“The BIG English language depends on the LITTLE language. The little language, they found, can do a big job all by itself.”

Through the years, Special English of VOA has become a very popular tool for teaching English, although it was not designed as a teaching program. The short sentences, limited vocabulary and slow pace of speaking make it easy to understand.  It succeeds in helping people learn English in a non-traditional way.  People around the world practice their listening and speaking skills by recording the programs and playing them repeatedly.  Internet users can also listen to programs on the Special English Web site while reading the text.  And they can receive scripts of features by e-mail.  In countries around the world, many English teachers require their students to listen to Special English. They praise it for the content of the programs and for improving their students’ ability to understand American English.  Universities, governments and private companies publish and broadcast Special English materials for use in English teaching.

American Mosaic, one of the main programmes of VOA special English with various topics of culture and music has so far attracted the attention of English learners.

" Mosaic is spelled m-o-s-a-i-c. The dictionary says that the word "mosaic" means a picture or design that is made by placing small colored pieces together. You can see colorful mosaics in art and in designs on buildings.

We chose the name "American Mosaic" because the purpose of the show is to create a picture of life in the United States through many small stories. Each story is different, like the different pieces of a mosaic. But together, they form a complete picture. We hope American Mosaic provides a complete and interesting picture of life in the United States.”

(About American Mosaic - 01 January 2009)

The more learners like the topics, the more effectively they learner language.

Besides, for better listening, it is necessary for language learners to understand relationships among vocabulary items in discourse. “Language learners will need to develop the full range of lexical strategies”[39]. Knowing lexical cohesion in discourse well, learners can understand it clearly and deeply.

As one of the most important cohesive mechanisms for the actualization of textual coherence, lexical cohesion has recently led to much debate in the field of applied linguistics and text linguistics. Halliday & Hasan define it as the cohesive relationship achieved by the selection of vocabulary, which is realized by certain cohesive devices and cohesive ties [30, p275]. The earliest study dealing with lexical cohesion can be traced back to Halliday, who, for the first time, introduces the notion of cohesion and attempts to root cohesion in the framework of semantics. In his model, two general categories of cohesion are defined: grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. Halliday and Hasan develop lexical cohesion to the perspective of texture. According to their categorization [30], lexical cohesion is composed of reiteration, synonymy, hyponymy and collocation. From then on, with the development of functional linguistics and text linguistics, large quantities of remarkable achievements have been made, and studies of lexical cohesion have been in multi-level patterns, among which Hoey's [39] model is the most influential. Since the1990s, the emphasis on research into lexical cohesion has gradually shifted from theoretical exploration to genre-based practical analysis and to contrastive studies across languages.