lexicalapproachtosecondlanguageteaching-090611065047-phpapp01.pdf

Educational presentation

1. Lexical Approach to Second
Language Teaching
Advisor: Dr. Su­Hsun Tsai
Presenter: Shen, Chia­Hui

2. Outline
•A New Role for Lexis
•Types of Lexical Units
•Lexis in Language Teaching and Learning
•The Next Step: Putting Theory Into Practice
•Implication
•Conclusion

3. A New Role for Lexis
Lexical approach (Lewis, 1993)
•Lexis is the basis of language.
•The lexical approach focuses on developing
learners' proficiency with lexis, words, and
word combinations, and it is an alternative
to traditional grammatical approach to
second language acquisition.

4. Types of Lexical Units
Taxonomy of lexical items (Lewis, 1997)
•words (e.g., book, pen)
•polywords (e.g., by the way, upside down)
•collocations
•institutionalized utterances (e.g., I’ll get it; We’ll see;
That’ll do; If I were you…; Would you like a cup of
coffee?)
•sentence frames and heads (e.g., That is not as…
as you think; The fact/suggestion/problem/danger
was…), and text frames (e.g., In this paper we
explore…; Firstly…; Secondly…; Finally…)

5. Lexis in
Language Teaching and Learning
chunks of meaning rather than to grammatical rules
holistic and concentrates on patterns of meaning
Activities used to develop learners’ knowledge of lexical
chains:
•Intensive and extensive listening and reading in the
target language
•First and second language comparisons and translation
•Repetition and recycling of activities to keep words and
expressions that have been learned active

6. •Guessing the meaning of vocabulary items from
context
•Noticing and recording language patterns and
collocations
•Working with dictionaries and language corpuses
created by the teacher for use in the classroom or
accessible on the Internet (such as the British
National Corpus or COBUILD Bank of English) to
research word partnerships, preposition usage,
style, and so on.

7. The Next Step:
Putting Theory Into Practice
•The lexical syllabus not only subsumes a
structural syllabus, it also describes how
the “structures” that make up the syllabus
are used in natural language (Willis,
1990).

8. •(I) Use Freq +d0 *.* to search the frequency for each
word in context e.g., Prince Cinders (Cole, 1999).
Implication--CLAN
• (II) Use chstring +s"Prince" "Emir" *.* +fcin to
make informants anonymous in all data.

9. EmirEmir Cinders was not much of an
emiremir. He was small, spotty, scruffy
and skinny.
• (III) CLAN – Tagging
To give a part-of-speech label to words
as chunks in storybook
http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/claws/trial.html

10. •(IV) To find out the shared words from
the revised story and the traditional
version one.
•To find out the unique words from the
two storybooks, respectively.

11. Conclusion
•Zimmerman (1997) suggests that the work of Sinclair,
Nattinger, DeCarrico, and Lewis represents a significant
theoretical and pedagogical shift from the past.
•First, they challenge a traditional view of word
boundaries, emphasizing the language learner’s need to
perceive and use patterns of lexis and collocation.
•Language production is the retrieval of larger phrasal
units from memory.
•Most important, the language activities consistent with a
lexical approach must be directed toward naturally
occurring language and toward raising learners’
awareness of the lexical nature of language.

12. Reference
•Cole, B. (1999). Prince Cinders. London: Hamish Hamilton
Ltd.
•Disney, R. H. (2005). Walt Disney’s Cinderella (A Little
Golden Book). Oklahoma, USA: Golden/Disney.
•Lewis, M. (1993). The lexical approach: The state of ELT
and the way forward. Hove, England: Language Teaching
Publications.
•Lewis, M. (1997b). Pedagogical implications of the lexical
approach. In J. Coady & T. Huckin (Eds.), Second
language vocabulary acquisition: A rationale for pedagogy
(pp. 255-270). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

13. Reference
•Moudraia, O. (2001). Lexical Approach to Second
Language Teaching. ERIC Clearinghouse on
Languages and Linguistics Washington DC. (ERIC
Document Reproduction Service No. ED455698)
•Willis, D. (1990). The lexical syllabus: A new
approach to language teaching. London: Collins
COBUILD.
•Zimmerman, C. B. (1997). Historical trends in second
language vocabulary instruction. In J. Coady & T.
Huckin (Eds.), Second language vocabulary
acquisition: A rationale for pedagogy (pp. 5-19).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

14. Thank you!Thank you!