Lexical Approach

The lexical approach is an approach to teaching language that sees words and word combinations as the foundation of language. The lexical approach is in contrast to structuralist approaches because it views lexis as having more creative potential than grammar. Proponents of the approach also believe that much of language is not novel, but instead consists of prefabricated or memorized chunks. The lexical approach is gaining more influence due to the field of corpus linguistics which is making real language data more widely available.

Keywords Collocations; Concordance; Corpus; Corpus Linguistics; Coverage; ESL Vocabulary; Idiomatic Expressions; Lexical Approach; Lexical Item; Lexical Phrases; Negotiated Meaning; Prefabricated Chunks; Polywords; Range

Overview

The lexical approach is an approach to teaching language that sees words and word combinations as the basic foundation of language. From this perspective, the language that we use consists of many multi-word "chunks," or groups of words that frequently appear together. Language teaching under this approach attempts to build vocabulary and raise students' awareness of language patterns.

The lexical approach is different from structural approaches because it places vocabulary before grammar. In structural approaches, grammar is viewed as the primary factor that allows for the creation of novel sentences while words are seen as static entities that merely fit into the slots that grammar provides. In contrast, the lexical approach views words as holding the most creative potential. Lewis (1993) writes that "language consists of grammaticalized lexis not lexicalized grammar" (p. vi).

The Word Continuum

Lewis (1993), in one of the most comprehensive descriptions of the lexical approach, describes the generative power of words as existing on a continuum. At one end are "semantically strong" words whose meaning is contained in the word itself. These words have limited "collocational range" for they do not frequently combine with other words to create new meanings. Such words are highly specialized such as "pneumonia" or "electromagnetic". At the other end of the continuum are words that have little or no meaning in and of themselves. These words, such as "this", "of" and "the," get their meaning from the words with which they combine. They collocate widely and have traditionally been viewed as part of English structure. While these are the extremes, most words fall somewhere in the middle.

Given the central position of words and word combinations to the lexical approach, those interested in its tenets generally examine how words create meaning. The first important principle is that words do not have a one-to-one correspondence with real life (Lewis, 1993). While words such as house and dog represent things that exist, it is not true that these words represent one and only one particular house or kind of dog. Rather, these general terms represent a category that can be understood when a hearer or reader applies background knowledge to the word. Perhaps you, as reader, for instance, have a picture of a kind of house or dog that comes to mind when you hear these words. Probably, your meaning is created partially by understanding what each word is not. A dog is not a cat nor is it a house; thus, you define the word by excluding what it cannot be. The meaning of a word can be refined through the addition of words that modify it. A large red house, for example, or a cute fluffy dog should convey a more specific meaning than the general terms house or dog. However, the exact nature of large, or cute, or fluffy is still an abstract concept without a direct correspondence to one and only one match in real life.

Words, Meaning & Context

Within a word, meaning is created by the base meaning of the word and by the derivations of the word created by changing letters or adding affixes (e.g. prefixes and suffixes). Adding -s to house gives us more than one house. Adding -ed to a word like jump changes the time in which the action occurs (Today I jump; yesterday, I jumped). Outside the word, meaning is created by the context in which it occurs. Context can refer to the situation in which the word is produced (e.g. a discussion between two friends or within a formal academic paper). It can also refer to the language that surrounds the word in a sentence or longer text. Both types of context influence the meaning conveyed by a word. Between two friends talking about a problem that has been previously discussed, for instance, knowledge of the ongoing situational context may be all that is needed to understand the word problem in the following conversation:

S1: "How'd your meeting go?"

S2: "Well, the problem has been taken care of"

Within a sentence level context, the surrounding words can provide clues as to what an unknown word may mean. For example, in the sentence, "The problem with my boss is that he always wants me to work late when I already have plans," the words surrounding 'problem' indicate that the problem is a conflict between what the boss and speaker want.

Writers and speakers use words within contexts to convey a particular meaning, but an additional factor in whether the meaning is understood is the hearer or reader. This person brings to the situation an understanding of the writer's/speaker's purpose, knowledge of the context and of the language. All of this knowledge shapes the outcome of the interaction. Because of the hearer/reader's knowledge, he or she can provide help to the speaker/writer by guessing the speaker's intention, providing unknown words, or ignoring or correcting errors. The result of the interaction between the two parties is a negotiated meaning that is unique to the particular participants (Lewis, 1993).

Lexical Phrases

The lexical approach takes into account all of these different ways of creating meaning. The approach emphasizes that students should be exposed to words in real contexts and that learners should become familiar with how context affects meaning. An effort is made to encourage students to negotiate for meaning, and of course, as the name implies, the greatest attention is given to the nature of lexical items themselves and their regularly occurring patterns within text.

One of the central principles of the lexical approach is that much of the language we use exists in our minds as prefabricated or memorized chunks. These chunks have been called by various names including: lexical phrases, formulaic sentences, and ready-made utterances. It is believed that the chunks are probably stored together in the brain in order to increase the brain's processing efficiency. Through the manipulation of thousands of chunks, individuals create new utterances (Boers, Eyckmans & Stengers, 2006).

Because chunking is so important, the lexical approach makes the teaching of lexical phrases a primary component of the approach. The main reasons for this include:

• Being able to use lexical phrases makes the student sound more native-like. Also, because the phrases are unpredictable from grammar rules or the vocabulary of which they are comprised, the only way to learn them is to learn or acquire them in much the same way that irregular spelling is learned.

• Because lexical phrases are thought to be retrieved from memory holistically, knowing more of them is thought to increase fluency in real-life situations.

• The use of these phrases creates a comfort zone for students. If they can use multiword units without error, they will feel more confident about their language use (Boers et al., 2006).

The teaching of lexical units begins with an understanding of what a lexical item is. According to Pawley and Syder, a lexical item is a minimal unit of text whose meaning is not totally predictable from form and which is socially sanctioned (i.e. people are known to use it)(as cited in Lewis, 1993). Lexical items can be words or they can be multi-word units. Though the categorization and labeling of multi-word units is still an active area of research some commonly recognized categories are

• Polywords

• Collocations

• Idiomatic expressions

Polywords

Polywords are generally short groupings of two or three words that occur together. They include several types of functions. For instance, phrasal verbs are one type of polyword which consists of a verb and a preposition or adverb and which have a special meaning (e.g., come in, fill out, cheer up). Other polywords include: fillers (e.g., excuse me, sort of), near-compounds (e.g., cover-up, the weather forecast), and short pragmatic phrases such as of course, by the way, and on the other hand (Boers et. al., 2006; Lewis, 1993).

Idiomatic Expressions

Idiomatic expressions are fixed collocations - meaning the words in the expression always occur in the same order and different words cannot be substituted for those in the expression. Idiomatic expressions have both a literal and a figurative meaning, but the literal meaning is not used. For instance, "I ran into her the other day" does not mean that the speaker literally bumped into someone while running, but that she saw someone unexpectedly.

At one time, idiomatic expressions were thought to be somewhat superfluous knowledge that one didn't really need to learn to speak a second language. Corpus linguistics has shown that to the contrary, idiomatic expressions are widespread. A productive area of research investigates where idiomatic expressions come from and how they can best be taught. One theory in this area states that idioms are not completely random but are often motivated by metaphors that exist in the culture to conceptualize certain concepts. One example of this is the metaphor, "Anger is heat." From this metaphor seems to be derived the idiomatic expressions: makes my blood boil, get into a heated argument, Don't lose your cool (Kövecses, 1986). A related theory is that idiomatic expressions are phonologically motivated. This means that certain expressions have been standardized because of the way they sound. For instance, the idioms "publish or perish" and "beat around the bush" use alliteration which makes them catchy and easy to remember. The possibility that idiomatic expressions are motivated suggests ways to teach them more effectively. By encouraging students to question why an idiom might have become standardized, teachers can encourage deeper-level mental processing which is likely to lead to greater retention (Boers et. al, 2006).

Collocations

Collocations are words that frequently co-occur in a text. The continuum of occurrence ranges from fixed collocations such as idiomatic expressions to free collocations that are novel and have less predictability and a greater potential for variety in meaning. Examples of collocates for the words do and make, for example, include: do: homework, dishes, laundry, my hair and make: bed, decision, friends, sure that, love. By teaching a set of collocates, teachers are thought to be able to improve usage by reducing mismatched words such as make homework or do decisions (Lewis, 1993).

Applications

Using Authentic Data

In the classroom, a lexical approach draws attention to the patterns of language use as exhibited above. Students are exposed to and taught a wide range of vocabulary as it occurs in context. Students are also encouraged to notice patterns themselves through the use of authentic data. One source of such data is a corpus or a large body of collected texts such as the COBUILD Bank of English Corpus, The Cambridge International Corpus or the British National Corpus (Richards & Rodgers, 2001). These corpora, which include millions of words collected from real spoken and written texts can be queried using a concordancer, a special kind of software program that looks for specific words or patterns. A concordancer typically produces lines of text (see below) that highlights the queried word as found within the corpus. Students, through reading the concordance lines, develop their own definitions for the word and notice what kinds of prepositions or other words are usually used with it.

A sample of concordance lines for the word "would" that was queried in the Collins Wordbank Online concordancer follows:

• To what some of the less well-informed media would have you believe, these young people mostly

• So i can have it done privately. How much would it cost, and can i have it done without my

• Of cindy from la or judy from morden, who would you plump for? York membery [p] the vintage

• A skeleton. It never occurred to me that people would see it that way. I'd been doing it in my live

• Mr kinnock emphasised that a labour government would not be able to achieve all its objectives in

• It seems unlikely now that either man would object to being put on the same role of

• The extent. The greatest possible deterrent would be the near certainty of being caught, but in

• In here to make a pitch as unprepared as you, i would have thrown him out in the first five

In teaching vocabulary, a lexical approach emphasizes teaching words and phrases that are going to be most common and most useful. Thus, words which have high frequency - the greatest number of uses in the language - are taught. Similarly, words that have wide range and coverage, meaning respectively that they occur in many situations or have meanings that easily substitute for more specific words (e.g. things), are given attention.

From corpora, many wordlists have been developed of important words for students. Ming-Tzu & Nation (2004) cite four levels of vocabulary lists:

• The list of 2000 high frequency words found in general service vocabulary;

• the Academic Word List comprised of 570 word families that are frequent and wide ranging in academic texts;

• Technical vocabulary word lists that are associated with a particular subject area;

• Low frequency word lists.

Harwood (2002) stresses the value of using corpus data because it has been shown that intuition often fails when it comes to identifying language that is frequent or wide-ranging.

Intensive Reading & Listening

In line with theories of second language acquisition, those who espouse the lexical approach state that noticing language chunks is important for language learning but in and of itself noticing is not enough to ensure acquisition. Rather, they say students must hear and read the words in several contexts so that they begin to make their own generalizations about how the words function in the language. To encourage this, teachers should provide extensive and intensive reading and listening practice, and help students notice similarities, differences, restrictions and examples between words. They can teach collocates together and encourage students to guess the meaning of words in context. Additionally, repetition and recycling or reviewing words over time is valued (Lewis, 1993). Nation states that teachers should recycle lexical items 10-12 times for higher level learners and that teaching without recycling is a "wasted effort" (as cited in Harwood, 2002, p. 142).

The Role of Grammar

Although the lexical approach views lexis as the basis of language and deemphasizes grammar, grammar still has an important role in the lexically-based classroom. Lewis (1993) provides a comprehensive overview of what grammar is and should not be. He suggests that full mastery of a language involves competent use of grammatical patterns, but that grammar has been overemphasized and incorrectly understood in the past. He offers twelve areas of grammatical instruction that should be included:

• Morphology and word formation,

• Manipulation of auxiliary words,

• Negation,

• Supra-sentential linking (e.g. Using words such as such as at the beginning of a sentence),

• Oppositions,

• Adjuncts (e.g., adverbs at beginning of sentences),

• Word order,

• Functional patterns,

• De-lexicalized words (e.g., verbs and function words),

• Word grammar,

• Stress patterns and groups, and

• Grammatical holophrases.

Issues

The lexical approach is still a fairly new approach in the English as a Second Language arena. Consequently, teachers are just beginning to learn how to incorporate these ideas into their classrooms. Some of the potential problems of implementation discussed by Harwood (2002) include deciding how to select and manipulate data, presenting data in a way that is interesting to students, grappling with the question of what "real" English is when data shows non-standard or culturally inappropriate uses, and learning how to recycle words when textbooks do not.

In answer to these possible problems, Harwood suggests that different corpora may need to be consulted for different purposes and different groups of students. He believes that frequency should not be the only criteria for vocabulary selection, citing the use of highly technical words that are infrequent. Unlike Lewis (2003) who believes that unusual samples should be a source of inquiry, Harwood believes that data should be edited to remove nontypical and inappropriate uses. This is because he says that learners can only acquire so much new information in one setting, and spending time on nontypical data causes learner overload.

To ensure that students enjoy working with corpus data, Harwood says that materials designers should strive to create a feeling of student involvement with the materials. Finally, teachers and students need to seriously question whether "real" English is something that should be taught or learned. In the face of evidence that learners often do not want to sound like native speakers and considering the fact that there are now multiple English varieties around the world, this question is likely to receive greater attention in the future.

In conclusion, the lexical approach is an approach that is based on the belief that words and word combinations are the foundations of language. Because the approach views much of language as existing as pre-fabricated chunks, attention in the classroom is given to noticing, learning and reviewing these lexical forms. Although the approach is still fairly new in the ESL field, advances in corpus linguistics are making more data available and this is sure to increase interest in the approach in the future.

Terms & Concepts

Collocations: Collocations are words that frequently occur together in text.

Concordancer: A concordancer is a software program used to search a corpus for language data.

Corpus: A corpus is a collection of texts that can be analyzed in order to learn about word use and language patterns. Most large corpora are now computerized.

Corpus Linguistics: Corpus linguistics is the field of linguistics that studies large bodies of texts in order to identify how language is used.

Coverage: Coverage refers to the ability of a word, because of its general meaning, to substitute for more specific terms.

Idiomatic Expressions: Idiomatic expressions are a type of fixed collocation. It is fixed because the words in the expression must occur in the same order for the meaning of the expression to be understood.

Lexical Item: A lexical item is a minimal unit of text whose meaning is not totally predictable from form and which is socially sanctioned (i.e. people are known to use it).

Negotiated Meaning: A negotiated meaning is the meaning that is co-created between a speaker and listener or a reader and writer through the process of interacting through language.

Polywords: Polywords are short one and two word phrases that co-occur in text.

Range: Range refers to the number of different types of texts in which a word is found.

Bibliography

Boers, F., Eyckmans, J., & Stengers, H. (2006). Motivating multiword units: Rationale, mnemonic benefits, and cognitive style variables. EUROSLA Yearbook, 6, 169-190. Retrieved December 12, 2007 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=22673900&site=ehost-live

Burt, J. S., & Heffernan, M. E. (2012). Reading and spelling in adults: Are there lexical and sub-lexical subtypes?. Journal of Research in Reading, 35, 183-203. Retrieved December 15, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=90459783&site=ehost-live

Collins Wordbank Online Concordancer. Retrieved Nov. 7, 2007, from www.collins.co.uk/corpus/CorpusSearch.

Crossley, S., & Salsbury, T. (2011). The development of lexical bundle accuracy and production in English second language speakers. IRAL: International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 49, 1-26. Retrieved December 15, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=59834865&site=ehost-live

Harwood, N. (2002). Taking a lexical approach to teaching: Principles and problems. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 12 , 139-155. Retrieved December 12, 2007 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Search Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=7676151&site=ehost-live

Jingwei, T. (2012). An empirical study on the effectiveness of the lexical approach to improving writing in SLA. Journal of Language Teaching & Research, 3, 578-583. Retrieved December 15, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=90356294&site=ehost-live

Kövecses, Z. (1986). Metaphors of anger, pride and love: A lexical approach to the structure of concepts. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Lewis, M. (1993). The lexical approach: The state of ELT and a way forward. Hove, England: Language Teaching Publications.

Ming-Tzu, K. W., & Nation, P. (2004). Word meaning in academic English: Homography in the academic word list. Applied Linguistics, 25 , 291-314.

Moudraia, O. (2001). Lexical approach to second language teaching. Washington, DC: ERIC Clearinghouse on Languages and Linguistics. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED455698). Retrieved December 12, 2007 from EBSCO Online Education Research Database. http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/19/24/8a.pdf

Richards, J. C., & Rodgers, T.S. (2001). The lexical approach. In J.C. Richards & T.S. Rodgers (Eds.), Approaches and methods in second language teaching (2nd Ed.) (pp. 132-140). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Suggested Reading

Baigent, M. (1999). Teaching in chunks: Integrating a lexical approach. Modern English Teacher, 8 , 51-54.

Lewis, M. (1993). The lexical approach: The state of ELT and a way forward. Hove, England: Language Teaching Publications.

Nation, P. (2003). Materials for teaching vocabulary. In B. Tomlinson (Ed.), Developing materials for language teaching (pp. 394-405). London, England: Continuum, vii.

Nation, P. (1995). Best practice in vocabulary teaching and learning. EA Journal, 1995-1996, 13 , 7-15.