Until very recently, vocabulary played a role in the production of language teaching materials that was very definitely a secondary one. Although inevitably present in any course book, vocabulary was generally subordinated to other elements that were considered more important to the process of learning a language. Thus, in the 1950s and 1960s, when grammar translation was the dominant approach to language teaching, the lexical content of courses was considered less important than the grammatical content of textbooks. To a large extent, the vocabulary taught was determined by the words that appeared in the works of classical authors whose texts were used for teaching purposes. Later, the structural or audiolingual methods, based on behaviourist theories subordinated the vocabulary to be taught to the linguistic structures that the student was required to automatize during the process of learning. In the 1970s, communicative approaches to language teaching began to be developed, partly as a reaction to the short-comings of earlier methods. Functions and Notions came to be the main curricular focus for language teaching, and functional-notional approaches dominated classroom practice. The vocabulary which appears in courses that were developed with this method in mind simply reflects the vocabulary which is used in the context chosen to introduce the functions and notions which the student is required to master – In the restaurant, At the airport, At the doctor’s to list but a few of the typical ones. The common assumption that underlies all these treatments of vocabulary is the idea that vocabulary acquisition takes place naturally when people learn other more basic elements: learn grammar, or structures, or functions, and you will inevitably learn vocabulary. Vocabulary acquisition is something that just happens on its own. One consequence of this is that the textbooks of the period show a surprisingly cavalier attitude towards the vocabulary items that they choose to teach. Words are included almost at random, and their selection depends heavily on the intuition of authors.
This paper illustrates this problem in a series of beginners’ Spanish courses. Specifically, we analysed a set of six textbooks published by the BBC over a period of 30 years (1965-1995). These courses were all aimed at adult learners of Spanish, working on their own, and were primarily intended as a companion text for radio and television broadcasts. Inevitably, however, they were widely adopted as standard textbooks for adult learners attending classes as well. It is difficult to underestimate the influence of these courses on adult education, and it is no exaggeration to say that these courses pretty much defined the syllabus for adult learners of Spanish in the UK for a period of about thirty years
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