Tungol, Lutgarda
Reflection on Preparing a Lesson Plan Using Lexical Approach in Teaching
Language Learners
Learners can generally communicate well having learned all the basic structures
of the language. However, they need to broaden their vocabulary to express themselves
more clearly and appropriately in a wide range of situations. Students might even have a
receptive knowledge of a wider range of vocabulary, which means they can recognize the
item and recognize its meaning. There must be a concern not only with students
understanding the meaning of words, but also being able to use them appropriately,
taking into account factors such as oral or written use of the language. Learners have to
recognize the meaning of the words to be able to participate in a conversation. Grammar
teaching and vocabulary teaching are equally important when teaching a foreign
language.
Chunks include collocations, fixed and semi-fixed expression and idioms, and
according to him, occupy a crucial role in facilitating language production, being the key
to fluency. It is essential to make students aware of chunks, giving them the
opportunities to identify, organize, and record these. Identifying chunks is not always
easy, and at least in the beginning, students need a lot of guidance.
My lesson plan (#2) was focused on TESOL standard 3.c - Using Resources
Effectively in ESL and Content Instruction. Students will be familiar with a wide range
of standards-based materials, resources, and technologies, and choose, adapt, and use
them in effective ESL and content teaching. The teacher uses an understanding of
individual and group motivation and behavior to create a learning environment that
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encourages positive social interaction, active engagement in learning, and selfmotivation.
Compared to lesson plan no. 1, which is a regular lesson plan and had emphasis
on technology, in lesson plan, lexical approach had to be taken into consideration.
Lexical approach has much to offer in the area of vocabulary teaching, and therefore it is
ideal to plan a lesson based on its main concepts, especially exploring the use of
collocations. The difference in writing this lesson plan from the previous lesson plan
(#1) is that lesson plan had an emphasis on use the use of technology, whereas this lesson
plan (#2), the use of lexical approach in teaching the language was stressed, too,
incorporated with the use of technology. With a little editing and revising, the lesson plan
can be more challenging to the students, if activities will be included. Many activities are
suggested for doing something with lexical items, such as sorting adjective or verb
collocates to their respective nouns, deciding which collocates from a list will not match,
using double gapped sentences to match collocations, reconstructing texts from the
collocations recorded and many more. Newspaper articles, if chosen, can be a useful
source of collocations, however should be of interest to the students. Recognizing that
the students read the news on a daily basis, the content should be stimulating, relevant to
the students’ lives, and also not too difficult to understand. From this source, the
collocations students find in this type of text should be useful for future recognition when
reading similar stories. Newspaper articles show the students how language is used in the
real world. According to Richards (2001, lexical approaches in language teaching reflect
a belief in the centrality of the lexicon to language structure, second language learning,
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and language use and in particular to multiword lexical units or “chunks” that are learned
and used as single items (p. 132).
Working on this assignment made me explore more options on how to teach
language to learners in an explicit and practical manner, not only focusing on the
structure of the language, but understanding and knowing how to use the language
appropriately.
In conclusion, I have never thought of the importance and usefulness of “chunks”
of words such as collocations and lexical units in learning a language, until I have
developed a lesson plan with this approach, and plan to utilize this approach in teaching
students with English as their second language, in the near future.
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Reference:
Richards, J.C., & Rodgers, T.S (2001). Communicative Language Teaching. Approaches
and Methods in Language Teaching. (pp. 156-157).Cambridge, UK:Cambridge
University Press.
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