there are opposites - which provides a ready made kind of exercise. Sorting the whole list would be a big and rather boring revision task.

The list in its original form contains 100 "qualities" and 50 of these have a corresponding opposite.

more for the Simple English list

oops...I've just realised that my first lot of 190 words are the ones INLCUDED in "independent user" there's a further 100 words which are not even included in this higher level but still made it into the Ogden list: "worm" for example.

ELT lexical syllabus

Simple English of the kind used for the Simple English version of wikipedia doesn't have a strict definition of the words that are permissible...but it certainly includes all of the 850 in Ogden's list of 850 basic ones.

Comparing this with the KET wordlist I find that Ogden has 190 words not covered by KET. See the "new lists" page on Wikieducator.