Chapter 12 Lexical Approach

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) .

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

Collocational restrictions 1 Collocational restrictions 1. white hair (for grey hair) strong drinker (for heavy drinker) eye shopping (for window shopping) 2. sour and sweet (for sweet and sour) 3. You first (for after you) 4. Where is here? (for where am I?) 5. Be careful of your health! ( for take care of yourself) 6. “Give me some water, please?”

Chunking mechanism 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.

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 .

In the new approach, the acquisition of word form, collocations and grammatical class information all result from predominantly implicit processes of analysis of sequence information. Phonology, lexis, and syntax develop hierarchically by repeated cycles of differentiation and integration of chunks of sequences (Ellis, 2001).

The Lexical Approach places communication of meaning at the heart of language and language learning. This leads to an emphasis on the main carrier of meaning, vocabulary. The concept of a large vocabulary is extended from words to lexis, but the essential idea is that fluency is based on the acquisition of a large store of fixed and semi-fixed pre-fabricated items, which are available as the foundation for any linguistic novelty or creativity (Lewis, 1997, p.15).

Principles of the Lexical Approach (Lewis, 1997) Language rests on a series of continua Language consists of grammaticalised lexis, not lexicalised grammar Collocations are central to language production and should be more actively taught ‘used language’ 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). The grammar/vocabulary dichotomy is invalid. Collocation is used as an organizing principle. The Observe-Hypothesis-Experiment cycle replaces the Present-Practice-Produce Paradigm.

Collocation and idiomaticity

5. Situational utterances: usually complete sentences 1. Polywords: short fixed phrases, whose meaning is often not analysable by the regular rules of syntax. They can substitute for single words e.g. kick the bucket, powder room, put up with. 2. Phrasal constraints: short, relatively fixed phrases with slots that permit some variation. 3. Deictic locutions: short to medium length phrases of low variability to monitor conversation, e.g. as far as I know, if I were you. 4. Sentence builders: phrases of up to sentence length - highly variable phrases containing slots e.g. not only X but Y. 5. Situational utterances: usually complete sentences e.g. I’ll see you next week. 6. Verbatim texts: e.g. numbers, alphabet, days of week, proverbs. (Nattinger & DeCarrico, 1992)

ex) taxi rank, record player, put off, of course. Polywords: Short, 2- or 3-word compounds ranging from opaque to totally transparent meaning. ex) taxi rank, record player, put off, of course. Collocations: These range from free collocations (red car) to totally fixed collocations (vested interest) - the latter category being one kind of polyword. Instutionalised expressions: These are pragmatic in character and ensure efficient processing in speech and writing. ex) short utterances: Not yet, certainly not ex) sentence heads or frames: Sorry to interrupt, but can I just say ex) full sentences with a readily identifiable pragmatic meaning. (Lewis, 1993)

Benefits of using chunks 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) . Beneficial for the L2 learners whose production is not native-like fluent but grammatically correct (Nation, 2001). Effective to the L2 learners since they encounter similar situations they can use the chunks in similar ways in real life (Singleton, 2000).

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) . 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

The concern that the storage room for lexical units may not be enough for the preconstructed chunks or expressions can be abated by following explanation.   The brain has 100 trillion connections joining billions of neurons and each junction has the potential to be part of a memory. So the memory capacity of a human brain is effectively infinite (Carter, 1998, p. 175).

What are the effects of Lexical Approach on teaching/learning grammar? Nam, Hyun-Jeong. “Implementing Lexical Approach to Teaching English Grammar to Korean L2 Learners.” Modern Studies in English Language & Literature 57.3 (2013): 329-47. Research Questions What are the effects of Lexical Approach on teaching/learning grammar? 1. Does Lexical Approach have a positive effect on teaching/ learning grammar to Korean L2 learners at a beginner level of proficiency? 2. Is it effective in the test designed for communicative purposes including open-ended or situation-bound questions, far from the conventional test involving closed, slot-filling, or multiple-choice questions?

Procedure Lexical Approach was applied to the two classes (a total of 114 participants) for a semester (1 session of pre-test, 13 sessions of treatment, 1 session of post-test) while the control group consisting of 56 participants in the same program received conventional grammar teaching. The pre-test was provided to the experimental group before the treatment and then was compared with the post-test after the treatment.

The details of the treatment for the experimental group 1. OHE (Observe-Hypothesis-Experiment), as Lewis (1997) suggests, was used in place of the conventional PPP (Presentation-Practice- Production). 2. Inductive yet conscious-raising methodology was adopted. 3. Since the prompts for practicing and producing were not the grammar rules but the situation or topic, the names of particular grammar rules were used to a minimum. 4. The exercise types were adopted from Lewis’s (1997) book “Implementing the Lexical Approach” as in “sentence heads” (p.95), “probable expressions with slots” (p.98), “grammaticalisation” (p.102), “modalisation” (pp.102-103), “collocation” (pp.92-93), “similar stress patterns” (p.101; modified to similar structural patterns), and “doublegapping-modals and common verbs” (p.106). 5. The activities were adopted from his book (Chapter 7) as in “text search”, “find the noun”, “find the collocate” (modified to “find the verb, find the colligation”), “phrase matching”, “happy families”, “multi-word adverbial phrases”, “fixed expressions”, and “Soap follow-up”.

Data collection The pre-test and post-test utilized the same questions with the interval of 14 weeks. Both language receptive and productive questions were included. Paired-samples t-test ---for the comparison of the mean score between pre-test and post-test of each group (both experimental and control groups). Independent samples t-test --- to compare the extent of improvement of grammar knowledge between the experimental group and the control group.

Results The positive effect of Lexical Approach on Korean L2 learners’ grammar learning was borne out by the results of the present study. It was evident in the tests where the particular pragmatic functions were used as the prime. The study suggests that since the subjects in the experimental group were taught various examples as a form of lexical chunks and practiced producing sentences for various situations that may require particular chunks, not only the grammar structures but also additional information such as pragmatic properties of the lexical chunks may be stored together in their lexicon.

Discussion The subjects in the control group gained sufficient grammar knowledge from the instruction, and yet the knowledge is organized to be more efficient for any conventional slot-filling or multiple-choice type of questions. However, the way that the knowledge is stored in their mental lexicon did not seem to promote the efficient retrieval for actual production primed by real-life situations in the test.

Pedagogical suggestions 1 Pedagogical suggestions 1. Lexical Approach should not be interpreted as a mechanical memorization of lexical chunks in an unsystematic way. 2. It should not be limited to automatized manipulation of grammar structures similar to the audiolingual method (Boers & Lindstromberg, 2009: 145) so that the prime of the learner’s memory for the actual production can be the particular situation or topic that requires particular pragmatic functions.

3. Active investigation of the grammar structures from various examples of lexical chunks should be more effective if made by the learners (Ellis, 2001: 62). For the learners’ effective analysis of grammatical sequences, teachers should provide them with various “noticing” and “consciousness-raising” activities (Lewis, 1997).