The Lexical Approach

The Lexical Approach concentrates on developing learners' proficiency with lexis or vocabulary. It focuses on chunks of language rather than individual words and believes most language is acquired through comprehension and production of lexical phrases. The approach identifies collocations, chunks, and frames and advocates raising learners' awareness of the lexical nature of language through extensive listening, reading, repetition and noticing patterns.

Uploaded by

Gergely Zs

Available Formats

Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

0% found this document useful (0 votes)

243 views

The Lexical Approach

Uploaded by

Gergely Zs

Available Formats

Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

You are on page 1/ 4

The Lexical Approach

The Lexical Approach concentrates on developing learners proficiency with lexis, or words,
word combinations, collocations, sentence frames. It is based on the idea that an important
part of language acquisition is the ability to comprehend and produce lexical phrases as
unanalyzed wholes, or chunks. It is an alternative approach to traditional grammatical
approach.

Lexical chunk is an umbrella term which includes all the other terms. We define a lexical
chunk as any pair or group of words which is commonly found together, or in close
proximity. 50 - 80% of text is made up of chunks. The reason why we are so fluent is that we
have a great amount of overlearnt chunks at our disposal.

To illustrate this idea, think of the phrase “best wishes.” The word “best” in the phrase can
be replaced with “good,” “happy” or “fun” and still be grammatically sound, but native
speakers will know that something’s off and will use the word “best” anyway.

Collocation is also included in the term 'lexical chunk', but we refer to it separately from time
to time, so we define it as a pair of lexical content words commonly found together.
Following this definition, 'basic' + 'principles' is a collocation, but 'look' + 'at' is not because it
combines a lexical content word and a grammar function word. Identifying chunks and
collocations is often a question of intuition, unless you have access to a corpus.

Lexical Chunks (that are not collocations) Lexical Chunks (that are
collocations)
by the way
up to now totally convinced
upside down strong accent
If I were you terrible accident
a long way off sense of humour
out of my mind sounds exciting
brings good luck

Collocations
"Collocation is the readily observable phenomenon whereby certain words co-occur in natural
text with greater than random frequency. Instead of words, we consciously try to think of
collocations, and to present these in expressions. Rather than trying to break things into ever
smaller pieces, there is a conscious effort to see things in larger, more holistic, ways.”
Lewis, M. (1997). Implementing the lexical approach: Putting theory into practice. Hove,
England: Language Teaching

Collocations are arbitrary, decided only by linguistic convention. They are also idiomatic,
very often their meaning cannot be derived from their constituent parts. Some collocations are
fully fixed, such as "to catch a cold," "rancid butter," and "drug addict," while others are
more or less fixed and can be completed in a relatively small number of ways, as in the
following examples:

1. blood / close / distant / near(est) relative

2. learn by doing / by heart / by observation / by rote / from experience

1
3. badly / bitterly / deeply / seriously / severely hurt
4. very quick, clever, interesting, tired
5. absolutely brilliant, awful, fanatic, fantastic

"Language consists of grammaticalized lexis, not lexicalized grammar"

Lewis, M. (1993) The Lexical Approach. Hove: Language Teaching Publications p.34.

Collocational competence

*She listens the classical music .

*He plays on the violin .
*He very likes football .

Taxonomy of Lexical items from Michael Lewis:

 words (e.g., book, pen)

 polywords (e.g., by the way, upside down)
 collocations, or word partnerships (e.g., community service, absolutely convinced)
 institutionalized utterances (e.g., I’ll get it; We’ll see; That’ll do; If I were you; Would
you like a cup of coffee?)
 sentence frames and heads (e.g., That is not as you think; The
fact/suggestion/problem/danger was .) and even text frames (e.g., In this paper we
explore ; Firstly ; Secondly ; Finally)

Ideas about teaching with the Lexical Approach.

 Successful language is a wider concept than accurate language. Emphasis is on

successful communication not grammatical mastery.
 Language is not learnt by learning individual sounds and structures and then
combining them, but by an increasing ability to break down wholes into parts. We can
also use whole phrases without understanding their constituent parts.
 Noticing and recording language patterns and collocations.
 Grammar is acquired by a process of observation, hypothesis and experiment. That is,
the Observe-Hypothesise-Experiment cycle replaces the Present-Practise-Produce
Paradigm.
 Grammar exploration instead of grammar explanation.
 Intensive and extensive listening and reading in the target language.
 First and second language comparisons and translation—carried out chunk-for-chunk,
rather than word-for-word—aimed at raising language awareness.
 Repetition and recycling of activities.
 Guessing the meaning of vocabulary items from context.
 The language activities consistent with a lexical approach must be directed toward
naturally occurring language and toward raising learners’ awareness of the lexical
nature of language.
 Working with dictionaries and other reference tools.

Implications for language teaching.

 Translation is not used.
 Vocabulary lists with L1 items are not used
 Huge amounts of authentic input should be made available
 Awareness raising
2
 Rote learning comes back
 Working with language corpora is needed

Retell the story in your own words.

Retell your story in their words.

Advantages of the Lexical Approach

 The lexical approach speeds up language acquisition.

 “Chunking” is actually a memory improvement technique. By grouping commonly co-
occurring words and treating them as one larger whole allows the brain to process
greater amounts of information.
 Chunking allows your class to cover plenty of information quickly. Instead of your
students individually processing every word in a sentence, what every word means and
how each one grammatically relates to the word next to it, they’re dealing with
chunks. Instead of building fluency one word at a time, you’re doing it one phrase at a
time.

Limitations

While the lexical approach can be a quick way for students to pick up phrases, it doesn't foster
much creativity. It can have the negative side effect of limiting people's responses to safe
fixed phrases. Because they don't have to build responses, they don't need to learn the
intricacies of language.

Conclusion

The Lexical approach is not really a revolution but an evolution as it tries to develop
principles already known by communicative language teachers. The originality of the
approach lies in its claims about the nature of language. The distinction between grammar and
vocabulary has become less valid and a more realistic view about language, based on the
supremacy of lexis over grammar is advocated.

To illustrate this idea, think of the phrase “best wishes.” The word “best” in the phrase can be
replaced with “good,” “happy” or “fun” and still be grammatically sound, but native speakers
will know that something’s off and will use the word “best” anyway.

Sources:
Lewis, M. (1993). The lexical approach: The state of ELT and the way forward. Hove,
England: Language Teaching Publications.
Lewis, M. (1997). Implementing the lexical approach: Putting theory into practice. Hove,
England: Language Teaching
Lewis, M. (2000) Language in the Lexical Approach, In: Teaching Collocation, Further
Developments in the Lexical Approach. Hove: Language Teaching Publications.
Chapter 7, pp 126-155.
Nattinger, R. J., DeCarrico, J. S. (1992), Lexical Phrases and Language Teaching. Oxford:
Oxford University Press
Harwood, N. (2001) Taking a lexical approach to teaching: principles and problems Talk
delivered at 35th IATEFL conference.

3
http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~nharwood/lexapproach.htm
Thornbury, S. (1998) The Lexical Approach: A Journey without Maps? Modern English
Teacher, Vol.7. No.4. http://www.thornburyscott.com/assets/Lexical%20approach.pdf
Swan, M. (2006) Chunks in the classroom: let’s not go overboard. The Teacher Trainer. 20/3,
2006 retrieved at http://www.mikeswan.co.uk/elt-applied-linguistics/chunks-in-the-
classroom.htm