The Pedagogical Implications of a Lexical Approach in Learning and Teaching English
Anna Maria Aiazzi, Italy
Anna Maria Aiazzi graduated in Modern Foreign Languages (English Language and Literature) at the University of Florence. She took her Ph-D. degree in English and American Literature at the University of Florence. She has published some articles in Italian literary reviews concerning V. Woolf, W. Lewis, Vorticism and Quantum Theory and the Italian translation of Joyce's 'Ulysses' by the Florentine G. de Angelis. Since 2002 she has been teaching English Language and Culture mainly in Italian secondary schools of second degree. From 2004 to 2006 she attended the SSIS-course at the University of Florence. In 2006 she took a qualification degree to teach English in Italian secondary schools of first and second degree. In 2007 she also took a degree as Teacher for Impaired Students at the University of Florence. She is the author of an article published in HLT: 'Teaching as a Matter of Love'.
E-mail: bruno.aiazzi@tin.it
Menu
From observation to reflection
The nature of lexis
The teaching of lexis in schools
My experience of vocabulary teaching
Conclusions
References
During my two-year teaching practice and temporary teaching as a supply teacher in Italian secondary schools I realized very soon that, in general, vocabulary teaching was paid scant attention, and was mostly limited to presenting new items as they appeared in reading texts. In fact, vocabulary was only rarely taught systematically; it was almost exclusively taught as subservient to grammar and, above all, as a list of individual words which were only rarely introduced to pupils as 'collocations'.
Lexical teaching consisted of introducing vocabulary to pupils as a body of separate words, that is, as a sequence of isolated word items. But what struck me most was that lexis was taught essentially through translation, that is, through the presentation of written texts in English which were to be translated into Italian almost word by word. This word-by-word translation was done either orally by the teacher in class, or by the pupils at home with a bilingual dictionary. In this case, pupils had to write down the corresponding Italian version of the English texts. In seconday schools the translation was done orally: pupils had to write glosses on the English words they did not know and, then, be ready to read in class the whole translation into Italian without producing a written version, but keeping in mind the words they had looked up.
In this kind of approach pupils had to translate every single word in order to understand the meaning of the whole text. No attempts were made by teachers to encourage pupils to grasp the general meaning of the texts intuitively, without claiming to understand every word, that is, to make pupils understand the meaning of the unknown words in ways different from a detailed translation into Italian by paraphrasing, gesturing, drawing on the blackboard, showing objects or miming.
In general, this kind of approach did not seem to work, because pupils got bored and tired of looking up words in dictionaries, they often did not do their homework or simply refused to do it. Furthermore, only a few pupils were able to remember the words they had looked up and reuse them in different situational contexts. Listing of this kind, where pupils have rare possibilities of retrieving words, seems to have slight pedagogical value.
It was evident that pupils were not used to coping with a certain degree of tolerance towards ambiguity. In fact, they often made mistakes of interpretation when translating a text at home. This showed their incapacity of dealing with a text intuitively, that is, understanding its general meaning at first and, at a second stage, grasping every single detail by translating. Giving pupils the impression that they need to understand every word is not an effective method of teaching a foreign language, because it creates unrealistic expectations which, if not fulfilled, can discourage them.
Consequently, almost all pupils had difficulties in speaking English, that is, they had to make a great effort to speak only a few sentences, because they seemed incapable of thinking directly in English and had to translate every single word in their mind before speaking. For this reason, they were unwilling to speak English unless they were strongly motivated to express their ideas. Not only were they not fluent, but they were neither accurate, as far as grammar structures were concerned: in fact, they made several mistakes when speaking and had a strong tendency to translate from Italian into English almost literally, without considering that collocations, idioms, fixed or semi-fixed expressions should be translated into English with equivalent expressions, and not word by word.
During the last years, after having read Lewis's books, I began to realize that many grammar mistakes could be caused by vocabulary deficiency, and particularly by lack of collocational competence by pupils; this meant that, in many cases, teachers' response to pupils' errors should be lexically rather than grammatically orientated (Lewis, 1993:172).
Furthermore, a word-by-word vocabulary teaching was very ineffective and unproductive and could not ensure that input would turn into intake. It was evident that what the pupils needed was gradually to develop an awareness of lexical chunks of different kinds which were previously usually treated separately. So, I perceived more and more that, as a teacher, my task was to help pupils become aware of lexical items or phrases by noticing them as they meet them, record them accurately using effective storage systems and be able to reuse them in different situational contexts. Awareness-raising activities, such as using a collocation dictionary, recording and collecting collocations and playing collocation games should be frequently presented to pupils in order to train them to notice and select collocations, idioms, fixed or semi-fixed expressions for themselves.
Lewis's books made me reflect upon the nature of lexis and perceive language as a holistic entity. Commonly speaking, 'to have a big vocabulary' means 'to know a lot of words', according to Lewis,instead, it means "to have access to a huge store of lexical items" (Lewis, 1993:89). The peculiarity of a lexical item is that, in itself, it has no meaning unless it is used for a specific purpose. So, lexical items can be defined as the minimal units used "for certain syntactic purposes" (Lewis, 1993:90). But this description is not sufficient to explain the nature of both language and lexical items. In fact, language does not exist in a vacuum, but has a socio-pragmatic function, as it is a means of communication. Lexical items, consisting of single or multi-words, must be socially recognised as independent units. Their use is therefore functional and must be appropriate to a definite social context.
In no way are lexical items or 'chunks' peripheral to the main body of language, but lie at the very heart of native speakers' language competence. Native speakers have a store of hundreds of thousands of lexical chunks in their heads, ready to draw upon, in order to produce fluent, accurate and meaningful language. Consequently, much recent research considers formulaic language as the very centre of language acquisition, completely overturning the idea that language was formed by atomistic particles. On the contrary, language is built up by indivisible wholes. It is a holistic entity, an organism which continuously undergoes a process of change and development, and which cannot be reduced to the sum of its separate parts.
This view is very far from the Structuralist perspective held in the previous decades, and is a great change in understanding the way in which L2 acquisition works. Structuralism asserted that, in order to acquire a foreign language, one had to master its grammatical rules. In fact, the knowledge of the grammar structures seemed sufficient to generate grammatically correct sentences and to achieve accuracy and fluency. Nowadays this assumption has lost much of its plausibility. What is also considered fundamental in language acquisition practice is "the ability to produce lexical phrases as unanalysed wholes or 'chunks'" (Lewis, 1993:95). This means that one can use whole phrases without understanding their constituent parts. These chunks can be seen as the raw material by which one begins to perceive grammar patterns as significant and to build up a morphological-syntactic competence. According to this view, lexical phrases acquired as wholes are the primary step towards the mastery of syntax.
So, a more effective way of processing speech is not to make a word-by-word analysis, but to consider lexical phrases as if they were wholes having a unique meaning. This procedure also reflects the way in which lexis is stored in memory: in fact, a great quantity of vocabulary is stored and retrieved in units larger than individual words.
According to my teaching practice experience, lexis has a subordinate role in L2 teaching with respect to grammar. In fact, nearly all language teaching starts with the presentation of grammar rules, which are explained to pupils after having been extracted from the situational contexts in which they were originally set.
After this first phase of presentation, pupils have to practise the grammar rules through exercises which can be either related to the text previously introduced (comprehension exercises), or completely detached from any situational context (de-contextualised exercises). This last type of exercise is usually made up by sentences of short or medium length, which are neither connected to each other, nor to any referential context. What is considered important at this stage of acquisition is to make pupils practise the grammar rules for their own sake, without any intention to communicate meaning in a socio-pragmatic context involving external participants.
After having practised the grammar rules through innumerable exercises and over an extended period of time, pupils are considered capable of personalised production. Then new grammar rules are introduced to pupils, who are expected to learn them following the same process of accumulation of discrete items, graded according to their supposed difficulty.
This 'Presentation-Practice-Production' model of teaching English grammar was largely adopted in all the schools where I practised. I sometimes observed that pupils seemed to have forgotten the grammar rules they had been previously presented with, although they were expected to have acquired them definitively. In fact, pupils who were introduced to abstract grammar structures through exercise practice seemed to have partly forgotten those structures after a short time, when a new grammar rule was presented to them 'replacing' the previous one in their memory.
This seems to happen when grammar rules are simply practised but are not reelaborated at an emotional, imaginative or experiential level, that is, at a creative level by pupils. In fact, grammar rules learnt in such a way are not stored in the long-term memory, where they can be retrieved successfully at any time, but are processed in the short-term memory and can be forgotten very easily after a short period of time.
Reflecting upon Lewis's Lexical Approach, I realized that what pupils were missing was an approach based on a perception of language and learning as essentially organic and holistic, which could follow the natural way in which the mother tongue is learnt. In fact, from Lewis's perspective, lexis, that is, 'word grammar', has a fundamental role, whereas sentence grammar has a decreased one: according to him, language consists of 'grammaticalised lexis' and not of 'lexicalised grammar' (Lewis, 1993:vi).
Lexical phrases should be introduced relatively early in the learning process, and without a conscious analysis of their constituent parts. The Lexical Approach suggests that pupils should build up a large vocabulary much more quickly and earlier than in traditional syllabuses. In fact, the Lexical Approach implies that "increasing competence and communicative power are achieved by extending the students' repertoire of lexical phrases, collocational power, and increasing mastery of the most basic words and structures of the language" (Lewis, 1993:48).
L1 acquisition research affirms that the mother tongue is not learnt by 'building up' one brick after the other, that is, learning individual sounds and structures and then combining them, but by an increasing ability to break down wholes into significant parts. The Lexical Approach claims that L2 acquisition works in a similar way: what is central is the ability to chunk language successfully and meaningfully. This conviction reflects Stephen Krashen's assertion that L2 acquisition should follow a natural order. In this perspective, errors are tolerated and considered as a natural phase in the acquisition process, that is, as a stage of intergrammar.
Lewis proposes a greatly diminished role of grammar teaching as it was traditionally meant, that is, the teaching of a prescriptive grammar, in favour of a word grammar. This approach consists of exploring the word grammar of a given word, noticing and recording high frequency collocations, idioms, fixed or semi-fixed expressions, that is, the most common lexical items/phrases in which a word may regularly occur. Its main assumption is to identify useful patterns and pre-fabricated chunks of language which have a high probability of occurring in sentences usually spoken by English native speakers, in order to make pupils achieve both fluency and accuracy.
The Lexical Approach does not disdain or dismiss the teaching of grammar; it simply invites teachers to revise their traditional concept of grammar, giving word grammar a higher priority. In particular, practice should be directed towards helping pupils collocate words and grammaticalise from word to sentence.
During my temporary teaching at a vocational school for tourism I was able to experiment the teaching of lexical items/phrases, that is, collocations to pupils. When I first met these pupils I immediately realized that their knowledge of vocabulary was very limited. For this reason, they were unwilling to speak English and had great difficulties in understanding a wide range of topics. Consequently, during my first lessons, I had to continuously interrupt myself to check if the pupils could follow at least the gist of my discourse. When I asked them some questions about the topic I was discussing, their silence was discomforting, mostly to me.
I understood that I had to arrange challenging activities to stimulate them, even if the time I was to spend with them was rather limited. Being aware that collocations can be a powerful lexical tool for teachers working with 'English for Specific Purposes', I thought that teaching collocations to these pupils could enable them to speak and write fluent and accurate English, as well as to make them acquire a certain confidence with the foreign language. In fact, it is more and more evident that language proficiency in a particular field will be determined to a large extent by the pupils' mastery of the common collocations crucial to such a field.
Collocations can provide pupils with a powerful organising principle for language which, apart from helping them to manipulate a certain quantity of ordinary language, can become generative according to the creative use that pupils can make of it. So, I resolved to train them to detect collocations by exploring a text taken from a brochure on local tourist itineraries. Pupils who acquire a collocational competence are able to successfully deal with the unknown lexical items they meet when listening or reading, as their cognitive strategies are particularly stimulated and their ability to guess the meaning of lexical items on the basis of the context in which they are is extremely enhanced.
For this reason, noticing collocations can be considered a central pedagogical activity: teachers should heighten pupils' awareness of collocations, encouraging them to consciously explore the collocational fields of a word item and make better use of the language they already partly know (Lewis, 1997:33). It is evident how the time spent in classroom activities on half-known language is more likely to encourage input to become intake than time spent on completely new input. What is central is to make pupils more collocationally competent with the words with which they are already partly familiar: learning new vocabulary means, to some extent, learning familiar words in new combinations.
In this sense, semi-fixed expressions are the most generative lexical items, as they span between traditional fixed expressions, i. e. idioms and a more generative word grammar, being thus central to understanding how language is acquired, stored and retrieved in the mental lexicon. De-lexicalised verbs, in particular, can be used in a generative way which more resembles traditional grammar than vocabulary. Consequently, it is much more useful to explore with pupils the collocational fields of a word item rather than indiscriminately list new words.
After having tried to make the pupils infer the nature and function of collocations starting from some collocates written on the blackboard, I asked them, in pairs, to identify collocations of different kinds in a specific text. I did the same activity by myself on a copy of the same text which I wrote on some transparencies and showed to pupils, so they could check their lexical chunking with mine. This activity was meant to encourage pupils to notice different kinds of collocations and enable them to select idioms, fixed and semi-fixed expressions more responsibly: the chance of input to become intake was thus maximised.
In particular, I asked the pupils to concentrate on nouns, making them underline all the nouns they could find in the text; then, I asked them to search for any adjective immediately in front of the nouns and any verb coming in front or after the nouns. My intention was to make pupils detect whole phrases in which collocations were to be found.
As homework, pupils had to select some nouns and search in a monolingual dictionary for four or five verbs or adjectives which collocated with them. In order to make them think in English as much as they could and avoid a direct translation into Italian, I tried to give them explanations of the lexical items and phrases they did not know by paraphrasing, miming, drawing on the blackboard and showing them objects.
After having analysed the whole text, I asked the pupils to divide themselves into groups and write down summaries of the various paragraphs, that is, a text which should become their own 'brochure' and which they could personalise with pictures and drawings. Then, pupils had to illustrate their brochures to the whole class. I thought that setting a competition among pupils was stimulating, so I asked them to select the best brochure which was to be distributed to the whole class. The last step consisted of compiling a glossary where pupils included what they considered the most relevant collocations, idioms, fixed and semi-fixed expressions to be found in the text and which they could reuse in different situational contexts.
Evalutating the kind of mistakes that pupils had made, I realized how pupils' level of accuracy was higher when they had reused the collocations or lexical phrases from the texts, than when they had tried to grammaticalise with their own words. Being able to notice and select collocations was also useful to pupils when they were asked to speak in public to illustrate their brochures to the class: in fact, I noticed that they could speak with a certain confidence by relying on the fixed expressions they had memorised during the previous lessons, rather than reading mechanically the whole text.
According to Lewis's Lexical Approach, teaching lexis means essentially raising pupils' awareness of lexical chunking by directing pupils' attention to the collocations, idioms, fixed and semi-fixed expressions which they can encounter in a text. Pupils should be trained to analyse lexical chunks by being equipped with search skills, in order to develop their knowledge of lexical chunks independently of the teacher. This means that they should be provided with opportunities to experience lexical chunks in authentic texts and should be encouraged to analyse, generalise and experiment with these chunks, in order to be able to discover them for themselves. As it is probable that native speakers learn language in lexical chunks, it is not unreasonable to assume that learning certain chunks containing grammar structures will help pupils in their acquisition of English grammar patterns as well (Lewis, 2000:52).
Noticing plays a central role in language acquisition, as it can raise pupils' consciousness and enable them to meaningfully chunk any language they meet. Teachers have to consider, however, that pupils need to be initially trained to observe and notice collocations, in order to be able to select the ones which are crucial to their needs and interests. But noticing and selecting collocations can not, in itself, be sufficient to memorise them effectively: recording, cyclically revisiting and re-activating them is also necessary and essential. A good rule, however, is never to teach a new word item, particularly a noun, without giving a few common collocates.
In this case, lexical notebooks and specific formats or grids, where a word item is recorded together with some of its collocates, are useful storage systems. Accurate noticing of collocations, idioms, fixed and semi-fixed expressions help pupils convert input into intake, and provide them with an appropriate strategy to learn both the lexis and the structural components of a language: in fact, the more collocations pupils have at their disposal, the less they need to grammaticalise. In many cases, it is their lack of collocational competence that forces them into grammar mistakes, as they do not know the collocations which express precisely what they want to say.
According to my experience, teaching collocations to pupils is the only effective method to help them improve their communicative competence, and help them leave behind the so-called 'plateau' level where they are often stranded at an intermediate linguistic (i. e. lexis and grammar) competence.
Lewis M., The Lexical Approach. The State of ELT and a Way Forward, Language Teaching Publications, 1993.
Lewis M., Implementing the Lexical Approach. Putting Theory into Practice, Language Teaching Publications, 1997.
Lewis M., Teaching Collocations. Further Developments in the Lexical Approach, Language Teaching Publications, 2000.
Lewis M., Towards a Lexical View of Language - a Challenge for Teachers, "Babylonia", 3, 2005.
Please check the What’s New in Language Teaching course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Methodology for Teaching Spoken Grammar and Language course at Pilgrims website.
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