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Lindstromberg, S (2003) - My Good-Bye To The Lexical Approach - HLT Magazine, March 03 - Major Article 1

This document discusses the Lexical Approach to teaching language. It begins by introducing the Lexical Phrase Hypothesis, which proposes that large portions of language are stored and processed as chunks rather than individual words. It then discusses characteristics of lexical phrases, including collocations, and how the Lexical Approach focuses on vocabulary learning, including thousands of lexical phrases and collocations. It concludes by outlining the essence of the Lexical Approach in developing language competence through vocabulary mastery.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
54 views9 pages

Lindstromberg, S (2003) - My Good-Bye To The Lexical Approach - HLT Magazine, March 03 - Major Article 1

This document discusses the Lexical Approach to teaching language. It begins by introducing the Lexical Phrase Hypothesis, which proposes that large portions of language are stored and processed as chunks rather than individual words. It then discusses characteristics of lexical phrases, including collocations, and how the Lexical Approach focuses on vocabulary learning, including thousands of lexical phrases and collocations. It concludes by outlining the essence of the Lexical Approach in developing language competence through vocabulary mastery.

Uploaded by

rpnx21
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Humanising Language Teaching

Year 5; Issue 2; March 03

My good-bye to the Lexical Approach


Seth Lindstromberg

If this article interest you, Pilgrims offers courses in this area.


Click here for more information.

1. The Lexical Phrase Hypothesis


2. Some characteristics of lexical phrases
3. Collocations
4. The essence of the Lexical Approach
5. Applying the Lexical Approach
6. So is there a way to learn all this vocabulary, collocations
and stuff?
7. So maybe the LPH has been widely over-stated
8. Good-bye!

1 The Lexical Phrase Hypothesis

A major element in the theoretical basis of the Lexical


Approach to teaching/learning an additional language is the
Lexical Phrase Hypothesis1 (LPH), that isó

Many clumps of wordsóe.g., as well = 'too' and by and large =


'in general'óare not only used but also stored in memory and
processed as if they were single words.

This proposition derives from theoretical linguistics. In applied


linguistics, and in the lore of TESOL, it is often framed so as to
Would you like to
receive publication include not just fixed multi-word expressions such as the ones
updates from HLT? just mentioned but also ones that are only relatively fixed (see
You can by joining the
free mailing list today.
Section 3, 'Collocation').
  The LPH has strong and weak formsó
Refer this page to a
friend
StrongóA very large proportion of language-in-use consists of
lexical phrases.

WeakóThe proportion is significant but not overwhelming.

Lewis (1993) advocates an extremely strong form which I


summarize as followsó

Language-in-use is not primarily individual words


combined/parsed according to rules of grammar); rather it is
primarily recurrent word combinations, or lexical phrases that
are stored, accessed and processed as if they were single
words).

Part of the rationale for the LPH is that speakers of a language


gain substantial benefits from treating strings of words as if
they were units in themselvesó

increased fluency (when speaking and writing)


faster comprehension of when reading and listening
generally
better comprehension, especially when listening to fast
speech.

In other words, by storing multi-word expressions as chunks,


we can recall and use them without having to mentally
construct them from individual words each time we want to use
them or mentally parse (grammatically analyze) them each
time we read or hear them. Similarly, when we hear or read a
lexical phrase, we interpret it more swiftly if we take it 'as a
chunk'. An alternate term for lexical phrase, which suggests
these functional benefits, is pre-fabricated language.

One bit of evidence for the LPH is that, in the course of


acquiring their mother tongue, children pass through a stage
where they use phrases as if they were single words.

Another is thatóif we examine what people say and writeówe do


not find that they are combining words (into phrases) in all the
meaningful ways allowed by supposed rules of grammar.
Instead, much the same phrases tend to occur over and over
againóe.g., take umbrage at but not feel umbrage on account
of..

So far as I know there is as yet no certain way (e.g., looking at


images of brain activity) of saying for sure that a given phrase
really and truly is stored and processed as a single lexical item
by any particular person, let alone people in general.2
Therefore, when people (me, for instance) say that a particular
group of words is a lexical phrase, what they mean (or ought to
mean) is that these words might be a lexical phrase; they
might, that is, be a phrase which the mind in some significant
respect treats as if it were a single word. And that is what I will
mean from now on when I speak of lexical phrases even
though, for the sake of readability, I will omit the might.

Some characteristics of lexical phrases

A lexical phrase is a group of words which forms a grammatical


unit of some kind and which exhibits a degree of 'inflexibility'.
As to the last feature, some lexical phrases are totally 'frozen'
(unchangeable) while others are rather variable:

Invariable phrases: by and large, as well, let alone, so be


it
Somewhat variable phrases: Don't rock the boat, She's
rocking the boatÖ[rock the boat = 'disturb the
institutional status quo']

It is often claimed that certain long clichÈs are remembered


like single items of vocabulary, e.g., There's no time like the
present; Never a dull moment; It never rains but it pours, God
only knows. If so, there can be lexical sentences. (Multi-word
lexical unit would therefore be a better term than lexical
phrase.)3

Some lexical phrases are highly idiomatic (i.e., unguessable


from component words)óe.g., by and large (= 'generally').
Others are notóe.g., pick up a bad habit (whose meaning can
easily be guessed by a learner who knows a common meaning
of each word in the phrase).

In terms of form, lexical phrases are categorized in various


ways. Here is oneó

polyword - at any rate, by and large, as well [= 'also']


frame or slot - the [adj.]-er the [adj]ñer, as [adj]Ö.as,
so [adj]ÖthatÖ ,
Little didÖrealize thatÖ
sentence head - Could you....., God only knows wh-Ö
sentence tail - Ö, if you would., Öand so on.
clichÈ There's more than one way to skin a cat.

Some lexical phrases have 'speech-functional meaning'. For


example, Could IÖ? has the function in speech of introducing a
request. Others have lexical meaning, which is to say that they
are directly definable. Phrasal (or multi-word) verbs are like
this. For instance, bump into is definable as 'meet by chance'.
As with vocabulary generally, lexical phrases may be formal
(Would you mind ifÖ?) or informal (Put up or shut up, GimmeÖ
= 'Give meÖ', D'ya wannaÖ? = 'Do you want toÖ').

In short, believers in a strong version of the LPH consider


'vocabulary' to include not just thousands of individual words
but lexical phrases in their hundreds or, more probably,
thousands. (Has anyone tried to count them?) But there is
more. There are collocations too, thousands and thousands of
them. The LA says that vocabulary in this greatly expanded
sense should be the prime language focus of our teaching.

Collocations

It seems to me that people in TESOL, in their use of the term


collocation, sometimes give it wider scope than lexical phrase.
That is, the term collocation refers to both fixed lexical phrases
such as kith and kin (= 'relatives') and relatively loose
associations of words such as heavy rain. (This linkage is
loose in the sense that there are more or less synonymous
alternatives to heavy rain. So while strong rain is unnatural,
hard rain is possible; rain can also be pounding, drenching,
driving, torrential and so on.) But sometimes collocation is used
to refer just to more or less loose associations. Just to be clear,
I will adopt the latter practice.

It is sometimes said that a word may collocate left or right. For


instance, the noun rain can be followed by a great many words
but there are fewer that come to its left. It is therefore
combinations with these words that are more frequent and, we
may suppose, more habit governed. All this is meant by saying,
rain 'collocates left' (like this: heavy <= rain).4 By the same
reasoning, so does umbrage , take<=umbrage. Depend, on the
other hand, can be preceded by many words but it is generally
followed by on. So depend collocates right, like this: depend
=> on. And so does similar: similar=>to.

Sometimes collocation seems to be more or less evenly bi-


directional (e.g., rock <=>the boat).

It is often pointed out that computer-run analyses of multi-


million word 'corpora' (a 'corpus' is a large collection of texts)
have made it relatively easy to search out large numbers of
collocations. Before the advent of the computer this was an
exceedingly time-consuming enterprise. This is why the LA is
recent.

The essence of the Lexical Approach

A common view of language competence is, partially and


roughly, as follows:

Speakers and writers intend meanings which they express


through the appropriate choice and combination of words.
These words may, additionally, be nuanced by means of, for
instance, grammatical inflection.

To put this in an even smaller nutshell:

intended meanings => words + grammar/morphology=>


meaningful output

The converse (for listeners and readers) is:

input=> grammar + words=> understood meanings

Before the LA came on the scene, it was very commonly held


that a learner with a moderately substantial knowledge of
grammar (including morphology) and only a few thousand
words could be a strikingly effective communicator.
Consequently, there was near unanimity among
methodologists, materials writers and teachers that learners,
right up to upper-intermediate level, should spend a lot of time
on grammar.

There is something theoretically elegant about this view of


things; and it had such promise of efficiency! Indeed, it did not
always fail as a method of instruction.

The premise of LA, in contrast, is that language learning is


achieved largely by the brute ability of the human mind to
learn, store and process individual lexical items (=words and
recurrent word combinations).

To elaborateó

A common non-LA view is that our ability to learn vocabulary is


not particularly outstanding. What is outstanding is our ability,
in the instant before speaking, to speedily combine single
words into meaningful strings and, when listening, to parse and
understand at lightning speed. In this view, our memories are
relatively small but our on-line processors are very powerful.

The LA view is that our ability to learn vocabulary is massive


but our ability to do on-line grammar isn't. We are just not that
quick at combining single words into meaningful strings and we
tend, as much as we can, to avoid using grammar to build
utterances word by word. As listeners and readers, the speed
with which we understand goes up when we are confronted
with text that is full of lexical phrases and familiar collocations.
In short, our memories are vast but our on-line processors are
rather weak.

An implication of the latter view, given acceptance of the LPH,


is that a lot of time must be devoted to learning vocabulary
(including thousands of recurrent word combinations) so that
learners will be able toó

to compose and construe utterances quickly, as they


must do if they are to be competent in face to face
communication
to speak and write with natural phrasing, e.g., to avoid
collocations such as strong rain which are grammatically
correct but not natural.

And, the stronger your version of the LPH, the more hundreds
or thousands of vocabulary items you think your students have
to learn.

Applying the LA

For the teacher, the biggest question relating to the LA is, ìHow
do you translate it into practice?î Personally, I don't think that
advocates of the LPH have answered this question in a way that
adds much to current mainstream practice as reflected in, say,
recent offerings of UK publishers. (But read Lewis 1997 and see
what you think.) Further, I reckon there is room to doubt
whether it is indeed possible to translate into practice any
version of the LA which is based on a strong form of the LPH.

For one thing, there does not yet seem to be any means
satisfactory to education bureaucrats or to the merely curious
of deciding what vocabulary to teach at what level, in
particular, what vocabulary to teach beyond elementary level.

1. No comprehensive vocabulary frequency list made within


the past 50 years says which meaning of a word is most
frequentÖand therefore (perhaps) most deserving of
priority in the classroom. Think of such polysemic words
as on, right and sound and you will see what a problem
this might pose, since I assume you will not want to
make a habit of teaching all meanings at the same time.
2. Lexical phrases are sparsely included in such lists, if at
all.
3. So far as I know there exists no frequency list which
includes pedagogically useful information about the
commonest thematic contexts of this or that unit of
vocabulary.
4. In any case, publishers (who have been particularly
active in the funding of list compilation) try to keep their
frequency lists secret.

In short, any immediate, detailed application of the LA in


syllabus creation would be premature.

Things are only a bit better with respect to implementation in


the classroom. To start with, any ideal Lexical Method which
rests, ultimately, on a strong version of the LPH would enable
students (who in general cannot spend more than a few hours
a week in class) to learn vocabulary items (including recurrent
word combinations) at the rate of several score per hour. But,
the claims of Suggestopedia notwithstanding, no such method
is available.

So doubt forms. Is a truly effective method for mega-


vocabulary learning a realistic hope? Let's look at some of the
suggestions that have been made.

Again and again over recent years I have come across articles
in which authors recommend using concordances in the
classroom.5 But having students do this can, at best, lead to a
minutely tiny increment in their vocabularies becauseó

Concordance analysis is a highly bookwormy type of


activity and few people are willing bookworms. It's hard
enough to get students, particularly kids, to read stuff
that is intrinsically interesting. Getting them to pore over
collocations so that they may discover how this or that
bit of vocabulary patterns is minimally realistic. It is, like
the Soviet collectivization of agriculture, a great idea if
you ignore people's likely reactions to it.
It is far from invariably easy to see from a very limited
co-text (which is precisely what a concordance is) what
this or that unit of vocabulary might actually have been
intended to mean in its situation of use. True, one might
(this is at least theoretically possible) go back to the
corpus to see the larger context: but who except an out
and out bookworm would do this?
Concordance study strongly tends to lead to in-depth
learning about the near co-text of particular vocabulary
items rather than the learning of items in significant
numbers per se. But the gist of a Lexical Method is that
quantity is key.

All in all, collocation study is likely to be a grotesquely


inefficient use of class time if one does more than ask learners
(unless they plan to become linguists) to investigate the
collocation of a few highly frequent words. OK, if we are talking
about raising language awareness, then this activity could be
useful to someÖyou never know. But if we are talking about
any significant boost to vocabulary learning, then I think
advocacy of concordance study in the classroom is deep in the
realm of baseless hopeÖbut still not as deep in as the hope that
a significant number of students would do this kind of thing on
their own time, learner training or no learner training.
Michael Lewis, who has advocated the LA with particular zeal
(e.g., Lewis, 1993), is a particularly interesting case. Although
he talks revolution, he concedes (p. 193) ìthat no one
methodology represents the way forwardî.

A key conclusion he draws from a strong version of the LPH is


that learners need to devote a lot of time to study-learning
lexical units. The instructional/learning pattern he recommends
is that students should first observe data, that they should then
hypothesize about it, and then experiment.

It is not that I object to any of this at root. But what I do not


think this plan of action promises is the requisite increase in
the rate of vocabulary learning for if the assertion that
language is mostly lexical chunks means anything, it means
that students who wish to be comprehensively communicatively
competent have to learn tons and tons more vocabulary than
anyone used imagine even in their dreams.

The stress Lewis lays on learner training is more to the point.


With all this vocabulary to learn, people are going to have to
learn most of it on their own time. But the idea of learner
training has been around for some time and as worthwhile as it
may beóprovided it is seldom overt (being explicitly trained to
learn is not something that fascinates students for longóthere is
no revolution here, not as it has been described. All in all, an
examination of the Lewis's specific recommendations leads me
to conclude that, for all his fiery talk of fundamental change,
what he is advocating in the way of method is an assortment of
activities and task types familiar not only from Communicative
(but not particularly Humanistic) methodology but also, in too
large a part, from the methodology of dry-as-dust workbooks.

But this is still not the weightiest objection to a strong version


of the LA (i.e., a version based on a strong form of the LPH).

So is there a way to learn all this vocabulary,


collocations and stuff?

In order for a strong version of the LA to be more than just


plausible and thought-provoking, it must be implementable in a
way that reflects these propositionsó

A normal foreign/second language learner is endowed with the


ability toó

1. retain in memory and quickly access and process a


staggeringly vast number of vocabulary items of all sizes
2. learn vocabulary, including lexical phrases and other
recurring word patterns, at a very great rate.

In other words, what the LA seems to cry out for is a purpose-


built Lexical Method, or two, or three, or more. But so far, no
such method is anywhere in sight.

This is not to deny that, now and again, some very good
relevant material comes onto the market. Examples that spring
to mind areó

the learners' dictionaries put out by (especially) UK


publishers (all rich in information about
collocationÖthough all still disappointing with respect to
prototypical lexical phrases).
English Vocabulary in Use (McCarthy, Michael and Felicity
O'Dell. 1994. Cambridge)

Such bright spots not withstanding, not only has there been no
lexical revolution in classroom (as opposed, e.g., to
lexicographic) methodology; it is not even clear what one would
look like. And no revolution either in learner training, I suggest.

It merely, as before, seems likely that we can help our students


learn vocabulary by providingó

interesting comprehensible input that is rich in recurrent


word combinations.
interesting activities that help students notice and recall
chunks of these texts.
opportunities for students to speculate, to ask and to
hear about why it is that some words do or do not
recurringly combine with certain other ones. (I will return
to this point in the Section 7.)

We could, therefore, do worse than Ö

use song lyrics a lot


often use other kinds of short authentic texts
(See especially,
Davis, Paul and Mario Rinvolucri. 1987. Dictation.
Cambridge U. Press.
Maley, Alan. 1994. Short and Sweet. Penguin.
Maley, Alan. 1995. Short and Sweet II. Penguin.)
re-double our efforts to entice students to read for
pleasure (e.g., by combining the reading of a novel with
showings of a filmed version.)
apply Suggestopedia not to the lame dialogues normal to
the method but instead to material of quality, e.g.,
sections of the filmscript of My Fair Lady, the lyrics of 'Mr
Tambourine Man'Öwhatever seems right for your group.
involve students in conventional amateur dramatics.

So maybe the LPH has been over-stated

Yes, it has been. Proponents of a strong version of the LPH


under-play the importance of semantics at the word level. For
instance, they maintain that many high frequency words, such
as spatial prepositions, are 'delexicalized', which is to say that
they are often used with no meaning at all. The implication of
supposed delexicalization is that students shouldn't try to
understand what prepositions mean; instead, they should
somehow commit to memory many hundreds, or thousands, of
lexical phrases which contain prepositions. I have two things to
say about this.

1. That would require a lot of phrase learning, much more


learning by far than would be involved in adequately
learning the meanings of 70 or so spatial prepositions.
2. This view of prepositional meaning is false. Rather,
prepositions are rarely delexicalized as I will now briefly
argue. (Fuller arguments have been made in
Lindstromberg 1996, 1997 and 2001.)

Let's take for example something I wrote above in Section 5:


students would do this kind of thing on their own time. I am
quite sure that many LA enthusiasts would identify on [their]
own time as a lexical phrase, more particularly, as a 'frame'
which students should commit to memory as is. But this view is
unable to account for these factsó

One could also say in [their] own time.


In [their] own time has a different meaning from on
[their] own time.
The difference in the meaning of the two phrases derives
from the difference in meaning of the two prepositions
(which therefore cannot be considered as being
delexicalized).
The explanation is as follows:

It is common to speak and think of unwelcome events, states


and concerns as burdens that one can be 'under' (just like you
can be under a heavy burden) or which can be 'on' whoever is
experiencing them (just like a heavy burden can be on your
back) óe.g.,

take on a [burden of] responsibility, the straw that broke the


camel's back, be under strain, The problem weighed on his
mind, Her car died on her.

Do something on one's own time is in this group. That is, when


I say that students would do it on their own time, the nuance
that on supplies is that students' own time (their free time)
suffers through being used up by teachers' demands on it. The
expression in their own time has no such meaning because the
preposition in has no conceptual relation to the notion of
burden. Rather (because in is about containment), in their own
time means merely 'during their own time'.

There is a similar difference in meaning between have


something on your mind and have something in [your] mind.
The former is a concern or problem, i.e., a metaphorical
burden. The latter is not.

There is a virtual infinity of well-formed expressions like on


your mind and in [your] mind. Learners can either try to
memorize them one by one with comparatively little regard to
the meanings of the individual words that make them up (this
would be the advice of an LA fan), or, more efficientlyÖ

learn some of them one by one (e.g., the straw that


broke the camel's back)
but, for the rest,
become aware of operative metaphors
learn the meanings of individual words such as under, on
and in.

In short, over-reliance on the LA would lead away from the


discovery of real and usefully generative word meanings and
into inefficiency.

Good-bye!

There is a great deal of evidence for a weak form of the LPHóa


version, that is, which does not radically under-state the
importance of grammar and of word-level meaning. But
accepting this qualification raises the questionóIs the Lexical
Approach a useful construct? Given that it suggests no new
marching orders, my view is that it is not. Discard it, I say, but
at the same time incorporate a weak form of the LPH into the
set of beliefs underlying whatever pedagogical approach you
have already been operating with. It is perhaps too bad though
if you have been a zealous LA practitioner. Certainly, pedagogy
based on a strong version of the LPH should be avoided since
that would mean having a view of language which (1) suggests
that language learners have an astronomical amount of
vocabulary to learn but (2) offers no promising tips on how
they can speed up enough to do it. Fortunately then, a strong
version of the LPH is (3) inaccurate.

Acknowldegement
I am very grateful Rick Cooper for his comments on a late draft
of this. And thanks too to Michael Lewis for pointing out that
terms in a key passage on page one were in the wrong order.

Notes
1. Also underlying the LA is the belief that fluency is a more
important global learning aim than accuracy, grammatical
accuracy in particular.
2. Pinker (1999: 295-99) discusses the potential of four
techniques of 'functional neuroimaging' (positron
emission tomography, functional magnetic resonance
imaging, event related potential and
magnetoencephalography) to reveal how much of
language comes from rules and how much is listemes. He
says there is hope that good evidence may be in the
offing.
3. Pinker (1999, p. 26) suggests the name listeme as a
blanket term for all the items (words and multi-word
units) that we can find listed in our mental dictionary,
pre-assembled.
Justifying statements about direction of collocation is not
necessarily a straightforward matter. For instance, my
colleague Rick Cooper observed, on reading this passage,
that rain collocates to the right with dogs (i.e., rain dogs
is in a Tom Waits song), Man (as in the movie Rain Man),
with check and forest, for instance. I might counter his
counter-examples by saying that maybe rain serves the
function of adjective in them, not that of noun; but I
would not be terribly confident that my reply is to the
point.
4. Re the practice of concordancing, see, e.g., Stevens,
Vance (1995) at
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~barlow/stevens.html
Cobb, Tom
(1997) at
http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/r21270/cv/Hands_on.html

Re concordances pure and simple (e.g., if you just want


to know what they are), check out:
http://www.nsknet.or.jp/~peterr-s/concordancing/
http://ec.hku.hk/macomp/malangd.html
http://www.rjcw.freeserve.co.uk/

For a rosier view of LA seeó


Olga Moudraia at
http://www.cal.org/ericcll/digest/0102lexical.html

References
Lewis, Michael. 1993. The Lexical Approach: The State of ELT
and a Way Forward. LTP.
Lewis, Michael. 1997. Implementing the Lexical Approach:
Putting Theory into Practice. LTP.
Lindstromberg, S. 1996. 'Prepositions: meaning and method'.
ELT Journal, 50/3: 225-36.
Lindstromberg, S. 1997. English Prepositions Explained. John
Benjamins.
Lindstromberg, S. 2001. 'Preposition entries in UK monolingual
dictionaries'. Applied Linguistics 22/1: 77-103
Pinker, Steven.
1999. Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. Phoenix.

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