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Date Posted: 14:17:56 07/09/03 Wed
Author: Betania
Subject: Task 10

Lexical approach is…

Lexical approach consists of multi-word prefabricated chunks and not of traditional grammar and vocabulary, according to Michael Lewis’s definition. The lexical approach focus on the following items:
- institutionalized utterances (e.g., I’ll get it, we’ll see; That’ll do; If I were you; Would you like…?)
- words (e.g., book, pen)
- polywords (e.g., by the way, upside down)
- collocations, or word partnership (e.g., communicaty service, absolutely convinced)
- sentence frames and heads (e.g., that is not as… as you think; The fact/suggestion/problem/danger was…) and even text frames (e.g., In this paper we explore….; Firstly…; Secondly…; Finally…)

The reason for using these items is that fact that we tend to see the language not as words, but as collocations, and to perform them in expressions, as Lewis has pointed out. Some of its characteristics are:
- successful language instead of accurated language;
- it is not valid the grammar/vocabulary dichotomy;
- collocations is used as an organism principles;
- the Present-Practice-produce paradigm is replaced by the Observe-Hypothesis-Experiment;
- language is not based on lexicalized grammar, but on grammaticalised lexis.

The lexical approach is also seen as serious attempt to make teacher reevaluate his/her individual teaching and profession. As Lewis said, few teachers nowadays have been interested in changing his/her methodology in order to increase and improve the language teaching as a whole. So, the lexical approach aims to develop current thinking, corpus linguistics, discourse analyses and modern approaches to grammar.

The main activities suggested by this approach are:
- intensive and extensive listening and reading in the target language;
- repetition and recycling of activities;
- guessing the meaning of vocabulary items from context;
- noticing and recording language patterns and collocations(2);
- working with language corpuses(3) to research word partnership, style, and so on.

References
http://www-writing.berkeley.edu/TESL-EJ/ej09/r10.html
http://www.cal.org/ericcll/digest/0102lexical.html
http://www.nspeak.com/lexical.htm

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