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Taking a Lexical Approach

Anyone else actually read either of Lewis' books "The Lexical Approach" or "Implementing the Lexical Approach"?

"The Lexical Approach" seems to be the most misquoted book in ELT despite being the most encompassing read available in the field.  Lewis' highlights all the advantages of the Communicative Approach and how we've gone on to ignore some of the most important aspects therein.  And then he ties in studies into language corpora, research from all kinds of fields related to ELT, and key aspects of other approaches (eg. much of Krashen's theory)... and the result fits in perfectly with intuition.

The most important thing, as Lewis' insists himself, it is an approach (not a methodology) and should be seen as a good, foundational theory that you take with you into any other classroom situation or methodology.  In Communicative Language Teaching you can tie in a Lexical Approach.  In Task-Based Learning you can.  In Text-Based Learning you can.  In simply following the course-book you can.  You could probably even do a decent Grammar-Translation or Audiolingualism class approaching them from a Lexical viewpoint.  And when you do, what you provide the learners changes from being a side-dish or sushi box (nutritious already) into a full and wholesome meal (all that much more nutritious)!

So... any experiences with it?  Reading?  In class use?  Adapted activities/tasks?  Just generally letting it affect other things you do?

 

Comments

Submitted on 22 April, 2008 - 08:06

I hesitate to push my own wares, but in this case I'm offering something for free, so there's no ulterior motive. If you'd like to look at one of the precursors of The Lexical Approach you can take a look at my book The Lexical Syllabus (Collins COBUILD 1990) You can download it for free from the Birmingham University website at www.cels.bham.ac.uk/resources/LexSyll.htm

Dave Willis

Submitted on 26 April, 2008 - 12:13

Dave Willis as in Willis & Willis?

Fantastic - will be looking at that immediately! 

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