if i must complete your homework assignment for you, i require full attribution within the paper and the link to this question also in said paper.
i also require that you actually read, understand and attempt to run this code to enable you to understand it.
//get all the test from the file
$text_from_file = file_get_contents("filename.txt");
//get all the words within that text
$words = str_word_count($text_from_file , 1);
//count up all the unique words within the array
$unique = array_count_values($words);
//sort by most to least frequent
arsort($unique); //arsort required to keep keys and values together
//since we dont know the key values here, we need to use foreach
foreach($unique as $key => $val) {
echo("The most common word is " . $key . " which occurs " . $val . " times");
break; //always break after the first echo
}