LEXICAL APPROACH

Lexical approach

The lexical approach is a method of teaching foreign languages described by M. Lewis in the 1990s. The basic concept on which this approach rests is the idea that an important part of learning a language consists of being able to understand and produce.

The case of you must be joking discussed previously illustrated that corpus data requires adjustment before it can be allowed to serve pedagogical ends: for instance, untypical or culturally inappropriate items will need to be removed from the handout which is given to the learners. However, it is likely that further adjustments will still be required, due to teach ability and learn ability factors: that is, since anecdotal evidence (and common sense) suggests there is a limit to the number of items learners can learn at any one time (i.e. in a single lesson), including every lexical variant at every opportunity will complicate the issue unnecessarily