VoyForums
[ Show ]
Support VoyForums
[ Shrink ]
VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, [2], 3, 4 ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 15:24:09 07/11/03 Fri
Author: Maria Isabel Avila Martins
Subject: 10th.Class-Lexical Approach

The Lexical Approach
10th. Class


Philosophy

Michael Lewis (1997a, p.204) came up with the coined term “lexical approach” proposing that instead of working with isolated units of words we must try to think consciously of their collocations in expressions as a whole. Collocation is the ability we have to observe the occurance of certain words that appear in natural text with a certain frequency.

Definition

The lexical approach is one more alternative to grammar-based approach. Its target is to develop learner’s proficiency with lexis, or words and word combinations. Lewis (1993) proposes that the learners should be able to comprehend and produce lexical phrases as unanalyzed wholes or “chunks”. Thus, learners would be able to learn grammar by perceiving the patterns of language through those chunks. Teachers direct their instructions to expressions that occur frequently in spoken language. By using those expressions, learners would be stocking up formulae and compositions through word combinations, and not only the single words.
As Nattinger (1980) suggests, the teaching should focus the language production as made by joining the ready-made units in proper situations.

Taxonomy

Lewis(1997) suggests the taxonomy of lexical items as: words, polywords, collocations, institucionalized utterances and sentence frames and heads.

Principles

The most important principles of the lexical approach are:
· Language consists of grammaticalised lexis and not of lexicalised grammar.
· The observe-hypothesis-experiment cycle substitutes the present-practice-produce paradigm.
· Being successful with the usage of the language is more important than having accuracy.
· Language consists of multi-words “chunks” so the grammar/vocabulary dichotomy is not valid for this approach.
· Collocations, or word partnerships, such as security guard or astonishingly surprised, are integrated as the organizing principle.
· The primary importance for language teaching is the co-textual rather than the situational element of context.
· The main goal of the lexical approach is to make learners able to reflect on the forms and meanings analytically.

Activities

There are some activities used to develop the learner’s abilities to chain lexis:
· Constant listening and reading in the target language.
· The “chunks” should be compared between the first and the second language rather than comparing words.
· The activities should be recycled every now and then, and repetition is also a must.
· Students are asked to guess the meaning of vocabulary from its context.
· The activities should allow them to notice and record language patterns and collocations.
· Researches for word partnership, prepositions usage, style and so forth, through the internet or a previous language corpse built up by the teacher.

Jul.11th., 2003.

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]
[ Contact Forum Admin ]

Forum timezone: GMT-8
VF Version: 3.00b, ConfDB:
Before posting please read our privacy policy.
VoyForums(tm) is a Free Service from Voyager Info-Systems.
Copyright © 1998-2019 Voyager Info-Systems. All Rights Reserved.