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Date Posted: 13:55:33 07/09/03 Wed
Author: Gerson G. dos Santos
Subject: Task_10

Task 10 – Lexical Approach


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

According to Michael Lewis’s definition, lexical approach consists of multi-word prefabricated chunks(1) and not of traditional grammar and vocabulary. The lexical approach focus on the following items:

- words (e.g., book, pen)
- polywords (e.g., by the way, upside down)
- collocations, or word partnership (e.g., communicaty service, absolutely convinced)
- Institutionalized utterances (e.g., I’ll get it, we’ll see; That’ll do; If I were you; Would you like…?)
- 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…)

As Lewis has pointed out, 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. Some of its characteristics are:

- it is not valid the grammar/vocabulary dichotomy;
- collocations is used as an organism principles;
- successful language instead of accurated language;
- 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.

In conclusion, the lexical approach takes the English language teaching as an ‘organism’ (whole), and not only as something (words) isolated (‘atomistic’). So, the language will consist of multi-words ‘chunks’ and grammaticalised lexis in which students have to be awareness of.


(1) Chunks : several words that commonly occur together in fixed phrases.
(2) Collocations: phenomenon in which the words co-occur arbitrarily in nature context.
(3) Corpuses (plural of corpus): Corpus consists of any collection of large number of written texts or spoken from variety of natural sources, held in machine-readable form and capable of being analysed automatically or semi-automatically in order to represent a given area or sample of language.



References

BAKER, M. Corpora in Translation Studies: an overview and some suggestions for future research. Target, 7, 2 p. 223-243, 1995.
http://www.ltpwebsite.com/lexicalapproach.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

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