Lexical Approaches to Learning Business English

This entry looks at how our view of the English language has been radically altered by the advent of large databases of real usage of the English language and the consequences of this for language learning and teaching. One such consequence is that the learning and teaching of ESP (English for Specific Purposes), and in particular business English, can rightly focus on the language needed by students in their own unique contexts, without  undue burden of the traditional and often demotivating, focus on ‘tenses’ and sentence grammar.

·         Language corpora

·         The Lexical Approach

·         Lexical Chunks

·         Consequences for our view of  language

·         Learning and teaching

Language Corpora

The rapid growth of computerised corpora of English in the later part of the twentieth century has given researchers, course designers and teachers hitherto unavailable information about how the language works in practice. As a result, crucial insights into our descriptions of language have come into being. Yet despite all this, our understanding of how languages can be learnt, and how this work can be applied to the language learning experience itself, have lagged far behind.

·         Corpus data can identify the co-occurrence of words with grammatical patterns. It has been revealed that although words operate in strings which show basic grammatical relationships, the partnerships between words are primarily semantic or meaning based. Words occur together and this affects their meaning. Prior to this, the idea that that the major carrier of meaning was the individual word went unchallenged. No longer.

·         There are a number of ways in which words co-occur together to produce single units of meaning.

·         20% of the language used in all texts (spoken and written) is accounted for by the most frequently used grammatical items (the, of, I, that, was, and etc.) Consequently, learning the essential grammar needed for successful communication would best be served by focussing on how words typically operate in association and the patterns in which they are most frequently found in real use. For example, the word of is very frequently found in the pattern:

Noun Phrase (NP) + of + Noun Phrase (NP)

the heart of the matter, the majority of our international competitors etc.

·         The centrality of idiomatic and metaphorical language also came to be recognised, and this recognition extended to the need for them to be treated systematically.

·         Evidence from corpora has helped writers of learner dictionaries (such as OALD) to provide a much more accurate picture of the language and draw attention to the most useful and frequently occurring words.

The Lexical Approach

The fact that words seem to be primed to co-occur with other words formed the main impetus in Michael Lewis’ proposal of a Lexical Approach to learning and teaching language.  This constituted a direct challenge to the view that speaking a language was primarily a matter of slotting words into grammatical strings.  In fact the situation, according to exponents of this view, is quite the reverse.

Chunks

A key element in learning vocabulary is knowing that language use is largely predictable, in that the choice of words that can go with any given word is restricted not only by grammar but by association. This is commonly known as collocation and the relationship may be grammatical, as in the case of verbs collocating with prepositions:

depend on, look out for etc.

Alternatively, it can be lexical, when content (meaning carrying) words are frequently found together as in:

small print rather than *little print, have a meeting rather than *do a meeting.

These combinations can vary in strength. Both elements can co-occur with lots of other elements, as in  

target market, bull-market, flea market, market leader, market research

 Or they can have a stronger association, as in competitive advantage.

Strongest of all are those which have acquired the status of ‘fixed expressions’, such as:

as a matter of fact, without further ado etc.

Words not only collocate with other words, they collocate with other word families, or lexical fields, as in:

write an email, send an email,  delete an email, cc an email etc.

Learning and Teaching

These developments brought some recognition by course designers that a lexically based syllabus could give learners access to language as it is used, rather than as it is described by linguistic theory. Lamentably, these insights and suggestions have had less of an impact than they should. Consequences for language learning and teaching are:

·         Jane and Dave Willis argued that a syllabus based on the idea that the most frequent words and patterns would reflect the most frequently expressed meanings of a language and would be a more useful one from the learner’s perspective. This was the guiding principle for the Co-build Project, the main aim of which was to compile works of reference and course materials for English language learning and teaching.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBUILD

·         The focus shifted to specialised lexis- the vocabulary of commerce, of aviation, of science, marketing etc. 

·         The advent of the lexical syllabus-syllabuses based on specialised vocabulary, patterns and collocations, where vocabulary is given precedence over grammar as the central organising principle.

·         Time spent on promoting the noticing and manipulation of such patterns and chunks, and the systematic recording of the items realising them, is a much more efficient way for learners to progress than following a syllabus that requires the endless manipulation of sentence structures.

·         More time is spent on base verbs than on ‘tenses’, content nouns are taught in chunks (an influential politician rather than politician), sentence heads (Would you mind if…?) are taught unanalysed and chosen for inclusion in the syllabus based on their usefulness to the learner, linking between sentences is taught overtly alongside a growing understanding of how language operates at text level

·         Prepositions, modal verbs and de-lexicalised verbs are treated as part of single items (attend a meeting, get on well with).

Conclusion

Michael Lewis’s Lexical Approach and the lexical syllabus as proposed by Dave and Jane Willis share the beliefs that:

·         The prime function of vocabulary is to create meaning.

·         The traditional distinction between grammar and vocabulary is both invalid and unhelpful for learners.

·         Courses can be organised around the vocabulary that learners need and the items that occur most frequently in real use. Grammar can be treated as and when it is needed.

Findings from corpora showing how the language is actually used in practice show that both our description of the language, and our approach to learning and teaching (especially in ESP where time is short and focus paramount) need urgent review.

References and Further Reading

Carter and McCarthy (1998) Vocabulary and Language Teaching

Coady and Huckin (1997) Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition

Lewis (1993) The Lexical Approach

Lewis (1994) Implementing the Lexiclal Approach

Lewis et al (1997) Teaching Collocation

McCarthy (1990) Vocabulary

Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992) Lexical Phrases and Language Teaching

Nation (1990) Teaching and Learning Vocabulary

Pawley & Snyder (1983)Two puzzles for linguistic theory-native like selection and native like fluency. In Richards Language and Communication

Sinclair (1991) Corpus Concordance, Collocation

Thornbury(2004) Natural Grammar

D. Willis (1990) The Lexical Syllabus

Collins Cobuild Business Vocabulary in Practice (2006)

Language Corpora

The British National Corpus

http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/

Collins-Cobuild Corpus

http://www.collins.co.uk/Corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx

The Corpus of Contemporary American English

http://www.americancorpus.org/

Longman-Lancaster Corpus

http://www.pearsonlongman.com/dictionaries/corpus/lancaster.html