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).

Language rests on a series of continua Principles of the Lexical Approach (Lewis, 1997) Language rests on a series of continua Language consists of grammaticalised lexis, not lexicalised grammar

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

Collocation and idiomaticity

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. Phrasal constraints: short, relatively fixed phrases with slots that permit some variation. Deictic locutions: short to medium length phrases of low variability to monitor conversation, e.g. as far as I know, if I were you.

Situational utterances: usually complete sentences Sentence builders: phrases of up to sentence length - highly variable phrases containing slots e.g. not only X but Y. Situational utterances: usually complete sentences e.g. I’ll see you next week. Verbatim texts: e.g. numbers, alphabet, days of week, proverbs.

(Lewis, 1993) 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.

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).