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Date Posted: 11:01:20 07/09/03 Wed
Author: Renata Tunes Santos
Subject: TASK 10

TASK 10

Explain what a lexical approach is. Describe its main characteristics.

Lexical approach is an approach to teaching languages that has a lot in common with the communicative approach, but also examines how lexical phrases, prefabricated chunks of language, play an important role in producing fluent speech.
The lexical approach was first coined by Michael Lewis.
The fundamental principle of the lexical approach is "language consists of grammaticalized lexis, not lexicalized grammar." What this means is that lexical phrases offer far more language generative power than grammatical structures. Advocates of this kind of approach argue that lexis should move to the center of language syllabuses. Justification for this theory comes from statistical analysis of language which shows that we do indeed speek in chunks and collocations, which include fixed and semi-fixed expressions and idioms, and occupy a crucial role in facilitating language production, being the key to fluency. An explanation for native speakers’ fluency is that vocabulary is not stored only as individual words, but also as parts of phrases, which can be retrieved from memory as a whole, reducing processing difficulties. On the other hand, learners who only learn individual words will need a lot more time and effort to express themselves.
The most important contribution was to highlight the importance of vocabulary as being basic to communication. If learners don’t recognise the meaning of keywords they will be unable to participate in the conversation, even if they know the morphology and syntax.
Lewis extends the use of dictionaries to focus on word grammar and collocation range, although most dictionaries are rather limited in these and he also defends the use of ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ material from the early stages of learning.
The Lexical Approach and Task-Based Learning have some common principles, which have been influencing foreign language teaching. Both approaches regard intensive, roughly-tuned input as essential for acquisition, and maintain that successful communication is more important than the production of accurate sentences.

REFERENCES:

http://www.ltpwebsite.com/lexicalapproach.htm
http://www.ltpwebsite.com/implementing.htm
http://www-writing.berkeley.edu/TESL-EJ/ej09/r10.html
http://www.cal.org/ericcll/digest/0102lexical.html
http://www.nspeak.com/lexical.htm
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Square/3472/lexapproach.html

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