The Lexical Approach or the sad story of the dead rabbit
IATEFL-H Conference, Eger, October 2012
Judit Révész, balogrevesz@t-online.hu
A) Characteristics of the Lexical Approach
LA concentrates on developing learners' proficiency 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 "chunks. Only a
minority of spoken sentences are entirely novel creations. This was derived from Corpus
linguistics, which is the study of language as expressed in samples (corpora) or "real world"
text.
“Collocation is the readily observable phenomenon whereby certain words co-occur in
natural text with greater than random frequency. Instead of words, we consciously try to think
of collocations, and to present these in expressions. Rather than trying to break things into
ever smaller pieces, there is a conscious effort to see things in larger, more holistic, ways.”
(Lewis,M. (1997) Implementing the lexical approach: Putting theory into practice. Hove,
England: Language Teaching Publications.)
Colligation
Colligation is the way a word regularly co-occurs with a (grammatical) pattern, in other
words, it denotes the word and its grammatical environment. Each word has its own
“grammar”. Examples: “He passed HIS driving test” “He insisted ON MOVING out.”
Advantages of having a large repertoire of formulaic language or collocational
competence
 Chunks save processing time
 Listening, reading – better prediction, texts are not difficult because of unrecognized
words but because of a great density of unrecognized collocations
 Speaking and writing, faster production – increased fluency, more accurate negotiation
of meaning.
 Brain has huge storage capacity
 Grammar for free – chunks bring their grammar with them……
 Pronunciation for free – chunks bring their rhythm and intonation pattern with them,
using chunks increases fluency.
B) Implications for teaching/learning
Translation is out
With premature translation we ask learners to fabricate English sentences whereas they cannot
be fabricated. It encourages negative learner habits like translating from one’s own language
instead of thinking in the target language. Translation is a separate skill that has to be taught
at very high levels when a lot of chunks are available to the translator in both languages.
Vocabulary lists with L1 equivalents are out
It is best to link vocabulary items to
 reality,
 perceptions,
 definitions,
 sample sentences/linguistic context,
 collocational field.
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Monolingual dictionaries should be introduced gradually but as early as possible, the process
should start at pre-intermediate level.
Creativity is highly overrated
Learner creativity is not rewarded at exams. Although collocations change very fast, they are
controlled by the native speaker community. Learner creativity should start at the level of
combining chunks.
Rote learning is back
Fluent language use requires a large amount of over-learnt chunks.
Collocations memory, jigsaw
Copying – off-the wall-dictation
Gapped reading
Drills
Correcting text
Learning by heart, songs, poetry, tongue
Reconstructing text
twisters, proverbs, etc.
Dictation
Huge amounts of input
Intensive and extensive listening and reading in the target language so that chunks re-appear
in various linguistic and social contexts and therefore are re-enforced.
Working with language corpuses, collocation dictionaries, etc.
British National Corpus, Corpus Concordance English
C) Criticism
 St output is undervalued (RJ)
 There is no methodology or
syllabus (Thornbury)
 Learning time is limited,
grammatical structures are often
generative (Swan)
 Decisions about which collocations
to include at which level are
difficult.
 Accuracy is back in a more wicked
way.
Recommended reading
Harwood, N. (2001) Taking a lexical approach to teaching: principles and problems Talk
delivered at 35th IATEFL conference.
http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~nharwood/lexapproach.htm
Nattinger, R. J., DeCarrico, J. S. (1992), Lexical Phrases and Language Teaching. Oxford:
Oxford University Press
Payne, C. (2010) Corpus delicti 2. English Teaching Professional, Issue 71
Prodromou, L. (2003) The Idiomatic Paradox and English as a Lingua Franca. Modern
English Teacher, Vol. 12 No. 1
Swan, M. (2006) Chunks in the classroom: let’s not go overboard. The Teacher Trainer. 20/3,
2006 retrieved at http://www.mikeswan.co.uk/elt-applied-linguistics/chunks-in-theclassroom.htm
Thornbury, S. (1998) The Lexical Approach: A Journey without Maps? Modern English
Teacher, Vol.7. No.4. http://www.thornburyscott.com/assets/Lexical%20approach.pdf
Thornbury, S. (2004) Big words, small grammar. English Teaching Professional, Issue 31
Resources:
British National Corpus, http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/
Corpus Concordance English, http://www.lextutor.ca/concordancers/concord_e.html
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