It soon became clear, however, that language functions alone were not a satisfactory organising principle. In the first place some realisations of functions are in fact little more than fixed phrases (e.g. You must be joking!' Come off it!'). It may be important to learn them, but that is all you learn! In other words, some functional just single items exponents are you cannot use them to generate more language as can with you grammatical structure (see 2.2). Another problem lies i how to grade functions. Which should come first? What order should the grammar be taught in for students to be able it functions? A purely to apply to functional organisation meant that notions of difficulty which had informed earlier grammatical syllabuses could not be used since the grammar used to perform one function might be more or less difficult than the grammar used to perform the other. And the teaching of functions raised many problems that grammatical teaching had previously done (One not contentious argument was that by teaching people British people how apologise, for example, you were imposing a cultural stereotype on them.