Start teaching lexically in 2013

Many readers of this blog have read my rants about badly designed coursebook or digital activities and heard me moan about preoccupation with single words in ELT. This has probably left you wondering what kind of approach to teaching I actually believe in. This post describes the main principles of lexical teaching.

The term "teaching lexically" was coined, I believe, by Hugh Dellar and Andrew Walkley, coursebook writers (Innovations, Outcomes) and teacher trainers (University of Westminster), who have proudly taken over from retired Michael Lewis as torch bearers of the Lexical approach.

Before I go on, some caveats. This post is aimed more at people who are interested in the basics of the lexical teaching, so some of the suggestions may seem obvious to teachers familiar with the approach. Second, like with any post of this kind (Main principles of...), this is my take on lexical teaching and other proponents of the "lexical movement" may see things differently. Finally, as you're about to discover, teaching lexically doesn’t require a major upheaval in your teaching but rather minor "tweaks" to what you probably already do.

Principle 1: 

Ban single words

Words are never – well, almost never – used alone. I can think of only a handful of words that can be used on their own:

Hurry!

Silence…

Tragic.

But most of the time words are used in company of other words. So why record them alone? Why teach accident only to find that a minute later your students say *He made an accident, when you can teach have an accident? Or why write on the board deprived and its definition or L1 translation, when you can immediately provide the nouns it often goes with:

deprived area / childhood / background

Make a habit of writing new words on the board with other words that surround them and encourage your students to do the same in their notebooks. Ideally, write whole phrases or sentences to illustrate how a word is used:

Have you done your homework?

They are investigating the murder of...

That's it. I'm drawing the line.

If time doesn't permit, write at least two words together.

do homework

investigate the murder (of)

intense workout

heavy rain

Remember: collocations - and not individual words - are minimum units of meaning.

Useful links TeachingEnglish has a number of articles on teaching and recording collocations. OneStopEnglish offers expert advice on teaching vocabulary, including collocations.

Principle 2: 

Explain less – explore more

Let's face it. We, teachers, love explaining. After all, if we don't, it seems like we aren't fulfilling our role and students' expectations. But many things in English (or any other language for that matter) simply cannot be explained. There is no reason why we say heavy rain and not *hard rain, why buildings can be described as both tall and high, but people can only be tall and how come if we can look, stare and gaze at people, we can look at but not *gaze at a problem. Why not? If I am looking at it for a long time!

By @sandymillin via eltpics

By constantly explaining and giving students - often dodgy - "rules", we actually do them a disservice. Instead of handing students the answers on a plate, invite them on a journey of discovery. And remind them that language is an organism not a mechanism; and many things in language cannot be explained because... that's the way it is!

Useful link Humanising Language Teaching has a section entitled Corpora Ideas with a range of articles touching upon raising students' awareness of chunks, developing their tolerance of ambiguity and exploring lexis in class.

Principle 3: 

English word ≠ L1 word

Shifting the emphasis from words to collocations and multi-word phrases not only implies recording new language in chunks. You should try to reduce students' reliance on word for word translation. For example, I refuse to answer the following questions:

What does    (English word)    mean? 

or

How do you say ___(L1 word)     in English? 

Because it, of course, depends on 

what this word means in a given context

and

what the student wants to say

If you use translation in class, get students to translate whole phrases or collocations. For example, earlier this month (see my previous post: News Quiz 2012 - vocabulary review), I drew my students' attention how soft is not the same "soft" in L1 depending on the nouns it goes with:

       voice
soft skin
       drink

And do mild cheese, mild injuries and mild sentence correspond to the same "mild" in your students' L1? I  bet you'll find that, with the exception of scientific terms (e.g. appendicitis), there is NO word for word correspondence between semantic fields of L1 and L2 words.

Following on from Principle 2, if you set off on a journey of discovery, you should foster a culture of exploration in the classroom. Encourage students to ask questions about how words are used. Get them to look at the examples (and not only definitions!) in an online dictionary or show them concordances with the target word. Arouse their curiosity about language. You'll know that you've succeeded when students start asking you not only "What does the word mild mean?" but

What else can "mild" be used with?

or

Can we say "a mild punishment"?

Useful link Hugh Dellar and Andrew Walkley often post questions that emerge from classroom discussions about language on their Facebook page

Principle 4: 

Pay attention to what students (think they) know

This is important for two reasons. If students know take and place, does it mean they known take place? Or if they are familiar with both play and host, does it mean they will understand the meaning of play host (to)? What about make do (as in it'll make do for now)? The meaning of many collocations cannot be determined from individual words they are comprised of (these are referred to as non-compositional or idiomatic). Secondly, there are many collocations, whose meaning is semantically transparent (i.e. compositional collocations) which is precisely the reason why students fail to "notice" them and later have difficulty incorporating into their own lexicon.

Also, interestingly, most expressions in English (whether compositional or not) consist of the most common words such as: get, do, come, well, fall etc. 

Hand of Time by Looking Glass
via Flickr [CC BY-SA 2.0]

I'm running late

it has nothing to do with...

I'm coming down with something

get a grip

lose your cool

make ends meet

do well in...

have a word with...

don't get me wrong

Advanced level students are often drawn to sophisticated words such as "dejectedly" and "amenable". But revisiting the words they already know and exploring new meanings associated with them (by virtue of new collocations) they can get more mileage.

Useful link Luiz Otavio Barros in his post Teaching vocabulary: five tips you can't ignore talks about how to draw students' attention to new combinations of already known words. The other tips are worth noting too.

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But what about grammar? 

Another post on the role of grammar in lexical teaching will follow soon.