Lancaster

I arrived back in grey Lancashire yesterday afternoon. Sim picked me up from John Lennon airport  and after a quick drive up the M6 there I was in Lancaster. Tired after working in the Algarve sun on Andy's acre of land. clearing the brush and moving concrete blocks from one space to another. Loads of wildlife inside the holes in the blocks. A snake we thought a viper, a dozen lizards of various kinds, a wasp nest and insects aplenty. Spring happening. Sporting Clube de Portugal baseball cap necessary for protection against the sun and I still caught it on my face. Nice. Not the hat-I'd borrowed that.


A different season here. Cool and cloudy. The people grim looking. The big difference I notice every time is the predominance of the written word everywhere you look. Public information-or misinformation. Do this-don't do that. Labels complex and ubiquitous. Marketing everywhere you look. From the plane onwards. Boundless oceans of the written word. Is this what sophistication means? 

But then the upside. Straight down to Lancaster's public library this morning and I came away with a pile of reading material for the next week. And useful stuff too. All of it related to the upcoming work. And that, after all, is why I'm here. Time for action and putting the sunglasses away for a while. Sadly, no vipers or 'vespas' to fascinate. Mother's garden to look after and that will have to do. All in good time. We need, at times, to step back to look forward. 

Early Spring in the Algarve

Got down here yesterday after leaving Picoas and getting a taxi to Oriente. Sat and did some work on bringing together different approaches to provide an answer. A combination of TBL and a lexical approach with an eye to concordance information and the grammar and lexis of spoken English.

Still finishing off the last part while I sit in somebody else's Algarvian mansion with swimming pool, duck pond and tennis courts. It's isolated out here.

Memories. It's all very fresh.

Leaving Carcavelos

The eve of departure from my lovely little flat. Been packing for the last two days and the place is already feeling empty. Echoes have started to reappear with every bang of boxes or footstep. Teresa posted the flat on Facebook and although the decor is has a lighter touch than mine the photos capture the feel of the place. It was a good home to have these past years.



Only minutes from this!

Amendoeiras

Warmer after cool nights here. My street name merited remembering as I prepare for return to Lancaster in a few weeks from now. Rua das Amendoeiras must have looked something like this some years ago-still looks nice and I can see the odd tree from the windows of the flat. 

Blossum to all.

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

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.