studying present perfect continuous, will versus going to, past continuous, conditionals, etc. They need to experience how conversations develop, not look at structures in isolations.
It’s not grammar, but lexis, that makes someone’s language more advanced.
Lower levels need to learn ‘grammar-as-lexis,’ whereas higher levels need practice ‘grammaticalising’ and on rare occasions looking at more obscure structures but only in clear contexts.
He’s not saying to ignore teaching grammar but to focus more on language patterns than verb tenses and teach the lexico-grammatical chunks that go with the grammar. For example:
Just because I’m single it doesn’t mean I’m desperately lonely!
Do you fancy going out somewhere tonight?
I agree with him but it makes me wonder how much I actually do this in my own teaching and how much I teach more traditional grammar because it’s easier–it’s what is presented in the book and how I first learned to teach. It’s what students expect. It gives, especially lower levels, something to build on. It makes things more manageable for the students and like he said, gives them a feeling of progress. I’ve never been a fan of PPP. I have a problem with the word ‘present’ and much prefer ESA (engage, study, activate) because it puts the emphasis more on the student, getting them involved in the learning, but still I have trouble seeing these as isolated stages. Surely the learners should be engaged and activating their language at all times in their study. But maybe like grammar can be comfort for insecure newbie learners, PPP (or ESA) is the same for novice teachers. Should teacher training be more lexically focused?
Q & A with Michael Lewis
Michael Lewis was truly brilliant making us all laugh.
Changes he said we should all make:
- get grammar out of our heads–studying structure is an inefficient way to learn language
- get individual words out of our heads–it’s all about chunks
- students should stop practising grammar to ‘get it right.’ They need to get it wrong to learn. We don’t learn by practising what we already know.
- don’t ignore Teacher Talk Time–students need the correct input teachers provide
- stop breaking language down
- teach examples rather than rules
- if you have to teach from a structural syllabus–dump it.
- teach longer utterances because phrases have tunes but words don’t. It’s easier to remember a tune.
- teach less material but more thoroughly
- just because students like rules doesn’t mean it’s good for them. We don’t go to the doctor for the doctor to say what you want to hear, but to tell you what’s wrong.
Language learning is much messier than teachers and learners want to think. He used the analogy of watering a plant. We have to water it for it to grow but we can’t say which leaf it is we’re watering. We know we’re helping the plant grow, but we don’t know how. People’s lexicons are like that.
Hoey, M. (2005). Lexical Priming: A new theory of Language. London and New York: Routledge.
Lewis, M. (1993). The Lexical Approach. Language Teaching Publications.
Lewis, M. (1997) Implementing the Lexical Approach: Putting Theory into Practice. Language Teaching Publications.
Lewis, M. (ed.) (2000). Teaching Collocation: Further Developments in the Lexical Approach. Hove: Heinle Language Teaching Publications.
Woolard, G. (2013). Messaging: Beyond a Lexical Approach in ELT. e-book available on kindle