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(http://eflmagazine.com/)

THE MAGAZINE FOR ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHERS

BY LEO SELIVAN (HTTP://EFLMAGAZINE.COM/AUTHOR/LEO-SELIVAN/) /

19/02/2016

BEGINNERS’ GUIDE TO
TEACHING LEXICALLY

T
he term “teaching lexically” was coined by Hugh Dellar and
Andrew Walkley, coursebook writers (Innovations, Outcomes) and
teacher trainers (LexicalLab(http://www.lexicallab.com/)), who have
proudly taken over from the retired Michael Lewis as torch bearers of the
Lexical approach. In this article I outline the main principles of the lexical
approach, the way I see it, and highlight key figures in the history of the
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Lexical Approach and its main proponents today.

Principle 1: Ban single words

Words are never – well, almost never – used alone. I can think of only a
handful of words that can be used on their own:

Hurry!

Silence…

Tragic.

But most of the time words are used in company of other words. So why
record them alone? Why teach accident only to find that a minute later your
students say *He made an accident, when you can teach have an accident?
Or why write on the board deprived and its definition or L1 translation, when
you can immediately provide the nouns it often goes with:

deprived area / childhood / background

Make a habit of writing new words on the board with other words that
surround them and encourage your students to do the same in their
notebooks. Ideally, write whole phrases or sentences to illustrate how a word
is used:

Have you done your homework?

They are investigating the murder of…

That’s it. I’m drawing the line.

If time doesn’t permit, write at least two words together.

do homework

investigate the murder (of)

intense workout

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heavy rain

Remember: collocations – and not individual words – are minimum units of

meaning.

A bit of theory
The origins of the Lexical Approach can be traced back to John R. Firth (1890
– 1960), who was one of the first linguists to argue that the meaning of a
word is determined by the words it co-occurs with and popularise the term
“collocation”. His context-dependent view of language is succinctly summed
up by his famous quote:

You shall know a word by the company it keeps.

Useful links and resources

Inspired by J. R. Firth’s quote, Hania Kryzsewksa and Paul Davies’s new

book is aptly titled “The Company Words Keep”. The book features
more than a hundred activities for raising learners’ awareness of and
practising lexical chunks, exploiting authentic texts and supplementing
textbook materials.
See the book review HERE(http://ihjournal.com/the-company-words-keep-
by-paul-davis-and-hanna-kryszewska-delta-publishing-reviewed-by-dan-
cornford-ih-valladolid) and preview sample activities from the book on
the Delta Publishing website:
www.deltapublishing.co.uk/titles/methodology/the-company-
words-keep(http://www.deltapublishing.co.uk/titles/methodology/the-
company-words-keep)

Principle 2: English word ≠ L1 word

Shifting the emphasis from words to collocations and multi-word phrases not
only implies recording new language in chunks. You should try to reduce
students’ reliance on word for word translation. For example, I refuse to
answer the following questions:

What does (English word) mean?

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What does (English word) mean?

or

How do you say (L1 word) in English?

Because it, of course, depends on what this word means in a given context
and what the student wants to say.

If you use translation in class, get students to translate whole phrases or

collocations. For example, get students translate “soft” in the collocation
fork(http://leoxicon.blogspot.com/2011/05/cycles-of-recycling_08.html) below. Do
they always end up with the same word in their L1?
voice
soft skin
drink

Similarly, translation of “abuse” would probably be different depending on

the adjective it goes with:

physical

verbal abuse

drug

And do mild cheese, mild injuries and mild sentence correspond to the same
“mild” in your students’ L1? I bet you’ll find that, with the exception of
scientific terms (e.g. appendicitis), there is NO word for word correspondence
between semantic fields of L1 and L2 words.

A Bit Of Theory
Contrastive analysis was an approach to second language acquisition
prevalent in the 1960s. It was used to predict difficulties that L2 learners
might encounter when mastering new grammatical structures based on the
learners’ L1. If features of the learner’s L1 grammar are different to those of
the target language, they will cause interference and hinder acquisition of the
target language grammar. In recent years, Contrastive Analysis has attracted
interest of L2 vocabulary researchers. For example, Laufer & Girsai (2008)
show how learners’ acquisition of new vocabulary has improved when the
teacher drew their attention to differences between collocations in L1 and
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teacher drew their attention to differences between collocations in L1 and

English (interlingual differences). Similarly, Nesselhauf (2003) calls for the
pedagogical practice of contrasting collocations in English and the students’
L1 collocations when these do not coincide, i.e. the same noun collocates with
different verbs in English and L1.

Useful links and resources

If you are teaching in an EFL context and speaks the students’ L1, you
can use translation and contrastive analysis to highlight collocational
differences between English and L1. But what if you’re teaching in a
multi-lingual ESL setting? Ken Lackman’s ebooks are an excellent
resource for developing students’ awareness of and training them to
notice collocations and lexical chunks through fun classroom activities.

www.kenlackman.com/activitybooks2.html(http://www.kenlackman.com/activitybooks2.html)

Ken Lackman is a teacher and teacher trainer based in Canada, and is a

practical proponent of the Lexical Approach.

Principle 3: Explain less – explore more

Let’s face it. We, teachers, love explaining. After all, if we don’t, it seems like
we aren’t fulfilling our role and students’ expectations. But many things in
English (or any other language for that matter) simply cannot be explained.
There is no reason why we say heavy rain and not *hard rain,
why buildings can be described as both tall and high, but people can only be
tall, and how come if we can look, stare and gaze at people, we can look at
but not *gaze at a problem. Why not? If I’ve been looking at it for a long time!

By constantly explaining and giving students – often dodgy – “rules”, we

actually do them a disservice. Instead of handing students the answers on a
plate, invite them on a journey of linguistic discovery. And remind them that
language is an organism not a mechanism; and many things in language
cannot be explained because… that’s the way it is!

How can foster a culture of

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How can foster a culture of lexical exploration in the classroom? Encourage

students to ask questions about how words are used. Get them to look at the
examples (and not only definitions!) in an online dictionary or show them
concordances with the target word. Arouse their curiosity about language.
You’ll know that you’ve succeeded when students start asking you not only
“What does the word mild mean?” but:

What else can be “mild”?

or

Can we say “a mild punishment”?

A Bit Of Theory
Corpus Linguistics is the study of language through samples obtained from
real-world linguistic data. The work of John Sinclair, one of the corpus
linguistics pioneers, exerted great influence on Dave Willis (Lexical Syllabus,
1990) and Michael Lewis (The Lexical Approach, 1993). Sinclair showed that
we do not build sentences out of single words, and that frequent multi-word
units, such as mild heavy rain, exert influence, I’ll get it, Have you done your
homework? are stored in the mind ‘as wholes’. Sinclair referred to this
phenomenon as the idiom principle.

Useful links and resources

Once the remit of corpus linguists, many corpora are easily accessible
today online. There are also plenty of user-friendly, corpus-based
tools which can help you plan vocabulary lessons, i.e. look up common
collocates, identify word patterns and find natural examples. See a
collection of such tools on my blog: bit.ly/lextools(http://bit.ly/lextools)
If you are interested in learning more about corpus, how to perform
various corpus searches as well as building your own corpus, check out
Mura Nava’s blog EFL Notes(https://eflnotes.wordpress.com/). He is a real
corpus connoisseur.

Principle 4: Pay attention to what students

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Principle 4: Pay attention to what students

(think they) know
This is important for two reasons. If students know take and place, does it
mean they known take place? Or if they are familiar with both play and host,
does it mean they will understand the meaning of play host (to)? What about
make do (as in “it’ll make do for now”)? The meaning of many multi-word
units cannot be determined from individual words they are comprised of
(these are known as non-compositional lexical units). Secondly, there are
many collocations, whose meaning is semantically transparent
(i.e. compositional collocations) which is precisely the reason why students
fail to “notice” them and later have difficulty incorporating into their own
lexicon, such as take a photo or do homework (students often produce *make
in these combinations).

Also, interestingly, many expressions in English (whether compositional or

not) consist of the most common words such as: get, do, come, well, fall etc.

I’m running late

it has nothing to do with…

I’m coming down with something

get a grip

lose your cool

make ends meet

do well in…

have a word with…

don’t get me wrong

Advanced level students overlook these, paying more attention instead to

long, sophisticated words such as “dejectedly” and “amenable”. But revisiting
the words they already know and exploring new meanings associated with
them (by virtue of new collocations) they can actually get more mileage, i.e.

improve their fluency and naturalness

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improve their fluency and naturalness of expression.

A bit of theory
A new theory of language, known as Lexical Priming, lends further support to
the Lexical Approach. Its father, the neo-Firthian linguist Michael Hoey
(University of Liverpool), argues that words occur in predictable combinations
because language users store words in the context in which they have heard
or seen them and then reproduce those contexts in speaking or writing. In
other words through encounters with words in recurring patterns we become
primed to replicate these patterns. By drawing students’ attention to
collocations and common word patterns we can accelerate their priming,
enabling them to become more fluent and sound more natural.

Useful links and resources

Over the past 20 or so years, Michael Lewis’s Lexical Approach has

attracted a number of followers but has not been immune to criticism.
In his plenary talk at IATEFL 2014, Prof Michael Hoey provides
compelling evidence for the Lexical Approach by drawing on corpus-
linguistic and psycholinguistic research as well as his own theory of
Lexical Priming.
https://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2014/session/plenary-session-
michael-hoey(https://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2014/session/plenary-session-
michael-hoey)

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