The Lexical Approach

Historical Background

For most of the twentieth century, second language instruction was centered around the teaching of grammatical structure. The emphasis on structure reached its peak at mid-century with the Audiolingual Method, which emphasized the drilling of linguistic and phonological structures, with vocabulary items introduced only as needed to make the drills possible (DeCarrico, 2001). Although linguist Noam Chomsky's (1957) transformational grammar theory discredited the behavioristic tenets of Audiolingualism, it continued to emphasize the importance of structure in the form of speakers' internalized system of rules for generating sentences, with vocabulary learning still being viewed as somewhat secondary in importance.

By the early 1980s, linguists were becoming increasingly aware that much of the language that native speakers use consists not of original utterances formulated by structural rules, but rather of intact "chunks" of language that are learned as units. It was hypothesized that "up to 70% of everything we say, hear, read, or write is to be found in some form of fixed expression" (Hill, 2000, p. 53). Accordingly, linguists and language teachers, especially in Britain, began to give less emphasis to grammar and more to the analysis and teaching of these "chunks" of language.

One development that has contributed to linguists' awareness of lexical patterns is the advent of personal computers, and more recently the Internet, which have made it possible to assemble large corpora of examples of authentic language use drawn from literary, journalistic, and other types of texts. By using a software application called a concordancer, corpora can be searched for examples of a particular word in context, allowing researchers to discover which words commonly occur in conjunction with other words.

In the early 1990s, several lexical-based approaches to language teaching were advanced (cited in Richards & Rodgers, 2001), including The Lexical Syllabus (Willis, 1990), Lexical Phrases and Language Teaching (Nattinger & DeCarrico, 1992), and The Lexical Approach (Lewis, 1993). The latter is based on analysis of the COBUILD corpus of 20 million words, with beginning-level ESL instruction sequenced around the 700 most frequently-occurring English words, together with their common patterns and uses. Henceforth we will refer collectively to these various approaches simply as the Lexical Approach.

Theory of Language Learning

Unlike other methods, which may organize language instruction around grammar, functions, notions, or situations, the Lexical Approach centers on the teaching of collocations, or "the way words combine in predictable ways" (Hill, 2000, p. 47). DeCarrico (2001) classifies collocations into two basic types: (a) grammatical collocations, in which a noun, verb, or adjective occurs with a grammatical word, usually a preposition (e.g., rely on, afraid of, by accident, in retrospect); and (b) lexical collocations, which do not contain grammatical words, but consist of combinations of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Hill (2000, p. 51) offers the following examples of lexical collocations:

adjective + noun    a huge profitnoun + noun    a pocket calculatorverb + adjective + noun    learn a foreign languageverb + adverb    live dangerouslyadverb + verb    half understoodadverb + adjective    completely soakedHill adds that collocations vary in strength, ranging from relatively weak combinations such as have lunch whose elements may be recombined with other elements (eat lunch, do lunch) to idioms such as to let the cat out of the bag or to shoot the breeze, whose individual words have lost their literal interpretation.

Lexical Approach advocates point out that without attention to collocations, English language learners are prone to make mistakes such as the following:

Be careful. That snake is toxic.We will sever this class because it is too large.A Ferrari is a very potent car. (Conzett, 2000, p. 73)With countless thousands of collocations in the English language, proponents of lexical approaches disagree somewhat on how the lexical items to be taught should be selected. Willis's COBUILD course (1990) attempts to identify the most common English words and then teach their collocations, whereas other authors (e.g., Hill, 2000; Lewis, 2000; Woolard, 2000) recommend that teachers use their own judgment as to which collocations are the most important for learners to know. These authors suggest criteria for teachers to use in making their selection.

Advocates of lexical approaches also disagree to some extent on the role of practice in learning collocations. Willis (1990) considers practice useful for enhancing learners' familiarity and fluency with collocations to which learners have already been exposed. In fact, most learning activities that have been published in association with the Lexical Approach (e.g., DeCarrico, 2001; Hill, Lewis, & Lewis, 2000; Willis, 1990) seem to be based on the notion that practice with collocations is helpful and even necessary. Lewis (2000), on the other hand, insists that "any attempt to teach and practice the lexicon item by item is impossible" and that "it is repeated meetings with an item, noticing it in context, which converts that item into intake" (p. 171; emphasis in original).

Despite their differences, most proponents of the Lexical Approach share a concern for "shift[ing] responsibility for learning onto the learner" (Willis, 1990, p. 130). They stress that students must be taught about collocations and the importance of looking for them. Indeed, Lewis (2000) emphasizes that in order for input to be converted to intake, students must be taught to consciously notice the context in which words occur. Woolard (2000) advocates teaching students to use as a concordancer in conjunction with a linguistic corpus, as well as a dictionary of collocations, in order to form their own linguistic generalizations.

A second characteristic shared by advocates of lexical approaches is their emphasis on authentic language. Because the vocabulary items and collocations to be taught are selected from corpora samples, they represent language as it is used in "real life" by native speakers. Lewis (2000) cautions teachers against inventing linguistic examples to illustrate rules, pointing out that such examples are often unnatural and unlikely to promote language acquisition.

Since the early 1990s, the Lexical Approach has been widely implemented in Britain for teaching English as a second language. It is less commonly used in the U.S., particularly in the foreign language teaching community, where at present it is practically unknown.

Classroom Activities

Richards and Rodgers (2001) explain that materials associated with the Lexical Approach are of several types, including complete course packages with textbooks and ancillary materials such as the Collins COBUILD course; computer concordancing programs for use with corpora, or "printout" versions of these corpora; and collections of vocabulary teaching activities. The latter type of materials is perhaps the most common.

• Learning activities generally center on helping students notice and practice collocations. Following are some examples of activities that might be used in a Lexical Approach classroom:
• When discussing a new vocabulary item such as run out of, brainstorm a list of collocates (e.g., what types of things can you run out of?).
• From a list of related words such as speak, say, and tell, choose the correct word to fill in the gaps in a list of sentences.
• Given a noun along with a list of adjectives with which it does and does not occur, choose the appropriate collocates.
• Given a list of words that collocate with an unknown word, identify the word.
• Working with a printout of collocations of a given word, sort the collocations into categories according to meaning.
• Examine recorded or printed texts for collocations of common words.
• Do pre-writing activities related to the topic of the writing that raise awareness of collocations; for example, brainstorm a list of topic-related words and then list other words with which they collocate.
• Keep a lexical notebook of common words and their collocations.

Notes on the Video

The lesson in the video features an ESL class at Utah Valley University taught by Timothy Hall. The lesson begins by previewing vocabulary from a recorded dialogue, which students then listen to, answer comprehension questions, and then examine lexical items from the dialogue. Next, students participate in a teacher-led discussion of different collocations derived from the dialogue, including words used with "would you mind, "get," and "just." Throughout the lesson, emphasis is placed on noticing and using collocations.

References and Additional Resources

Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton.

Conzett, J. (2000). Integrating collocation into a reading and writing course. In M. Lewis (Ed.), Teaching collocation: Further developments in the lexical approach (pp. 70-87). Hove, England: Language Teaching Publications.

DeCarrico, J. S. (2001). Vocabulary learning and teaching. In M. Celce-Murcia (Ed.), Teaching English as a second or foreign language (3^rd ed., pp. 285-299). Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle.

Hill, J. (2000). Revising priorities: From grammatical failure to collocational success. In M. Lewis (Ed.), Teaching collocation: Further developments in the lexical approach (pp. 47-69). Hove, England: Language Teaching Publications.

Hill, J., Lewis, M., & Lewis, M. (2000). Classroom strategies, activities and exercises. In M. Lewis (Ed.), Teaching collocation: Further developments in the lexical approach (pp. 88-117). Hove, England: Language Teaching Publications.

Lewis, M. (1993). The Lexical Approach. London: Language Teaching Publications.

Lewis, M. (2000). Learning in the lexical approach. In M. Lewis (Ed.), Teaching collocation: Further developments in the lexical approach (pp. 155-185). Hove, England: Language Teaching Publications.

Nattinger, J., & DeCarrico, J. (1992). Lexical phrases and language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Richards, J. C., & Rodgers, T. S. (2001). Approaches and methods in language teaching (2^nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Willis, D. (1990). The lexical syllabus: A new approach to language teaching. London: Harper Collins.

Woolard, G. (2000). Collocation encouraging learner independence. In M. Lewis (Ed.), Teaching collocation: Further developments in the lexical approach (pp. 28-46). Hove, England: Language Teaching Publications.