Lexicalise Your Lesson 2: Teaching Grammar

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Lexicalise Your Lesson 2 Teaching Grammar

• Leo Selivan

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Background

• Michal Lewis. THE LEXICAL APPROACH. LTP 1993
• Michael Lewis. IMPLEMENTING THE LEXICAL APPROACH.
  LTP 1997

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Key principles

• Language consists of chunks
• (collocation is the most important kind)
• Acquisition is not linear
• Syllabus organised around meaning
• Language consists of grammaticalised lexis not
  lexicalised grammar

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A bit of history

• Advances in corpus linguistics
• Collins COBUILD Project
• Dave Williss Lexical Syllabus (1990)
• 700 most frequent words cover 70 of text

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Taxonomy

• Collocations
• Polywords (e.g. phrasal verbs)
• Sentence frames (the er, the er)
• Situational utterances
• (See you later, I should get going)
• based on Nattinger (1992)

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Collocation

• VN make a mistake
• achieve a goal
• AdjN demanding job
• NN knee injury
• AdvAdj deeply wounded
• VAdv talk freely
• NV (actions) bees buzz

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Traditional ELT
No wonder learners make mistakes
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Grammar and Lexis

• What grammar structures do you associate the
  following groups of words with?
• always / sometimes / usually / never
• for / since / never
• ago / last year / yesterday

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Grammar and Lexis

• But consider this
• We are already doing a lot to combat crime in
  the city
• Ben was already 17 when we moved to Birmingham.

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Misconceptions about grammar

• Grammar is not a supposed set of rules
• There is no evidence that explicit knowledge of
  grammar aids acquisition
• Grammar is not a set of transformations
• Grammar is often oversimplified to the point
  that it does not make any sense
• Spending a lot of class time on traditional
  EFL grammar condemns learners to remaining on the
  intermediate plateau.

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Misconceptions about grammar

• Youre looking good
• Ive been wanting to do this for ages.
• Look. Its been snowing!
• Wow! Did you see that?!

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Grammar and Lexis

• May I ?
• I might
• Ill see you tomorrow.
• I hope so.
• Can you wait a minute? Cant you wait a minute?

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Teaching grammar

• Structure-based learning
• Item-based learning
• Consciousness Raising

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TASK 1 Reflect

• Think of a grammar rule (in your coursebook or
  other materials you use) which you found not very
  helpful? Why was it unhelpful?
• Discuss in pairs.

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• I should really get going.
• Is there anything you need?
• Im not stupid, am I?!
• When it comes to
• Theres been a lot of opposition to
• Who do you work for?

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TASK 2 Correct errors

• Are you happy with this view of grammar?
• Discuss in pairs.

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Error Correction
Collect

• Correct

many grammatical errors are actually the result
of lexical deficiencies and that what is thus
needed is NOT more grammar correction and study,
but rather more lexical input
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Present Perfect

• Superlative
• It is the best / most Ive ever

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Past Perfect

• It was not as as Id expected.

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Topic Travel

• Have you ever been to?

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Useful objects

• pen / eraser / pencil
• Have you got (a) ?

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House

• bathroom / living room / bedroom
• shower / bed / sofa
• Where is Mike?
• He is in the bathroom, having a shower.
• He is in the living room, watching TV.
• He is in the bedroom, playing computer games.

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De-lexicalised words

• took the dog out for a walk
• You took advantage
• I took it as a compliment
• Lets take the bus
• Do you mind taking my photo?
• How do you take your coffee? With milk?
• Who do you take me for?!

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De-lexicalised words

• low-semantic content words with a vast number of
  common collocates

Put
Get
Make
Go
Set
Have
Do
Take
See
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TASK 3 Correct errors

• We studying in the same school.
• What does his job?
• Its the film about people who live in England
  at the last century.
• I dont know how to tell it.
• People which learn languages need a lot of
  practice.

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Misanalysed grammar items

• Will as the future
• Would as 2nd or 3rd conditional
• Reported speech
• Based on Willis (1990)

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Immediate advantages of LA

• Increased fluency (speaking writing)
• Faster comprehension when reading
• Better comprehension, especially when listening
  to fast speech

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Bibliography

• Hill, Jimmie Lewis, Michael (1997) The LTP
  dictionary of selected collocations Hove LTP
• Hill, Jimmie, Lewis, Morgan Lewis, Michael
  (2000) Classroom strategies, activities and
  exercises in Lewis, Michael ed. Teaching
  collocation Boston Thomson Heinle
• Lewis, Michael (1993) The lexical approach Hove
  LTP
• Lewis, Michael (1996) Implications of a lexical
  view of language in Willis, J and Willis D, eds.
  Challenge and change in language teaching Oxford
  Macmillan Heinemann
• Lewis, Michael (1996a) Implementing the lexical
  approach Hove LTP
• McCarthy, Michael ODell, Felicity (2005)
  English collocations in use Cambridge CUP
• Nattinger, James, DeCarrico, Jeanette. (1992).
  Lexical phrases and language teaching. Oxford
  OUP.
• Pawley, Andrew Syder, Frances (1983). Two
  puzzles for linguistic theory Nativelike
  selection and nativelike fluency. In J.C.
  Richards and R.W. Schmidt (Eds.), Language and
  communication (pp. 191-226). New York Longman.
• Sinclair, John (1991) Corpus, Concordance,
  Collocation
• Willis, Dave (1990) Lexical Syllabus Collins ELT