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A Guide to teaching English
2.8 Lexical approach
The underlying principle of this method is that grammar and vocabulary cannot be
strictly divided as is often the case in traditional teaching methods. A further notion is
that language is made up of lexical items using grammar to support them rather than
being made up of grammatical structures incorporating lexis. Lexical items are words
or chunks of words, which have their own meaning. For example, the following
combinations of words have different meanings to the individual elements that make
them up: by the way, look into, video recorder. Longer structures are also considered
to be lexical items, e.g. I just wanted to say that….
The theory is that we learn a language by learning lexical items and not by learning
grammar. Accordingly, the main focus of the work is lexical items rather than syntax or
grammatical rules. Critics have said that it difficult to know in which order lexical items
should be taught. Proponents of this method counter this by saying that the syllabus is
organised according to collocation. Collocation refers to words that are frequently used
together, e.g. make a phone call, make an appointment, heavy rain, by accident.
A further principle of this method is to teach through: observation, hypothesis and
experimentation. The observe phase involves being exposed to language, for example
a text to be read. Students are encouraged to deduce the meaning of unknown
language (this will be covered in Chapter 3), this phase is known as hypothesis. The
experiment phase involves using the language.
2.9 A final word on teaching methods
Of course there are other approaches to teaching, however, the above are the main
ones you should be aware of. I suggest you look at any course book you’re about to
use and see whether it favours one of the approaches above. You will find that after
some time teaching, you will have a preference for one (or more) approach over the
others. You might also find that different approaches work well with different students
and with different levels. Don’t worry too much about methodology at the beginning;
just do what feels right to you and what you see produces results in your classes.
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Copyright © Lucy Pollard 2008 All Rights Reserved
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