TESOL/Notional-functional approach

The notional-functional approach in ESL is a way of structuring a syllabus around "notions," real-life situations in which people communicate, which are further broken down into "functions," specific aims of communication.

When designing a lesson, teachers in TESOL often choose a real-world situation as their "notion," and choose corresponding functions to teach to prepare students to communicate in that situation in the lesson. For example, a lesson might be about how to buy something at a shop, in which case its notion is shopping and one of its functions might be asking prices.

Functions often lend themselves naturally to specific grammatical patterns or common expressions. In the shopping example, one expression might be the question "how much is this (singular noun)?"