My own second language learning has been the traditional grammar based. As a language teacher I have been greatly influenced by how I was taught. I am quite dependent on the text books for teaching the second language. Reading about the lexical approach has made me think about second language teaching. The question that comes to mind is how much of the sentences taught in the language textbooks do we actually use in real life? As Lewis (2000) says that "fleunt speech consists largely of rapidly produced short phrases, rather than formally correct 'sentences'" (p.174).
Hardwood (2002) is true in saying “If a lexical approach is implemented appropriately, learners will acquire lexis suitable for their needs” (p. 7). Learners will be able to use the ‘real’ language rather than the textbook language. However, implementing this approach is going to take a while. The attitude of learners, teachers, educational institutions and publishers all need to change if the lexical approach is to be appropriately implemented in the language classroom.
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As I mentioned - the increasing interest in corpus analysis is slowly feeding in to the EFT world - and as a result more and more course books are shifting the balance away from the dominance of the traditional structural grammar approach.
ReplyDeleteYes Farhana, I think so too. To cite hardwood in your blog learners will acquire lexis suitable for their needs” (p. 7). When I think of my own language learning and acquisition, we were all advised by our lecturers to keep a vocabulary dictionaries. In this way, we would have a store of words that we could call on any time, anywhere. Ultimately, we would find a word to that would suit our needs. Just likeFarhana has mentioned.
ReplyDeleteEnglish also is my second language. Look back on my own learning experience, I believe that there should be a place for traditional grammar-based approach for second language learning classroom. Knowing about basic sentence structure and commonly used tense is the fundation for further language study. However, such grammar-based approach could be only used in certain phase.
ReplyDeleteYes, there are many course books like cutting edge and EAP, start to focus on lexical approach rather than the structural grammar approach.
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