ABSTRACT
A notional-functional approach is concerned with analyzing language in terms of its communicative uses in specifi c contexts. As you learned in the vignette, British linguist David Wilkins (1976) outlined the basic tenets of this approach almost 40 years ago. You can tell from the reactions of the interviewee in the vignette that the notional-functional approach to curriculum design is quite different from a purely structural approach with its focus on language structures. The structural approach is often thought to be a synthetic approach because it is made up of separate, pre-selected, and ordered units of language (see Chapter 8, Appendix A, for example). The notional-functional approach as Wilkins conceived it was intended to be an analytic approach because it was not meant to rely totally on linguistic controls but to present language globally and in context.1 In an analytic approach, semantic demands determine linguistic content.
