Rob Waring



Lexical approach

- principles and implications in ELT in Japan -

November 5, 2008

# 078203 Mutsumi Kawasaki

1. Introduction to the presentation

The Lexical Approach proposed by Lewis (1993) provides principles for re-thinking many already existing familiar activities and techniques, and a new way of looking at the content of courses.

The focus of this approach is to develop learners’ proficiency with lexis including comprehension and production of lexical phrases as wholes or chunks. This approach will help learners to acquire language better in a lexical or lexico-grammatical[1] way rather than in traditional grammar-based teaching and learning that still exist in methodologies used in Japanese classrooms and course books.

This presentation briefly introduces the key principles of the Lexical Approach in second or foreign language teaching and learning, and later some implications are given in terms of contents of language, teacher’s roles, and exercises and activities textbooks should have.

2. What is the Lexical Approach?

The Lexical Approach:-

• is based on the view that the basic building blocks of teaching and learning are words and lexical phrases, rather than grammar, functions or other unit of organization.

• concentrates on developing learners’ proficiency with lexis[2]

• 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”

3. Key principles of lexical approach

• Lexis is the basis of all language.

• Lexis is misunderstood in language teaching because of the assumption that grammar is the basis of language and that mastery of the grammatical system is a prerequisite for effective communication.

• Language consists of grammaticalized lexis, not lexicalized grammar.

= Lexis is central in creating meanings; grammar plays a subservient managerial role.

• One of the central organizing principles of any meaning-centered syllabus should be lexis.

4. The importance of chunks

Having learners memorize lexical phrases (multi-word prefabricated chunks including collocations[3], institutionalized utterances, and sentence headings for example) will help their fluent production of the language because L1 users have a great store of lexical chunks that is useful and important for fluent production.

( L1 users store vocabulary only as individual words, but also as parts of phrases and larder chunks, which can be retrieved from memory as a whole, reducing processing difficulties. Learning individual words will need a lot more time and effort to allow learners to express themselves.

( Chunks enable automatic retrieval of stretches of language and unitary meanings.

5. Limitations of the Lexical Approach

• There are no systems (sequences)

( Users of this approach (either teachers or students) do not know what should come first, second, third and so on.

• No clear definition of what is grammaticalized lexis and lexicalized grammar.

( Because the distinctions between these terms are very fuzzy, we had better think them with a scale.

Word MWUs collocations idioms colligations fixed expressions

pure vocabulary pure grammar

6. Implication for ESL/EFL teaching and learning from the Lexical Approach perspective in Japan (problems and suggestions)

Language dealt in the classes

• A lot of words are learnt de-contextually.

( Natural language that the native speakers will probably produce should be taught. It is also vital to teach natural combinations of words (chunks) for natural and fluent production.

• The quantity or length of the chunks

( working memory has limited capacity[4]

• Learners should not create new language every time but memorize or acquire grammaticalized lexis or patterns for production.

• Teachers should teach lexis in natural occurring language such as authentic or contextualized language.

• Teachers should show the learners how words are used in particular contextualized situations (the depth of the language) rather than just introducing how they work (form-meaning relationship). It is much more important to raise the learners’ awareness of their language use and their self-reliant learning.

Teachers who will teach in the classes

• As the majority of English teachers are non-native in Japan, it seems to be more difficult to teach ‘real’ or ‘natural’ lexis used by native speakers.

The course books including exercises and activities

• The course books usually contain unusual and low frequency words that native speakers will rarely use. The teachers should teach words or lexis according to the frequency, learnability and usefulness.

• There are few taught content words or lexical words (not function words) are recycled because the course books are topic-based. Lots of words appear only a few times and are not sufficiently learnt.

• Textbooks and teaching procedures still tend to be grammar-based. The teachers have to spend much more time helping the learners develop their store of lexical chunks and less time on teaching grammatical structures.

• It will be more helpful to have learners pick up the words and word combinations through extensive reading and listening because there are not enough chances to learn only with the textbooks. To do this, the learners need to develop their knowledge or sense of noticing which words will go together in contextualized and meaningful ways.

Possible activities to develop knowledge of chunks (Moudrana, 2001)

〇 Intensive and extensive listening and reading

〇 First and second language comparisons and translation carried out chunk-for-chunk, rather than word-for-word aimed at raising language awareness.

〇 Repetition and recycling of activities, such as summarizing a text orally one day and again a few days later to keep words and expressions that have been learned active.

〇 Guessing the meaning of vocabulary items from context.

〇 Noticing and recording language patterns and collocations.

〇 Working with dictionaries and other reference tools.

〇 Working with language corpuses[5] created by the teacher for use in the classroom or accessible on the Internet (such as the British National Corpus or COBUILD Bank of English) to research word partnership, preposition usage, style and so on.

7. Conclusion

The Lexical Approach points out the blind spots or the weak points in vocabulary teaching and learning by offering several new powerful perspectives (Hayashi, 2002) However, it seems to be difficult to accept this challenge of language teaching or concentration on the lexis because most language teaching and teachers (and even learners) have treated grammar as the basis of language. Therefore, implementing the Lexical Approach does not only lead to changes of methodologies and classrooms, but also involves a teachers’ and learners’’ mindset.

8. Background reading and bibliography

Hayashi, H. (2002). 『英語の語彙指導–理論と実践の統合を目指して』.広島: 渓水社.

Kadota, S. & Ikemura, D. (2006). 『英語語彙指導ハンドブック』.東京: 大修館.

Lewis, M. (1993). The lexical approach: The state of ELT and the way forward. Hove, England: English Language Teaching Publications.

Lewis, M. (1997a). Implementing the lexical approach: Putting theory into practice. Hove, England: English Language Teaching Publications.

Lewis, M. (1997b). “Pedagogical implications of the Lexical Approach” in J. Coady & T. Huckin. Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition: A Rationale for Pedagogy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Moudra, O. (2001). “Lexical Approach to Second Language Teaching” in ERIC digest.

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[1] Lexico-grammmar (žŠY_‡eÕl):

- The linguistic resources (both grammatical and lexical) which learners draw on in expressing meaning and communicating in L2.

- The relationship between vo語彙文法):

The linguistic resources (both grammatical and lexical) which learners draw on in expressing meaning and communicating in L2.

The relationship between vocabulary and grammar. These forms of language organization are normally studied separately but increasingly lexico-grammatical patterns are being seen as central to language description and language learning.

[2] Vocabulary: a stock of individual words of the language with fixed meanings

Lexis (語彙形式):

- a more general word than the common vocabulary that includes single words and word combinations (multi-word objects) which have the same status in the language as simple words, the items we stored in individual’s mental lexicon ready for use

- consists of thousands of lexical items

Lexical items:

- the concepts of the individual word extended to the multi-word objects which are the fundamental units of the language

- word-like objects representing a single sense selection (Brazil, 1995)

e.g. single words, polywords, collocations (word partnerships), institutionalized utterances, sentence frames and heads, and text frames

[3] Collocation: the phenomenon whereby certain words co-occur in natural text with greater than random frequency (Lewis, 1997a, p.8)

[4] Magical number 7±2: working memory is considered to have limitation and the capacity is equivalent to between 5 and 9 on average

[5] Corpus: a collection of naturally occurring samples of language

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Fuzzy

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