THE LEXICAL APPROACH

Question 1

In a __ broadcast in 1929, the English __, Virginia Woolf, had this to say: ‘Words do not live in __: they live in the __. … And how do they live in the mind? __ and __, much as __ live, ranging __ and __, ___, ___’. The way that words ‘___’, and what this might mean for language teaching, is a __ concern of those who advocate a lexical approach.

Answer 1

1. radio
2. writer
3. dictionaries
4. mind
5. Variously
6. strangely
7. human beings
8. hither
9. thither
10. falling in love
11. meeting together
12. live in the mind
13. major

Question 2

When asked How does one achieve ___ in a second language?
Harold Palmer (see chapter 4 The Oral Method) was ___:
‘Memorize ___ the __ number of __ and __ word-group’ (1925, quoted in Smith 1999). But it took the advent of __ linguistics to persuade researchers, such as John Sinclair, that ‘learners would do well to learn the __ words of the language ___ because they carry the __ patterns of the language’ (1991). And it wasn’t until 1996 that __, under Sinclair’s supervision, produced a __ pattern grammar of its own (Francis et al. 1996), based on Sinclair’s conviction that there is a __ relationship between word __ and the __ that they occur with. Or, as Sinclair’s eminent predecessor, J.R. Firth (1957), put it, ‘you shall know a word by the __ it keeps’.

Answer 2

1. proficiency
2. unequivocal
3. perfectly
4. largest
5. common
6. useful
7. corpus
8. common
9. very thoroughly
10. main
11. COBUILD
12. corpus-based
13. close
14. meanings
15. patterns
16. company

Question 3

But it was a __, ___ and __ who was the first to attempt to
take this ___ of constructs – __, ___, ___, ___, __ and so on – and to base a __ approach upon it. In 1993, ___ published The Lexical Approach. It built on the success of his earlier book, ___ (1986), and reflected an ongoing interest in __ grammar – with the significant __ being Lewis’s ___of the relative importance of __ grammar, on the one hand, and __ (including multi-word ‘___’), on the other. Whereas ___ approaches had foregrounded __ patterns into which a ___ vocabulary was ‘___’, Lewis argued that language was primarily ___, and that the ‘___’ that constitutes a grammar serves merely to __ and ___ the meanings encoded in words. In short, as he famously claims in his list of ‘__’ at the start of his book: ‘Language consists of ___ lexis, not lexicalised ___’ (1993).

Answer 3

1. teacher
2. writer
3. published
4. mixed bags
5. word groups
6. collocations
7. patterns
8. formulaic language
9. syntactical constructions
10. teaching
11. Michael Lewis
12. The English Verb
13. pedagogical
14. difference
15. reappraisal
16. sentence
17. lexis
18. chunks
19. structuralist
20. grammatical
21. restricted
22. slotted
23. lexical
24. kit of rules
25. link
26. fine-tune
27. key principles
28. grammaticalised

Question 3

But it was a __, ___ and __ who was the first to attempt to
take this ___ of constructs – __, ___, ___, ___, __ and so on – and to base a __ approach upon it. In 1993, ___ published The Lexical Approach. It built on the success of his earlier book, ___ (1986), and reflected an ongoing interest in __ grammar – with the significant __ being Lewis’s ___of the relative importance of __ grammar, on the one hand, and __ (including multi-word ‘___’), on the other. Whereas ___ approaches had foregrounded __ patterns into which a ___ vocabulary was ‘___’, Lewis argued that language was primarily ___, and that the ‘___’ that constitutes a grammar serves merely to __ and ___ the meanings encoded in words. In short, as he famously claims in his list of ‘__’ at the start of his book: ‘Language consists of ___ lexis, not ___ grammar’ (1993).

Answer 3

1. teacher
2. writer
3. published
4. mixed bags
5. word groups
6. collocations
7. patterns
8. formulaic language
9. syntactical constructions
10. teaching
11. Michael Lewis
12. The English Verb
13. pedagogical
14. difference
15. reappraisal
16. sentence
17. lexis
18. chunks
19. structuralist
20. grammatical
21. restricted
22. slotted
23. lexical
24. kit of rules
25. link
26. fine-tune
27. key principles
28. grammaticalised
29. lexicalised

Question 4

Although labelled an ‘___’, Lewis’s __ was somewhat __ on the kind of detail that normally defines a ___, such as how an __ course using the lexical approach might be __ or __. One pioneering attempt to incorporate the findings of __ research into course __ and base a syllabus entirely on __ data was The ___ (Willis & Willis 1988), which was predicated on the view that ‘the ___ and ___, __ meanings in English are those meanings expressed by the __- words in English’ (Willis 1990). Accordingly, the first book in the series was based on the __ most frequent words in English, and the kinds of constructions that they typically occur in.

Answer 4

1. approach
   2 brainchild
2. short
3. method
4. entire
5. sequenced
6. implemented
7. corpus
8. design
9. frequency
10. Collins COBUILD English Course
11. commonest
12. most important
13. most basic
14. most frequent
15. 700

Question 5

Lewis, however, is highly ___ as to the value of __, ___syllabuses, whether of grammar ___or of ___(‘I am concerned to establish a lexical __, not a lexical __’). He tends to align himself with Stephen Krashen’s view that __ is best facilitated by ___to ___ input, in the form of __: ‘A central
requirement of the Lexical Approach is that language material should be
__and __rather than ___’ (op. cit.). He proposes a ___ cycle of __, ___and __, where selected and preferably ___, texts are subjected to tasks that promote the __and ___of such lexical features as collocations and __and semi-fixed __, and where __ between the ___language and the student’s __is __.

Answer 5

1. sceptical
2. additive
3. discrete-item
4. items
5. words
6. approach
7. syllabus
8. acquisition
9. exposure
10. comprehensible
11. texts
12. text
13. discourse
14. sentence based
15. pedagogical
16. observing
17. hypothesizing
18. experimenting
19. authentic
20. noticing
21. manipulation
22. fixed
23. expressions
24. comparison
25. target
26. L1
    27 encouraged

Question 6

Lindstromberg and Boers (2008) elaborate on this __model, with a
‘___ programme for ___learning’, which aims:

1. to help students ___chunks and appreciate their ___;
2. to ___target selected sets of chunks and apply ___
   known to help students commit chunks to __;
3. to __knowledge through __.

___activities involve learners __ texts for ___chunks and
checking these against information in a __or in an __

Answer 6

1. basic
2. three-based
3. chunk
4. notice
5. importance
6. deliberately
7. techniques
8. memory
9. consolidate
10. review
11. Typical
12. scanning
13. possible
14. dictionary
15. online corpus

Question 7

Because the lexical approach has __if ever been realized as a __ method but, instead, has been integrated into existing methods, such as __, or __, it is __to assess its true __. Certainly, there has been a ___ interest in __ teaching, including the teaching of ___and other __ items, in recent years, and this is reflected in most current teaching materials. Moreover, research suggests that a ____ of vocabulary is a ___ for both ___ and ___ fluency, and that – as Palmer long ago argued – the __ chunks, the ___the fluency. Retrieving chunks as opposed to ___ words both saves __ time and confers a degree of ___ (i.e. the capacity to sound ___) on the user. Hence, any approach that promotes the acquisition of __ language can only benefit the ___.

Answer 7

1. seldom
2. stand alone
3. Communicative Language Teaching
4. Text Translation
5. difficult
6. effectiveness
7. renewed
8. vocabulary
9. collocation
10. multi-word
11. critical mass
12. prerequisite
13. receptive
14. productive
15. more
16. greater
17. individual
18. processing
19. idiomaticity
20. natural
21. formulaic
22. learner

Question 8

__, though, there are few if any ___ procedures that the lexical approach has offered us. ___texts for lexical chunks is like scanning the ___ for constellations: unless you already know what you are looking for, it is a fairly ___ business.

Answer 8

1. Unhappily
2. innovative
3. Scanning
4. night sky
5. hit-and-miss

Question 9

When Lewis first formulated his lexical approach it was __ in a
theory of language (i.e. that ‘much language consists of multi-word
“___”’) but it __ a __ theory of learning. Since then, such a
theory has ___ . A ___ theory of language acquisition lends
support to Lewis’s __premise. It argues that, through __ to rich
sources of __ language use, certain ___ sequences –
called __ – and their associated meanings are stored in ___ and can be ___ and __ for future use. Over time, using the __ human capacity to identify patterns, the __ structure (i.e. the grammar) of these constructions is __ , providing a model for the creation of __ utterances. The theory suggests that there is a __ case for viewing language __ as ___ systems of __ and __ , and more as a __ of __ units ranging from __ morphemes (-ing, -ed) to ___ structures (verbs with ___objects) by way of collocations (highly likely, ___and ___) – with lexis occupying a __role. While ___ a lexical approach, a usage-based theory does seem to confirm the view that teaching that is based on the __ separation of __and __-misrepresents both the means and the ends of language learning.

Answer 9

1. grounded
2. chunks
3. lacked
4. coherent
5. emerged
6. usage-based
7. basic
8. exposure
9. real
10. frequently encountered
11. constructions
12. memory
13. retrieved
14. re-combined
15. innate
16. internal
17. unpacked
18. novel
19. strong
20. less
21. independent
22. grammar
23. vocabulary
24. spectrum
25. meaningful
26. individual
27. abstract syntactic
28. two
29. safe
30. sound
31. central
32. not fully validating
33. rigid
34. grammar
35. vocabulary