The Lexical Approach and Advanced Learners In Teacher Development

ing, we find the Longman Language Activator invaluable, but mostly for single words, of course.)

Tasks and exercises

For years, our approach has been exclusively task-based. Students are asked to read and react to articles, discuss social problems, carry out simulations, write essays and summaries, give presentations, and so on. Very often, models are offered, That is, as far as is possible in the classroom, all language is in a full context, and all language analysis is in the form of feedback. This in itself is a perfectly sound approach.

However, the lexical approach also suggests "exercises", as comprehensively set out in Chapters 6 and 7 of Implementing the Lexical Approach (Lewis 1997). For our students, perhaps the most useful basic

exercise type is of the "find five more typical slot fillers" variety. This implies examining lexical items without a real context, Lewis claims (1 993: 103) that "words may be perfectly adequately contextualised by learners in terms of their real world experience or imagination." This point needs research. At this stage, informal feedback from students suggests they don't find exercises of this type particularly useful.

it is essential that we try to help our students to become INDEPENDENT CONVERTERS OF INTAKE TO OUTPUT

However, if the items dealt with are lexically directly related to an item from a full context, and themselves given a fairly full context, this sort of exercise is perceived as very valuable. An example will make this clear.

The original text had:

The bride and groom head for their car under a hail of rice.

Students are asked to find other words that can replace hail in a hail of rice, and no

te them in fairly full and realistic contexts, giving sentences like:

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid died in a hail of bullets.

The Prime Minister resigned under a hail of criticism from all sides. etc

Intake to Output

The inability in our students to see and then use lexical patterns (and any other language features) is a very severe handicap. I can only conclude, with Lewis, that it is essential that learner's are taught how to chunk at a very early stage. However, I work with learners who probably mostly see themselves as at or near the end of the language learning process. Another problem.

And lessons are short and classes are large. The teacher can sometimes help (as above), but it is essential that we try to help our students to become INDEPENDENT CONVERTERS OF

INTAKE TO OUTPUT. We should give them the ambition to improve, and maybe this should start with raising their awareness of their limitations and opportunities. These limitations are fundamentally lexical. The opportunities lie in the richness and extent of the texts that they are surrounded by.

Texts and materials

But what texts to offer or recommend? Traditionally, we've worked extensively with broadsheet newspaper articles, mainly dealing with social, political and cultural issues, on the grounds that our students need to be challenged intellectually. Their awareness of the world and conflicting values in it should be continually challenged. To interact with this world, they need better lexis.

Perhaps the most important principle underlying all our work is summed up by Neuner: "Foreign language teaching is more than shaping the learners linguistic behaviour. It con- tributes to opening up new horizons of experience and developing the learners personality" (Neuner 1988).

A lot of authentic language, in all types of text, however, contains lexis which is of little use as a model. One genre is highly figurative language like this (from an Observer article on the end of the British Empire):

1 ... the demise of the Raj in 1947 ...

2 ... colonies and colonists come in a myriad of forms ...

3 ... Let us hope that the departure from Hong Kong does not join the partition of India in the blackest of imperial chapters ...

Demise can be replaced by ending, fall, etc with little loss of ideational meaning, though with much loss of connotation, of course. The same sort of process can be applied to myriad. The metaphor in 3 is not one that could be expected of our students. In the classroom or in materials, this can be dealt with by excluding these formations from consideration, or by pre-editing, but it is difficult to know how to help students concentrate on more probable lexis when they are working with authentic language in the real world.

At the opposite end of this linguistic scale you sometimes find the uncomfortable phenomenon of the non- native speaker using slang and very informal language slightly inappropriately. Neighbours is an excellent source of spoken models, but East Enders isn't, for this very reason.

I must emphasise that this is far from patronising: our students read serious English language newspapers of all kinds, and watch a lot of soaps on the BBC!

Conclusion

Obviously, we have an intuitive need to help our students to develop and mature both linguistically and intellectually. The two are inextricably involved. And that means that some- how we should strive to find ways to help them, as individuals, to learn to go on using the language - the words and word combinations - they need to in-take and activate, to refine and empower their output.

《The Lexical Approach and Advanced Learners In Teacher Development》