ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses a question that has been posed many times and for which many answers have been found. That question is: “What is the language knowledge that learners first need when they learn a language?” Previous answers to the question have generally focused on specific grammatical structures or vocabulary that were considered useful. The major exception to this is the Council of Europe work which has defined a Threshold level (Van Ek & Alexander, 1975), and a lower Waystage level (Van Ek, Alexander & Fitzpatrick, 1977), in terms of communicative function – what people need to do with language.
