Needs Assessment, GSL

Hello, students of the seniors' class!

This week we are getting to know our Language Companion binders, writing our stories, talking about goals for English, and doing a needs assessment. We are between topics.

Needs assessments are not new to you. We've been doing those since I first became your teacher. You know what? It's not easy for a teacher to come up with interesting modules week after week when the makeup of the class doesn't change! Some of us have been together for four years now, I think! Other teachers can recycle old material every few months.

Anyway, while we figure out what we want to tackle next, I would like to address everyone's goal of mastering the English needed for everyday life in Canada. Have you ever heard of the General Service List?

That is a list of the 2,000 most common words used in English. If you can understand those, you are well on your way to understanding 90-95% of spoken English and about 85% of written English. So let's see how many of them you already know. I have an activity to help you learn a few of the ones you haven't already mastered.

Here is a new expanded GSL with frequency ranking numbers!