Q: What is your definition of “knowing a word”?

Knowing a word means… Knowing how often it occurs, the company it keeps, its appropriateness in different situations, its syntactic behavior, its underlying form and derivations, its word associations and its semantic features (Richards, 1976).

Chunking mechanism semantic field money, withdraw, ATM, transfer, deposit The particular set of lexical items in the semantic field is so closely related that they may be easily drawn for actual usage (Carter, 1987). Banking, for example, builds up a semantic field with specialized, topic-related lexical items such as money, withdraw, ATM, transfer, and deposit. The fact that words are grouped into lexical sets in the field and they are semantically related in the lexicon demonstrates the structure of the lexicon.

Lexical Connection and relations 1. Around fifty people die of hunger hunger = starvation 2. Nothing seemed to satisfy their hunger for truth hunger = starvation ?

Traditional linguistics Traditional linguistics views language as a closed modular system where syntax can be described as a body of logical rules for generating the sentences of a language that are grammatically correct.

Principles of the Lexical Approach (Lewis, 1997) Language consists of grammaticalised lexis, not lexicalised grammar

Principles of the Lexical Approach (Lewis, 1997) Collocations are central to language production and should be more actively taught.

Principles of the Lexical Approach (Lewis, 1997) ‘used language’ should be stressed: probable language rather than possible language.

Lexical approach  In the L2 learners’ communication, lexical errors rather than grammatical errors are the most serious factor in the break down of communication (Gass & Selinker, 2001).

Lexical approach  The grammar/vocabulary dichotomy is invalid.  Collocation is used as an organizing principle.  The Observe-Hypothesis-Experiment cycle replaces the Present-Practice-Produce Paradigm.

Benefits of using chunks 1. The language users can economize an effort on building up every piece for structuring expressions or phrases from the scratch every time by using the preconstructed expressions(Carter, 1998). 2. Beneficial for the L2 learners whose production is not native-like fluent but grammatically correct (Nation, 2001). 3. Effective to the L2 learners since they encounter similar situations they can use the chunks in similar ways in real life (Singleton, 2000).

4. Language functions can be automatically learned through the chunks (Carter, 1998). Pragmatic competence is determined by a learner's ability to access and adapt prefabricated "chunks" of language (Nattinger & DeCarrico, 1992). 5. Learning formulaic chunks reduces the learning burden and maximizes communicative ability by providing 'islands of reliability'(Ellis, 1994).

Learning chunks and L2 lexical knowledge Learning chunks ensures…  Accuracy  Fluency  Native-like usage  functional value Learning chunks reduces…  Foreignness  Learning burden