The Lexical Approach and Advanced Learners In Teacher Development

John Strange

Introduction

This article asks a number of questions about aspects of lexical work with a particular group of students. Any suggestions for answers would be most welcome.

Part of my work at a teacher training college in the Netherlands is general language proficiency teaching to second year (18 to 20-year-old) students. These have completed Headway Advanced in their first year. They are mostly at a level where they can already function as credible users of English in secondary classrooms, which is our overall aim.

Background

As will be instanced below, the students' ability to find the right words and word partnerships, particularly in spontaneous conversation, is, in most cases, rather limited. This is rooted in two aspects of their background.

Firstly, most have gone through secondary school learning lists of words with Dutch translations, which they've then forgotten as soon as the test was over. (Most Dutch secondary materials and teaching are based overwhelmingly on decontextualised grammar and vocabulary.) Secondly, they have been exposed to vast amounts of real English, and have become highly skilled at intaking content - actually a really useful skill - while ignoring linguistic form.

Some of our students use L1 influenced formations even when working directly and immediately with a text which contains the "correct" ones. Some examples the original text had the road turns to the right. Keep on to the end of the road was reproduced as follow the road that is, they simplify and reduce, and are quite happy with this. They "manage". That is, they don't manage.

A connected phenomenon occurs in my experience even when students are offered specific language to use in role-play-type activities. If the student has Can I ask you for some thing? more readily available than Could you do me a favour?, then it's the former - or no realisation of this gambit at all - which is more likely to be produced, even in one of those functional exercises where the favour phrase has been specifically "presented".

The Lexical Approach

I have always been vaguely aware that students very often fail to say exactly, or even approximately, what they mean, but it wasn't until I read The Lexical Approach that I began to see ways to help them. The book is packed with all sorts of challenging ideas on the way people learn (and don't learn) languages, but its central thesis is summed up in Chapter 12: The Role of Materials (oddly enough). It's worth reproducing this in full, and I make no apologies for being repetitive:

Many key ideas in this book suggest looking at language in new ways. Most notably, chunks other than words and sentences are seen as central to language. Few of these will be familiar to students. Their natural approach to language is to concentrate on the message, not the medium; their previous language learning will almost certainly have taught them to recognise and value vocabulary (words) and sentences ('grammar'). As part of Learner Training, their attention needs to be redirected to these other chunks, the recognition of which is an important aid to speeding the progress of language acquisition.

Chunks

In both The Lexical Approach and implementing the Lexical Approach, Lewis seems to suggest that learners need to know different categories of chunks. In my experience this is an unnecessary complication. All they need to know is that there is a continuum from totally fixed expressions to usefully variable word partnership.

The problem

Here are some examples of students in conversation (with me).

I never considered teaching to be anything I liked, but I really liked [teaching practice], you know. I want to be in control - that has to do with it - you know, people listening to you - I really like it - the things you have to say, you know - you can teach them things - I like that - I mean, not control, like being the boss, but ... having the ... power to lead a whole group

2 [about a family situation] There are all kinds of small arguments and discussions and stuff, and I'm in the middle and I don't want to be. I try to ignore it, but sometimes it's very difficult, and if you do it too often, someone will be, like., "Oh, you're choosing someone's point of view.'

3 That course is a bit of a sore topic. Nobody likes it.

Here are my interpretations of what the students actually wanted to say. Interpretations or guesses? It doesn't actually matter, because when I offer these ideas to the students, they seize on them, saying: "Yes, of course!" And this, of course, is a portrait in miniature of one sort of teaching/learning process.

1. what attracts me about / the opportunity / chance /exercise authority

2. liable / to accuse me / take sides / put .... in a difficult position

3. not exactly popular / (flavour of the month ?)

The extreme usefulness, and shortcutting nature, of what attracts me/ like / etc about and of not exactly is obvious. Take sides would seem to be more or less indispensable for the topic. One could admire the students' compensation skills, but the fact remains that they failed to communicate what they really wanted to, and it was their lexis that let them down.

An analysis of some of their carefully prepared presentations shows that they can find much more appropriate lexis, given time, though this genre tends to involve fewer fixed and semi- fixed expressions as such.

(in writ