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Date Posted: 06:32:13 07/11/03 Fri
Author: André Luiz Elias
Subject: Task #10

“Language consists of grammaticalised lexis, not lexicalised grammar”. This is one of the principles that underlies what Michael Lewis (1993) calls “lexical approach”. So this approach aims to develop learners’ awareness of the lexis of a language. “It is based on the idea that an important part of language acquisition is the ability to comprehend and produce lexical phrases”. It is important to clarify that lexis in this context does not simply mean single words, but also combination of words – chunks -, collocations, lexical phrases, etc. The basis for this approach believes that some combinations of words are stored in our cognitive sysem as a whole. It is interesting because one of the principles of the Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 1987) is that some entrenched expressions are stored in our cognitive conceptual system as single entities. Just because they are entrenched. This is why (I think) the lexical approach is linked to the language corpora. Through analysing a large corpus, it is possible to infer whether a specific expression is already conventionalized and hence stored in mind as a unit. Yesterday (July, 10) a professor from Tilburg University (Netherlands) – Joost Schilperhood – gave a talk here at FALE titled “Fixed vs. Novel Expressions in sports commentary: when and why?” and his talk was not about lexical approach itself, but while he was talking I was linking his words to this task: these groups of words that we use as chunks were included in what Schilperhood called “fixed expression”. He also talked about the motivation for the use of this kind of lexis: in a very familiar frame, that is, a situation that we are acquainted to, such as an encounter in the morning where we use: “Hello, how are you?”. I was wondering that we as language teachers should try to “pretend” familiar situations in order to effectively apply the lexical approach. And I also think that in classroom we should try as much as possible to be able to combine different approaches in order to provide learners a bunch of opportunities for them to improve their learning.

References:
http://www.cal.org/ericcll/digest/0102lexical.html
http://www.nspeak.com/lexical.htm
http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/talk/questions/lexical_approach.shtml

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