2. The Lexical Approach Michael Lewis, 1993 What is “The Lexical Approach”? Types of Lexis Principles of LA Considerations on LA Procedure Implications Recommendation Conclusion

3. Lexical Approach I. What is “The Lexical Approach”? Concentrating on developing learners’ proficiency with lexis, or words and word combinations. Reflecting a belief in the centrality of the lexis to - language structures - language use - multiword lexical units or “chunks”

5. Lexical Approach II. Types of Lexis (Cont) 3. Idioms: dead drunk, cost the earth, keep your feet on the ground 4. Similes: as old as the hills, as still as dead, as hungry as a wolf, as easy as A.B.C 5. Connectives: finally, to conclude, whereas, meanwhile, consequently 6. A conversational gambit is an opening used to start a conversation with someone : Guess what! Tell you what, Hello, how are you? …

6. Lexical Approach III. Principles of LA Language = Grammar + Vocabulary Observe – Hypothesis – Experiment Circle (Present – Practise - Produce) Gramaticalized lexis--not lexicalized grammar Holistic - not atomistic Lexicon-is-prime

7. IV. Considerations on designing LA class Objectives Syllabus Roles of teachers Roles of learners Materials

10. Considerations on designing LA class 3. The teacher’s roles Teacher’s talk is the major source of learner’s input Organizing the technological system, providing scaffolding to help learners The teacher methodology: Task Planning Report

11. Considerations on designing LA class 4. The learner’s roles Replace the idea: the teacher is “ the knower”  the learner is “the discoverer” Data analyst

12. Considerations on designing LA class 5. Materials TYPE 1 Course packages TYPE 2 Collection of vocabulary teaching activities TYPE 3 “print-out” version of computer corpora in text format TYPE 4 Computer concordance Programs

13. Concordancers and Corpora Corpus : a collection of examples of texts/utterances of a language Concordancer : computer software which analyses corpora. See : http://www.collins.co.uk/Corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/lookup.html

15. Classroom procedures usually include the use of activities:-> draw Ss’ attention to lexical collocations -> enhance Ss’ retention and use of collocations

17. Repetition and recycling of activities.

18. Guessing the meaning of vocabulary items from context.

19. Noticing and recording language patterns and collocations.

21. Develop activities that Ss themselves can discover collocations (in and outside of the classroom)V. Procedure

22. V. Procedure Another suggestion from Hill (2000): Classroom procedures involve: a) teaching individual collocations b) making Ss aware of collocations c) extending the already-known of Ss by adding collocation restrictions to known vocabulary d) storing collocations through encouraging Ss to keep a lexical notebook.

23. VI. Implications Provide input: text and discourse Provide activities  ask sts to work actively on the chunks Give sts chance for practicing of those chunk productively Repeat and recycle activities with those expressions

25. The Cambridge International Corpus

26. The British National CorpusUse corpora but be corpus-based, not corpus-bound Concentrate on items - no direct translational equivalence Text and discourse, rather than sentence-based LA is not the lexical syllabus

28. Lack the full characterization of an approach or method.

29. Still an idea in search of an approach and a methodology.We, Ts, should spend less time explaining English language grammar, more time exposing Ss to useful language and doing awareness arising activities. The way we view language affects the way we teach it.

30. References http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/knowledge-wiki/chunks http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/articles/lexical-approach-1-what-does-lexical-approach-look http://grammar.about.com/od/c/g/chunkterm.htm http://www.cc.kyoto-su.ac.jp/information/tesl-ej/ej09/r10.html