Not long ago, a (non ESL) teacher/friend noticed the term 'graded material' in an article and commented: What? Are ESL teachers expected to grade (assess) their material as well as their students?

Graded material, as any ESL teacher knows, is material arranged in order of difficulty - progressing from the simple to the more difficult. Carefully graded materials are important in most areas of teaching; in language teaching, they are essential.

What are the criteria for determining difficulty?

Forty years ago, difficulty was determined solely by word level: There were official wordlists for beginners all through to advanced learners. Structural levels of difficulty were largely ignored, and you could find sentences in beginner level textbooks/readers such as, "and he was never heard from again" - because the lexical item 'again' appeared on the basic level wordlist. Just imagine having to teach/learn English that way!

About thirty years ago, the emphasis shifted. Structural level became the criterion for determining difficulty - and materials were graded accordingly. In the vanguard was the popular Longman's series of structurally graded readers. Editors and publishers in the field began to implement the then-called 'structural approach' in earnest and, carefully correlating it with
the official wordlists, and produced the grading system which has been in use since then. And what a welcome change that was!

Still, when a pendulum swings, it sometimes goes to the opposite extreme. A whole generation of adherence to exclusively structural/lexical guidelines has also produced a tendency towards some very stilted dialogue and some culturally limited materials. However, a change is in the air!

More and more, those who are aware of the phenomenon are seeing a third criterion applied alongside existing grading criteria: Frequency. Frequency is measured by how often an item comes up in 'real language' - irrespective of its structural or lexical difficulty.

My advice to ESL teachers in the field: Don't wait thirty years for the frequency yardstick to be fully realized. Go with your instincts:

A. If you are teaching in elementary school in Arabia, for example, you know that the idea of a pet dog is foreign to your students (dogs are used to help shepherds) whereas the concept of a pet goat is very familiar. So follow the guideline 'Frquency as an added criterion for grading' and teach the word 'goat'very early on - adding it to 'dog' - or even substituting it - when that word comes up in your graded textbooks/readers.

B. If you are teaching adult conversation, and especially if you're a native speaker of American English, you know that the greeting 'How've you been?'is a high frequency item. Yet it doesn't appear in course books along with the expressions 'How are you?' etc. because of its structural complexity/grading. So teach 'How've you been?' together with the other greetings - preferably for active use, but at least for aural comprehension purposes.

In other words, use your common sense regarding frequency. If your language instincts are good, and you're still in ESL thity years from now, you will be seeing your additions appearing in published material!

Miriam Lavi has been professionally involved in ESL for forty years. She is the author of the
popular e-guide 'How to Become a Personal ESL Trainer' which is available exclusively via her website: www.esltrainers.com.