15. Lexical approach.
Approach
Lexical approach was developed by Michael Lewis in 1993. Lexical approach
concentrates on developing learners’ profiency with lexis,or words and word
combinations. It is based on the idea that an important part of language
acquisition is the ability to comprehend and produce lexical phrases as
unanalyzed wholes or lexical chunks.
The key principle of a lexical approach is that “language consists of
grammaticalized lexis,not lexicalized grammar.” In other words, lexis is central in
creating meaning, grammar plays a secondary role in managing meaning.
Teachers should spend more time helping learners develop their stock of
phrases,and less tine on grammatical structures. Language is basically its lexicon.
The Lexical approach in language teaching refers to one derived from the belief
that the building blocks of language learning and communication are not
grammar,functions,notions,or some other unit of planning and teaching but
lexis,that is words and particularly multi-word combinations.
Theory of language
The Lexical approach reflects a structural view of language. This views language as
a system of structurally related elements for the coding of meaning. The elements
of the system included lexical items as well as grammatical units. The Lexical
approach adds another level of “structure”,namely multi-word units.
Lexical chunk is a unit of language which is made up of two or more words. It is an
umbrella term,which includes all the other terms,including phrasal
verbs,idioms,collocations,lexical phrases,set phrases,fixed phrases and so on. The
role of collocation is also important in lexically based theories of language. Multi-
word lexical units are thought by some to play a central role in learning and in
communication.
Theory of learning
Michael Lewis proposed the following account of the learning theory assumed in
his initial proposal for a lexical approach :
- Encountering new learning items on several occasions is a necessary but
sufficient condition for learning to occur;
-Noticing lexical chunks or collacations is a necessary but not sufficient condition
for “input” to become “intake”;
- Noticing similarities,differences,examples contributes to turning input into
intake,although formal description of rules probably does not help;
- Acquisition is based not on the application of formal rules but on an
accumulation of examples from which learners make provisional generalizations.
The goal of learning is that “chunks that are met,noticed and learned must then
be adequately entrenced in the learners’ long-term memory”.
The learning of chunks is facilitated in a number of ways:
-Through noticing: targeted chunks must first be noticed in the input learners
receive;
- Through cognitive processing: chunks must be processed through different
forms of elaboration,which will increase the level of cognitive involvement
needed to foster retention;
- Through exposure: repeated encounters with chunks are likely to increase the
likelihood of them being learned. Making the language class a laboratory in which
learners can explore,via computer concordance databases,the contexts of lexical
use that occur in different kinds of texts and language data;
- Through comparisons with L1: Some applied linguists have suggested that for a
number of languages there is an appreciable degree of overlap within a given
language in the form and meaning of lexical collocations,collocations that may not
exist in the language being studied.
Objectives
The Lexical approach is not conceptualized as a comprehensive plan for a
language program. It can be understood as providing one strand of a language
course for students, thought by some educators to be appropriate at
intermediate level and above and one that can be used in conjunction with other
approaches and methods.
The goal of the Lexical approach is to develop learners’ awareness and use of
lexical chunks as an important feature of naturalistic language use. A related goal
is for learners to develop strategies for identifying and learning the chunks that
they encounter in spoken and written texts.
The Lexical approach may be used with lower-level students when the chunks are
provided,rather than acquired through independent reading and listening.
The syllabus
The Lexical Approach syllabus is structural syllabus. It is also called as “lexical
syllabus”.
For lower-level students,direct teaching of the chunks that occur most frequently
in the kinds of texts students engage with in their learning and that language
corpora can be a source of information for this strategy.
The syllabus provides a list of the most frequent chunks that occur in spoken
English. For intermediate and advanced-level learners, similar information is not
readily available. The syllabus will therefore consist of an organized record of the
chunks learners have encountered in different written and spoken texts,it is a
retrospective syllabus.
Types of learning and teaching activities
The Lexical approach activities include awareness activities, training in text
chunking,as well as activities designed to enhance the remembering of chunks.
Such activities can be included in any course and not necessarily one based on the
Lexical Approach.
Awareness activities
These activities facilitate the noticing of chunks. An example is the use of corpora,
a resource that is particularly useful in revealing collocation restrictions. An
example of the kinds of displays that appear in text materials and in the
concordancing displays from which the printout materials. Computer corpus
allows students and their teachers to see how these words actually behave in
authentic texts.
Many different kinds of corpora are available and give detailed information on
how teachers can create and use their own corpora. The use of free online corpus
tools shows how language is used in real situations. Teachers may ask students to
do online corpus searches of the target item directly, or may provide handouts
showing the results of a search.
Training in text chunking
Chunking exercises seek to raise awareness of chunks and how they operate. It
involves asking students to highlight or underline word strings in an authentic text
that they consider to be multiword units. Dictionaries or online sources
( concordance tools or search engines such as Google) can be accessed to in order
to verify the chunk status of selected word strings.
Memory- enhancing activities
One type of memory-enhancing activities is “elaboration”. They give this account
of elaboration. This is an umbrella term for diverse mental operations and learner
may perform with regard to the meaning and the form of words and phrases.
Elaboration can consist in thinking about a term’s spelling, pronunciation,
grammatical category, meaning and associations with other words.
Retelling
After studying text with a particular focus on the chunks that appear in it,
students take part jn retelling activities,they can summarize or retell what they
have read but attempt to use the same chunks in text.
Teacher roles (major source of learner input; creator of learning environment;
manager of classroom)
Teachers have several roles in the Lexical approach. The teacher is assumed to be
a language analyst, capable of recognizing multi-word units in texts, they able to
assess which ones are important enough to justify sustained attention in class
and able to use texts in such a way as to exploit their potential for the learning of
chunks.
The teacher may be expected to be familiar with the use of computer software
and corpora and to use data-driven learning activities as the basus for both
deductive and inductive learning.
The talk of the teacher is a major source of learner inout in demostrating how
lexical phrases are used for different functional purposes.
Teachers must understand and manage a classroom methodology based on
stages consist of Task, Planning and Report.
Teachers must create an environment in which learners can operate effectively
and help learners manage their own learning. Teachers must abandon the idea of
the teacher as “knower” and concentrate instead on the idea of the learner as
“discoverer”.
Learner roles (data analyst; making use of computer; providing participation with
listening,noticing and reflecting)
Learners assume an active role in chunk-based approaches to learning. They may
be expected to work with computers to analyze text data previously collected or
made available “free-form” on the Internet. Here the learner assumes the role of
data analyst constructing his or her own linguistic generalizations based on
examination of large corpora of language samples taken from “real life”. In such
schemes, teachers have a major responsibility for organizing the technological
system and providing scaffolding to help learners build autonomy in the use of
system. Learners are also encouraged to monitor their own learning of chunks
and to review chunks they have encountered,for ex: through the use of a
vocabulary notebook or electronic journal-as a way of helping remember them.
The role of instructional materials
Materials and teaching resources to support lexical approaches in language
teaching include coursebooks that include a focus on multi-word units in the
syllabus, such as corpus-informed materials, corpora that can be accessed by
teachers and students in which a corpus of texts can be used with concordancing
software to explore how words and multi-word units are used.
Some corpus-informed coursebooks have emerged,but as the process of doing
extensive corpus searches and analyzing the data can be time consuming, it is
unclear to what extent the practice will extend beyond coursebooks intended for
very large numbers of students.
