An introduction to the Lexical Approach

[@thaicuisineoui]

New into ELT teaching here. Great content, spasiba. Keep it up.

[@AlexWallsELT]

Thanks

[@mobinashamsa]

Great content, keep up the good work.

[@AlexWallsELT]

Thank you for your comment and I hope it helped!

[@assismari]

Great lesson! Thank you!

[@AlexWallsELT]

Glad you liked it!

[@assismari]

@@AlexWallsELT don't you have online courses for teachers?

[@AlexWallsELT]

Currently no, but thank you for that. It's given me a bit of a kick to start working on a course I've been planning for a while, and I've now recorded around 10% of the video content for it, so maybe by next month I can say yes to this question!

[@ahmedbebars6844]

Very useful video. Which books can you recommend that teach frequent English language chunks? Thanks.

[@AlexWallsELT]

A good question. I'm a big fan of the Outcomes series by National Geographic which has recently published its third edition. This is one of the few lexical book series out there and as such it does contain high frequency chunks. To offer some balance though, the coursebook authors are both British and the book contains a lot of usages of British English that have prompted American colleagues to ask me if we really use English like that. The other criticism, and the authors make this criticism themselves, is that Outcomes doesn't go as far lexically as it would like to - it goes about as far as the publishers allow so that they can still sell it to schools. The world is still not ready for a radical implementation of the lexical approach it seems (even 30 years on). Whatever book you do decide to use, I think it's quite easy to make it more lexical. For the vocabulary sections, find the useful collocations that go with them. Don't just teach a list of crimes for example (typical B2 unit), but useful verbs (with prepositions) such as "to commit", "to be charged with", "to be acquitted of", etc. Teach the second conditional through its most commonly expressed ideas "if I had the money", "if it were up to me", "if I could go back in time", rather than an extensive presentation on its form. In both cases, we can use our grey matter to think about the common chunks that people actually use, but more reliable than our brains is to explore a corpus and see what really happens. If you're not familiar with the iWeb corpus, I'd recommend having a look at it and trying to work out what commonly occurs.

[@mihajloravic8814]

Hi Alex. Thanks for the videos. Have you got any ideas or book recommendations on teaching lexical relationships eg synonymy/hyponymy/collocation/connotation. Thanks!

[@AlexWallsELT]

Hi Mihajlo. Thanks for the comment. Probably the best books to start with are Teaching Lexically by Dellar and Walkley and the Company Words Keep by Paul Davies and Hania Kryszewska, both by Delta Publishing. There's also a free PDF by Ken Lackman that does the rounds on the internet called Lexical Approach Activities - just google that.

[@mihajloravic8814]

@@AlexWallsELT great, thanks!