The lexical approach : An emphasis on collocations. View 1 excerpt. This research paper brings forward a general overview of the Lexical Approach proposed by Michael Lewis as an alternative to grammar based methods. Moreover, it also includes some theories … Expand. Highly Influenced. View 3 excerpts, cites background. Using Lexical Approach to teach vocabulary. Vocabulary acquisition is very important in the English language learning, and there are various ways of teaching and learning vocabulary.
But students still have many difficulties in achieving high … Expand. We could not talk about vocabulary teaching nowadays without mentioning Michael Lewis , whose controversial, thought-provoking ideas have been shaking the ELT world since the publication of his … Expand.
View 1 excerpt, cites background. Teacher language awareness and cognitive linguistics CL : building a CL-inspired perspective on teaching lexis in EFL student teachers. It has been suggested recently that it may be useful for language teaching practitioners to have some knowledge of cognitive linguistics. Cognitive linguistics CL provides tools that may help the … Expand.
The end of CLT: a context approach to language teaching. All of our dyings occur in the midst of the lives of others. Wonderful story. Thanks for elaborating on your connection to Lewis and telling us all that will never meet him a little bit more about the man behind the books and the ideas. Thank you for writing about the extraordinarily innovative Michael Lewis.
I hope his last years were comfortable. A great article and moving too. For example, he defines the use of some and any more accurately than any of the grammar books I have on my shelves.
He can write too, which makes a change. I remember Michael manning the LTP book stand or trestle table alone and still speaking at conferences. I guess we had several meals because OUP reps liked him and invited him along to the OUP authors and editors dinner at a conference even though LTP was technically the opposition — he had written for OUP briefly and unsuccessfully.
I can remember Michael sending Italian academic gurus into rage with his explanations and me agreeing with him. Editors, reps and authors afterwards asked me who he was. It comes to us all in the end. I shall make a note to avoid Brighton then.
Hi Peter. Thanks very uch for taking the time to write and share these memories. I may well have been in that Brighton talk you refer to, btw. I recall Robert may well have been pre-oiled before launching into his commentary. I think the conclsuion of avoiding the city henceforth is a wise one.
And this is, in the end, what Michael ended up railing against later on. In also lacks any sense of the inerplay between lexis and grammar, and the problemartic nature of even having separate cateogires for such things. But sure, loads of people did find it revelatory, I know.
It is a such a telling piece,superbly written. Please recommend some titles from this great personality that should be read by a high school teacher. Hi Rakesh. Thanks for taking the time to read and to add your comment. Start there and see how ou get on. That book had exactly the same effect on me: it absolutely and definitively changed the way I saw language — and much of my subsequent career has been spent trying to work out what the classroom implications for this expendaded way of looking are for everyday teaching and for materials design.
The conclusion that all lexis has grammar was beautifully exemplifed up at IATEFL last week by the way in a tlak by some Cobuild folk on pattern grammar. They looked at the way different meanings of common words had different patterns attached to them in quite wonderful detail. Very interesting to get your perspective, Hugh. I worked with Michael from in Sweden until Our first book together was Practical Techniques for Language Teaching, which, believe it or not, is still in use today in a few places — it was the summation of all our teacher training ideas at the time.
He took several months off to write and would not let me influence him. When I read it, I told him nobody would take it seriously. It was too critical of current practice. I told him there was a book there, but not in its current form. He went away and re-wrote Sense and Nonsense as the book you know today, but not without a lot of fighting and me stone-walling him! When we sold LTP Michael effectively retired.
I decided to go back to what I was initially trained for — teaching English in a secondary school — which I did in the State system here in Edinburgh, teaching poetry, drama etc.
The Scottish system puts a great emphasis on textual comprehension and analysis. I came to the view that one of the main reasons why working class students struggle at English is their lack of vocabulary and in their writing — their very limited ability to collocate naturally. I can honestly say that teaching English in a secondary school was the most rewarding 6 years of my working life.
He proved that words only had compatibility to a certain tolerance. But for l2 learners this can be quite complex. An example might be in classifying a term such as applications software into an extension of the range computer hardware. Collocations must be acquired both through direct study and large amounts of quality input.
Students usually have difficulties with lexical and grammatical relationships and, undoubtedly, the most common problems they face when trying to study collocations are in the areas of recognition, understanding and production, particularly in the cases of those complex and very complex units. Conscious processing is vital in the language learning process.
Thus, noticing is a necessary condition for storage and as Schmidt , p. For lewis , noticing collocations is a necessary but not sufficient condition for input to become intake. This is also reaffirmed by Thornbury when adds that there is no acquisition without noticing. The most useful role of the teacher in consciousness raising is to encourage noticing by providing students with strategies to use outside the classroom and familiarity with as much appropriate, quality language as possible.
Some advanced students often lack motivation due to the fact that they feel they know English grammar. They usually possess a good command of active vocabulary and do not see the necessity for acquiring more new items. According to lewis most students will in fact remain stuck on the intermediate plateau and tend to continue producing both spoken and written language containing unnatural- sounding elements.
As formulaic language units can themselves be stored as automatised units in memory, learning these new items involves storing them first in our short-term memory prior to transferring to long-term memory. Although this is not consciously controlled some important points must be taken into account. First, unlike long-term memory that can hold any amount of information, in short-term memory the retention process may not be effective if the number of constituents exceeds seven.
Another point that affects storage is word frequency as the easiest items to notice and retrieve are those more frequently used. This information facilitates the acquisition process by grouping items of vocabulary in semantic fields. Wray is in favour of the automatic repetition of these units for their acquisition and argues that the storage of these sequences is produced holistically, as if they were single units. This process facilitates acquisition because, as was detailed above, learners do not need to analyse morphologically or syntactically such units for comprehension.
We agree with Cortina on her recommendation of three graded steps in the process of acquiring formulaic sequences: automatisation, contextualisation and production. The first is related to guided activities, while the second and third are related to semi-guided and free production activities. This pedagogical approach allows learners to work independently during the first two steps, whilst the teacher can indulge the practice of oral skills. Among consciousness raising activities, meaningful tasks, such as dictogloss, seem to be the best option for lexis acquisition.
We recommend dictogloss of texts containing collocations, as it is the bridge to afford automatisation. These tasks encourage students to analyse and process language more deeply, which facilitates both the learning and retention of information in long-term memory. We suggest that there is also an inherent creative and motivational element involved. The tasks should be selected to allow the input to become intake and thus, to produce automatic retrieval. Some recommendations to develop collocations in the classroom are given below: Handling with general and specific dictionaries and other reference tools.
Making vocabulary learning enjoyable and stimulating. Guessing the meaning of lexical items from context. Using real situations in simulations. Working in groups: helps learning independence and exchange knowledge. Practising rhetorical functions. Noticing collocations and language patterns. Recycling and repetition of tasks. Working with language corpuses.
A variety of word association games and exercises using the diverse techniques of cloze procedure. Further hints through underlining. We have found it appropriate to maintain their original headings: Matching and definition a. Now, try to define each of these terms in the same way: storage device flatbed plotter laser printer colour monitor impact printer daisywheel printer disc drive line printer voice recognition device b. Choose the correct definition for the multi-word noun compound: 1.
Optical character recognition input a. Basic telecommunication access method a. Cathode ray tube display unit a. Building compounds Preparation: the teacher must collect enough pieces of text scientific papers, instruction manuals, specialised newspapers and magazines… to be able to give at least half of one to each student.
A page or two is not enough for this exercise. Find six such combinations and be prepared to teach their meanings to the rest of the class. This may well mean bringing in the context in which you found them. Teach your collocations clearly and briefly. In the next class: 1. Then the group is asked to produce other nouns that combine well with the first noun. The result may be: Qualifying Head Head Head Head Head Head Head noun noun noun noun noun noun noun noun System chart communi- design analysis failure generation control cation language Address bus Format mapping calculation modifica- range control sorting tion register field 2.
Decoding compounds: rewriting: The aim of this activity is to decompose noun compounds or to construct them from a decomposed text, understanding the relationships between their elements. Conclusion This paper has offered a general insight into the methodological foundations of the lexical Approach and its implications in formal teaching situations.
As recent l2 research indicates, learning collocations, apart from increasing the mental lexicon, leads to an increase in written and spoken fluency.
Thus, an understanding of collocation is essential for all learners, especially for those on upper-intermediate and advanced level courses for the active improvement of oral output within and outside classroom practice. For that purpose, we have made some recommendations for classroom practice, as well as illustrations of tasks oriented to one of the most important lexical problems in EST discourse: the so-called Noun Compounds.
References Aitchison, J. Words in the mind- an introduction to the mental lexicon. Oxford an New York: Blackswell Publishers ltd. Chambers, F. System, 25 4 , Cortina, B. Deignan, A.
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