Yesterday I attended the Lexical Teaching Conference at Westminster College, a day of teaching ideas inspired by Michael Lewis’s Lexical Approach. I felt privileged to be able to hear ideas from some of my TEFL heroes like Michael Hoey, Hugh Dellar, Andrew Walkley , Luke Fletcher, Nick Bilbrough, and Michael Lewis himself. Here are some highlights from the sessions.
The Lexical Approach and Lexical Priming–Michael Hoey
Michael Hoey presented three criticisms of the Lexical Approach and then showed why they are invalid.
Criticisms of the Lexical Approach
1. It ignores how languages are learnt.
Not true–there is solid psycholinguistic research, namely semantic and repetition priming, that backs up the idea that we store words as chunks. One word helps us access a second one faster and more accurately (or slows down access). For example, if we see the word ‘wing,’ it is harder to access ‘pig’ than ‘swan’ because words are semantically linked in our mind.
2. There’s no theoretical underpinning.
Again, not true–his theory of lexical priming accounts for collocation and fluency. There are lots of problems with existing theories of languages anyway. For example, many theories assume a single language when in fact there are many variations (think dialects) masquerading as a single language. Also, theories don’t take into account words have multiple meanings yet we know what is meant.
3. It only applies to Indo-European languages.
More research is needed, but his preliminary research shows that lexical priming applies also to Chinese.
His conclusion: The Lexical Approach is safe to use.
When we encounter a word we automatically and subconsciously notice many aspects of it. Our experience of a word primes us to expect certain associations.
Some of the things we are primed for:
- collocation (e.g. eyes and ears)
- semantic association (eyes and ears are body parts)
- pragmatic collocation (e.g. consequence is often used negatively, result positively)
- colligation (grammatical patterns)
- textual collocations (Is a word likely to be repeated in a text or substituted with a pronoun?)
- textual colligation (Where does an expression occur in the text?)
One thing he said that really struck me was that reading primes us so it is important to read in order to learn vocabulary and subconsciously pick up all of those primings. Learning vocabulary in turn primes us to organize text in writing. Which leads me to remember the importance of context in teaching vocabulary. Without context students miss out on primings. This also makes me wonder about the ongoing debate over whether it’s better to use authentic material or graded. Lexical priming theory makes me think there’s an argument for authentic material because it primes students for how language is really used rather than an artificial, graded priming. This kind of priming may also contribute to the intermediate plateau.
Working Exercises Hard–Hugh Dellar
This followed nicely after Lexical Priming because it helped answer a question I had lingering in my head.
How in the world can our students pick up all the priming necessary to really know a word/expression in the short amount of time they have in class?
Hugh’s answer was that we need to give them this extra priming by drawing their attention to chunks of language from their coursebook and through our boardwork.
Some helpful lesson tips:
- Spend time prepping lessons, pulling out ‘ambient language’ from exercises and anticipating expressions that they may need and mapping it out beforehand. Think of more examples of collocations to extend what is in the coursebook.
- Don’t pre-teach vocabulary. Instead let students get on with the exercise and spend the time in the ’round-up’ after. The vocabulary exercise does teach the unknown words in context; otherwise it becomes just a test.
- Students need less context setting and more meaningful language analysis.
- Board up whole sentences, not just single words or even chunks. Remember the longer the phrase, the more that is primed.
- Write these sentences as a gap-fill.
- Do vocabulary exerci