We could not talk about vocabulary teaching nowadays
without mentioning Lewis (1993), whose controversial, thought-provoking ideas
have been shaking the ELT world since its publication. We do not intend to
offer a complete review of his work, but rather mention some of his
contributions that in our opinion can be readily used in the classroom.
His most important contribution was to highlight the
importance of vocabulary as being basic to communication. We do agree
that if learners do not recognise the meaning of keywords they will be unable
to participate in the conversation, even if they know the morphology and
syntax. On the other hand, we believe that grammar is equally important in
teaching, and therefore in our opinion, it is not the case to substitute
grammar teaching with vocabulary teaching, but that both should be present in
teaching a foreign language.
Lewis himself insists that his lexical approach is not
simply a shift of emphasis from grammar to vocabulary teaching, as ‘language
consists not of traditional grammar and vocabulary, but often of multi-word
prefabricated chunks’(Lewis, 1997). Chunks include collocations, fixed and
semi-fixed expressions and idioms, and according to him, occupy a crucial role
in facilitating language production, being the key to fluency.
An explanation for native speakers’ fluency is that
vocabulary is not stored only as individual words, but also as parts of phrases
and larger chunks, which can be retrieved from memory as a whole, reducing
processing difficulties. On the other hand, learners who only learn individual
words will need a lot more time and effort to express themselves.
Consequently, it is essential to make students aware
of chunks, giving them opportunities to identify, organise and record these.
Identifying chunks is not always easy, and at least in the beginning, students
need a lot of guidance.
Hill (1999) explains that most learners with ‘good
vocabularies’ have problems with fluency because their ‘collocational
competence’ is very limited, and that, especially from Intermediate level, we
should aim at increasing their collocational competence with the vocabulary
they have already got. For Advance learners he also suggests building on what
they already know, using better strategies and increasing the number of items
they meet outside the classroom.
The idea of what it is to ‘know’ a word is also
enriched with the collocational component. According to Lewis (1993) ‘being
able to use a word involves mastering its collocational range and restrictions
on that range’. I can say that using all the opportunities to teach chunks
rather than isolated words is a feasible idea that has been working well in my
classes, and which is fortunately coming up in new coursebooks we are using.
However, both teachers and learners need awareness raising activities to be
able to identify multi-word chunks.
Apart from identifying chunks, it is important to
establish clear ways of organising and recording vocabulary. According to Lewis
(1993), ‘language should be recorded together which characteristically occurs
together’, which means not in a linear, alphabetical order, but in collocation
tables, mind-maps, word trees, for example. He also suggests the recording of
whole sentences, to help contextualization, and that storage of items is highly
personal, depending on each student’s needs.
We have already mentioned the use of dictionaries as a
way to discover meaning and foster learner independence. Lewis extends
the use of dictionaries to focus on word grammar and collocation range,
although most dictionaries are rather limited in these.
Lewis also defends the use of ‘real’ or ‘authentic’
material from the early stages of learning, because ‘acquisition is facilitated
by material which is only partly understood’ (Lewis, 1993, p. 186). Although he
does not supply evidence for this, I agree that students need to be given tasks
they can accomplish without understanding everything from a given text, because
this is what they will need as users of the language. He also suggests that it
is better to work intensively with short extracts of authentic material, so
they are not too daunting for students and can be explored for
collocations.
Finally, the Lexical Approach and Task-Based Learning
have some common principles, which have been influencing foreign language
teaching. Both approaches regard intensive, roughly-tuned input as essential
for acquisition, and maintain that successful communication is more important
than the production of accurate sentences. We certainly agree with these
principles and have tried to use them in our class.
There are several aspects of lexis that need to be
taken into account when teaching vocabulary. The list below is based on the
work of Gairns and Redman (1986):
· Boundaries
between conceptual meaning: knowing not only what lexis refers to, but also
where the boundaries are that separate it from words of related meaning (e.g.
cup, mug, bowl).
· Polysemy: distinguishing
between the various meaning of a single word form with several but closely
related meanings (head: of a person, of a pin, of an organisation).
· Homonymy:
distinguishing between the various meaning of a single word form which has
several meanings which are NOT closely related ( e.g. a file: used to put
papers in or a tool).
· Homophyny:understanding
words that have the same pronunciation but different spellings and meanings
(e.g. flour, flower).
· Synonymy:
distinguishing between the different shades of meaning that synonymous words
have (e.g. extend, increase, expand).
· Affective
meaning: distinguishing between the attitudinal and emotional factors
(denotation and connotation), which depend on the speakers attitude or the
situation. Socio-cultural associations of lexical items is another important
factor.
· Style,
register, dialect: Being able to distinguish between different levels of
formality, the effect of different contexts and topics, as well as differences
in geographical variation.
· Translation:
awareness of certain differences and similarities between the native and the
foreign language (e.g. false cognates).
· Chunks of
language: multi-word verbs, idioms, strong and weak collocations, lexical
phrases.
· Grammar of
vocabulary: learning the rules that enable students to build up different
forms of the word or even different words from that word (e.g. sleep, slept,
sleeping; able, unable; disability).
· Pronunciation:
ability to recognise and reproduce items in speech.
The implication of the aspects just mentioned in
teaching is that the goals of vocabulary teaching must be more than simply
covering a certain number of words on a word list. We must use teaching
techniques that can help realise this global concept of what it means to know a
lexical item. And we must also go beyond that, giving learner opportunities to
use the items learnt and also helping them to use effective written storage
systems.
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