(1) Lewis, M. 1993. The Lexical Approach.
The lexical approach concentrates on developing learners' proficiency with lexis, or words and word combinations. it is based on the idea that an important part of language acquisition is the ability to comprehend and produce lexical phrases as unanalysed wholes, or "chunks", and that these chunks become the raw data by which learners perceive patterns of language traditionally thought of as grammar.
-->Lexis is the basis of all language. [Lexis being differentiated from vocabulary: Vocabulary = a stock of individual words with fixed meanings; Lexis = includes those single words, and also the word combinations that are stored in every individual's mental lexicons]
--> 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 prerequitsite for effective coomunication.
--> Key principle: language consists of grammaticalised lexis, not lexicalised grammar.
--> Hence: one of the central principles with which to organise a meaning-centred syllabus should be lexis.
(2) Lewis, M. 1997. "Pedagogical Implications of the Lexical Approach" in J. Coadins & T. Huckin (Eds.), Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition: A Rationale for Pedagogy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp 255-270.
(3) Nattinger, J. 1980. "A Lexical Phrase Grammar for ESL", TESOL Quarterly, 14, pp 337-344.Lexical items can be grouped like so:
- words (table, chair)
- polywords (by the by, upside down, what's more)
- collocations, or word partnerships (community service, unbelievably cold)
- institutionalised utterances (We'll see; That'll do; If I were you...; Can I offer you some tea?; I don't know about you, but...)
- sentence frames and heads (That is not as...as you think; The fact/suggestion/problem was...)
- text frames (In this paper we explore...; Firstly...; Secondly; Finally...)
Teaching should be based on the idea that language production is the piecing together of ready-made units appropriate for a particular situation.So essentially, we should teach collocations alot. [Collocation is defined by Lewis (1997, Implementing the Lexical Approach: Putting Theory into Practice, p8) as the phenomenon whereby certain words co-occur in natural text with greater than random frequency.]
As it is with all methodologies/approaches, it has flaws and weaknesses. One of the implications that I do not appreciate (perhaps because I am a little bit on the language purist side) is that concentration on the lexis will necessarily reduce the role of grammar. That makes things hard because up till now, most language teaching has treated grammar as the basis of language, especially of language understanding and language production. So while it offers a glimpse into a whole new world that looks to be refreshing and exciting, it's also quite disorienting. I mean, it turns everything as we know it, on its head! Think about it: language as GRAMMATICALISED lexis instead of LEXICALISED grammar? Amazing. Utter madness. Totally possible.
However, I woke up this morning still thinking about the key assumptions of this approach. I was dying of curiosity, because I'd never really thought about things that way before. So I nosed around, reading random pages from a couple of books, the newspaper, blogs, and guess what? I find that I agree. I think that a very large part of our language (spoken or written) appears to be fixed--just reused and cleverly fixed to appear original-ish. Look around. Read. Pay attention to the speech around you. It's really quite creepy! I feel like my head is going to explode with this new revelation. Very whoah-inducing.
So then I remembered this thing I got in my mail like years ago, one of those forwarded "interesting" things:
fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can. i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad it
I can read it, no sweat. I didn't even pause. There was no deciphering required, almost as if everything were spelt perfectly. And this makes for very , very interesting implications. Do you think that perhaps the base assumption of the Lexical Approach can be applied to spelling/reading individual words as well? That is, maybe we memorise chunks of language (words, phrases etc), but we may also possibly memorize the the individual written word (perhaps as a whole image instead of discrete letters...) and apply it to our daily reading, instead of actually reading each word as we come across it?
Sure, I suspect that at least one of the reasons we can read the above excerpt is because of our stock of "language chunks" in our mental corpus--as per the claims of the Lexical Approach, we may have been able to guess the words in the excerpt because they are expected to follow from certain words or phrases. I say this because if you were to pluck out random words from the piece above and ask me to read them completely out of context, I'd have trouble doing it. I mean, I'm one of those people who suck at Unscramble The Word games. So contextualisation is obviously very important.
But maybe we also memorise the image of the written word as well, and we only skim over words when we read, not go over every letter that builds the word. Maybe we only do the latter when it's a new, unfamiliar or less-commonly-used word.
