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Article published In:
ITL - International Journal of Applied Linguistics
Vol. 47 (1980) ► pp.15–27

Focal Words and the Recovery of Sentence Meaning

| Professor of Linguistics and Education, Rutgers University Camden, New Jersey

In listening and reading, the foreign language learner must be able to process a tremendous amount of information in a short time. In order to do this, he must develop a strategy for choosing those items that help in recovering that information. One way of doing this is to concentrate on focal words: words containing key elements of meaning in the sentence. These words may then be used - in speech and writing - to reconstruct the original message. This paper explores the relationship of focel words to other sentence elements and describes various focal word exercises for listening and reading.

Published online: 1 January 1980
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/itl.47.02dar
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