Lexical Warmer for the New Year

A Lovely View of Lancaster from the Priory (adj +n +of +NP)


Yes. The snow's gone now and a mild few days in prospect before I'm off back to the Algarve for a night. Then it's back up through the Alentejo to Lisbon and a New Year starting. The time has passed far too quickly and my feet have hardly touched the ground. Parties, kids and family. A lovely walk with Rachel along the canal on a frozen afternoon with her saving the ice and snow people from the ugly grit. A football match or two. Old faces and newly grown. A day in Preston and rescuing an old soldier from a fall on the ice then depositing him safely in the Harris Museum café. A few books bought. Some jeans and shirts in the sales. Decisions, decisions, decisions. On Monday I'll be back to the grind. I'm giving a training session on lexical approaches to language learning. An old favourite. There is a need for this. A very definite need for this. 


At random, a few items of interest from the above;


a mild few days, in prospect, back to + NP, touch the ground, an old soldier, a training session...and many more. That the majority of language teachers would fail to notice these items is worthy of comment. Michael Lewis' much needed and elegantly argued for change in mindset has seemingly failed to do that, 'set'. 


From now long experience I know all too well that if I presented the above opening to this blog to 9 out 10, and that's a generous estimate, practising English language teachers without comment, a good half of them would no doubt ignore the many complex and interesting things going on therein in favour of isolating the few complete sentences present and make a beeline for the verb forms they could identify. 'Present Perfect, Present Simple, Present Continuous, Future Simple 'tenses'' they would say and that would be that. A good few of them would also say that the English is either not well-formed as full sentences have not been used for much of the text. or that this kind of text is not representative of the type of language that learners can be usefully be exposed to.  Wrong on both counts. 


In opening his book Implementing the Lexical Approach (LTP, 1997) Lewis states that;


The standard view divides language into grammar (structure) and vocabulary (words). The Lexical Approach challenges this fundamental view of language. Instead, the Lexical Approach argues that language consists of chunks, which when combined, produce continuous coherent text.. (p7) 


This insight is crucial. That professional (and other) language teachers ignore this view on a daily basis is most certainly true and the predominance of the slot filling role for vocabulary still persists despite the influence now aging Lexical Approach and the such works as Scott Thornbury's Natural Grammar (OUP, 2005), wherein language patterning at phrase and clause level is given its due emphasis, alongside the sentence level grammar most equate with that much misunderstood and unduly limited word. For there is much more to 'grammar' than the sentence structures which continue to form the backbone of syllabuses as delivered in practice and the border between the grammatical and the lexical is indeed blurred.  


David Wilkins, as Lewis observes, said that 'Without grammar little can be conveyed; without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed' (Teaching Collocation. LTP 2000, p7). For language learners the crucial task is 'in acquiring a sufficiently large mental lexicon...even for intermediate learners this is enormous'. (ibid) The role of tradtional grammar  structures  needs to be re-evaluated as lexis takes centre stage. A new sense of awareness needs to be engendered and this should become second nature to teachers. First the mammoth task of shifting the emphasis back to where it belongs needs to be given. A tall order for this profession as it stands. But we can all fight our own little corners.