Teaching Collocation. Further Developments in the Lexical Approach. Part 2

Description

As David Wilkins observed many years ago, 'Without grammar little can beconveyed; without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed. ' The single mostimportant task facing language learners is acquiring a sufficiently largevocabulary. We now recognise that much of our 'vocabulary' consists ofprefabricated chunks of different kinds. The single most imporlant kind ofchunk is collocation. Self-evidently, then, teaching collocation should be a toppriority in every language course.The centrality of lexisIncreasingly, language teachers have turned to the question of how languageis stored in the brain. If native speakers store large amounts of language inchunks, what strategies should language teachers adopt if they are to helplearners build mental lexicons which are similarly phrasal?From practice to theoryBooks of this kind tend to go from theory to practice; this book reverses thatorder. The authors in Part 1 describe how what they do in class has changedas a result of their developing awareness of the lexical nature of language.Pafi 2 describes in more detail the present state of our understanding oflanguagea nd acquisition.T eachersw ho havet ried someo f the suggestionsinPart l, and want to take their understanding furlher, should turn particularlyto chapters 7 and8. Teachers with a lot of experience of lexically-basedteaching, or those on in-service courses may prefer to read these two chaptersfirst, before returning to the more detailed practical suggestions of part 1.The contributors to this book have one principal objective - to developlearners'mental lexicons, and with that, to give those leamers a far widerrange of life-choices. It is a worthwhile objective.Michael Lewis, Hove, January 2000