How are you? Where do you live? However, as learners get older they tend to memorise less. Such short but frequent 'grammar spots' will help to slowly raise students’ awareness and build their understanding of the English grammar system.Įnglish lessons in a Primary school involve teaching a lot of chunks, such as Good morning. The above demonstrates how the teacher should be constantly on the ball and take every opportunity to draw students’ attention to grammar. You can ask your students: When did they get married? How should you change the sentence if the couple you are talking about is no longer married? For example, when exploring a text with your students, you may come across a sentence like this: One of the fathers of the Communicative Language Teaching Henry Widdowson advocated using lexical items as a starting point and then 'showing how they need to be grammatically modified to be communicatively effective' (1990:95). What does ‘s stand for in each of these cases ( is or has)? Don’t make any noise – she’s fallen asleep.If grammarians do not even attempt to address all areas of grammar, how can we, practitioners, cover all the aspects of grammar in our teaching, especially if all we seem to focus on is a limited selection of discrete items, comprised mostly of tenses and a handful of modal verbs? It would seem that we need to expose our students to a lot of naturally occurring language and frequently draw their attention to various grammar points as they arise.įor example, while teaching the expression fall asleep / be asleep you can ask your students: The only way to grasp their meaning is through continuous exposure and use.įinally, even the most authoritative English grammars never claim to provide a comprehensive description of all the grammar, hence the word 'introduction' often used in their titles (for instance, Huddleston & Pullum’s A Student's Introduction to English Grammar or Halliday’s An Introduction to Functional Grammar). Dave Willis cites the grammar of orientation (which includes the notoriously difficult present perfect and the uses of certain modal verbs) as particularly resistant to teaching. In contrast, the knowledge of formulaic language has been shown by research to have a significant bearing on the natural language production.įurthermore, certain grammar rules are practically impossible to learn. Michael Lewis, who might be considered the founder of the Lexical Approach, once claimed that there was no direct relationship between the knowledge of grammar and speaking. You are, no doubt, all familiar with students who on one hand seem to know the 'rules' of grammar but still fail to produce grammatically correct sentences when speaking or, on the other, sound unnatural and foreign-like even when their sentences are grammatically correct. Similarly many other 'traditional' grammar items can be introduced lexically relatively early on. I’d like to is not taught as 'the conditional' but as a chunk expressing desire. Indeed, since the concept of notions and functions made its way into language teaching, particularly as Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) gained prominence, some structures associated with grammar started to be taught lexically (or functionally). Recognising certain grammar structures as lexical items means that they can be introduced much earlier, without structural analysis or elaboration. If I were you…, I haven’t seen you for ages etc. It also includes certain patterns that were traditionally associated with the grammar of a language, e.g. Why use a technical term borrowed from the realm of linguistics instead of the word 'vocabulary'? Quite simply because vocabulary is typically seen as individual words (often presented in lists) whereas lexis is a somewhat wider concept and consists of collocations, chunks and formulaic expressions. The term 'lexis', which was traditionally used by linguists, is a common word these days and frequently used even in textbooks. In the past linguists were preoccupied with the grammar of language however the advances in corpus linguistics have pushed lexis to the forefront. The shift in ELT from grammar to lexis mirrors a similar change in the attitude of linguists. I consider the problems with 'traditional' grammar teaching before arguing that what we actually need is more grammar input as well as showing how lexis can provide necessary 'crutches' for the learner.įor more on the Lexical Approach see other articles on the TE website:
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