INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL

OF

TPPLIED
AKING ALL
EXICAL APPROACH
TEACHING
A
INGUISTICS
, Vol. 12,TO
No.
2, 2002 139

Taking a lexical approach to teaching:

principles and problems
NIGEL HARWOOD
Canterbury Christ Church University College

After briey reviewing some of the reasons why the traditional grammar/vocabulary distinction is no longer adequate, this article describes
two key principles which are claimed to be at the core of teaching
according to a lexical approach. There are, however, a number of
major difculties which necessarily co-occur alongside any attempted
classroom implementation. Having discussed how these difculties may
be overcome, the article closes by conceding that there is still much
work to be done before the approach can hope to become more fully
integrated into the mainstream ELT coursebook.

Introduction
Lexical approach is a term bandied about by many, but, I suspect, understood
by few. What does taking a lexical approach to language teaching mean? What
are the principles and tenets behind a lexical approach? What problems will
teachers have to face if they wish to adopt a lexical approach?
For the present purposes, I will be using the term lexical approach to mean
that lexis plays the dominant role in the ELT classroom, or at least a more dominant role than it has traditionally, which has largely been one of subservience to
grammar (Sinclair & Renouf 1988). The approach stresses the necessity of
using corpora to inform pedagogical materials and the importance of regularly
recycling and reviewing the language taught. I should make clear from the start
that my understanding of the term lexical approach is not necessarily the same
as Michael Lewis (e.g. 1996, 1997, 2000), although I imagine that my take on
the principles and problems inherent in implementing a lexical approach probably have a considerable amount in common with Lewis own views.
The article1 begins with a brief outline of what I mean by the term lexis,
before briey outlining two of the tenets which in my view constitute a lexical
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approach. The same tenets are then problematized at greater length. Finally,
while it is argued that there is still much to be done before a lexical approach is
accepted by a majority of practitioners and researchers and integrated into
mainstream ELT, I close by claiming that the approach can be seen as having
many of the same concerns as state-of-the-art applied linguistics.

The concept of lexis

Language teaching has traditionally viewed grammar and vocabulary as a divide,
with the former category consisting of structures (the present perfect, reported
speech) and the latter usually consisting of single words. The structures were accorded priority, vocabulary being seen as secondary in importance, merely serving to illustrate the meaning and scope of the grammar (Sinclair & Renouf 1988).
However, a number of studies (e.g. Altenberg 1990; Erman & Warren 2000;
Kjellmer 1987; Pawley & Syder 1983) have shown that the Chomskyan notion
of a native speakers output consisting of an innite number of creative utterances is at best a half-truth: in fact prefabricated items form a signicant part
of a native speakers spoken and written output. Only this can account for what
Pawley and Syder (1983: 193) call the puzzle of nativelike selection: a native
speakers utterances are both grammatical and nativelike, and while only a
small proportion of grammatically well-formed sentences are nativelike, that
is, readily acceptable to native informants as ordinary, natural forms of expression, these are the sentences which native speakers produce. It would
seem, then, that speakers need both a prefabricated, automatized element to
draw on as well as a creative, generative one both idiom and open choice
components (Sinclair 1991).
Once the importance of prefabricated language is acknowledged, the traditional grammar/vocabulary distinction becomes problematic: as the above studies
show, native speakers are prone to using much of the same language over and
over again rather than starting from scratch each time they speak/write. For
the purposes of this article, therefore, when I use the term lexis I have in mind
strings of words which go together (i.e. prefabs and collocations) as opposed to
the single words language teaching traditionally called vocabulary: rather
than consisting of a repository of content words, lexis is not easily distinguishable from the concept traditionally labelled as grammar (e.g. Singleton 1997).
This fuzziness suggests that lexis is more powerful than was once thought, and
hence deserves a higher priority in syllabuses.

Principles of taking a lexical approach

PRINCIPLE 1: TEACH REAL LANGUAGE, NOT TEFLESE; USE COMPUTER
CORPORA BUT BE CORPUS-BASED, NOT CORPUS-BOUND

At the centre of a lexical approach is the insistence on teaching real English

and a rejection of the ersatz language found in the average ELT coursebook;
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and indeed a number of corpus-based studies (e.g. Holmes 1988; Hyland 1994;
Mindt 1996; Williams 1988) conrm that the language coursebooks teach is not
what people really say (Lewis 1997: 10), it is TEFLese (Willis 1990: vii).
Hence it can be argued that the only way to avoid distorting the language with
this TEFLese English is for the coursebook writer to access the authentic language
via corpora, as opposed to relying on their intuition. It is well documented that
intuition (even native-speaker intuition) often fails to accurately reect actual
language in use (e.g. Biber, Conrad & Reppen 1994); in contrast, corpora can
instantly provide us with the relative frequencies, collocations, and prevalent
grammatical patterns of the lexis in question across a range of genres. In addition,
light is shed on lexical variation (cf. Fernando 1996; Moon 1998). To illustrate
the point, I draw on data from an earlier study (Harwood 2000) comparing the
language found in a native-speaker corpus (the British National Corpus) with
the language in a selection of coursebooks. In Bell and Gowers coursebook
(1992: 150), for instance, no variation of the phrase You must be joking is
included, giving the learner the impression the form is frozen. However, the
BNC includes the following variations:
I says [sic] youre joking . . .
You are joking me?
You are joking, arent you?
You gotta be joking!
You have got to be joking . . .
You have got to be joking me . . .
You have to be joking . . .
You must be bloody joking!
You must be fucking joking!
You must be joking . . .

Youre ipping joking!

Youre joking . . .
Youre joking, arent you?
Youre joking, of course . . .
Youre not joking?
Youve got to be fucking joking . . .
Youve got to be joking!
Youve gotta be joking mate . . .
Youve gotta be joking!
Youve just got to be joking . . .

and while it is relatively simple to use native-speaker intuition to point to the

fact that You have got to be joking me, for instance, or I says [sic] youre
joking are relatively untypical examples of variation on this phrase, and hence
not worth teaching (especially since, if the learner is familiar with more common
variations, they would understand and be able to respond to this variant in any
case); and while it is similarly straightforward to determine that variations such
as Youve got to be fucking joking cannot be included in international teaching
materials because of their potential to offend, we are nevertheless left with a
number of typical, polite variations which Bell and Gowers material fails to
cover and which corpus data has brought to the fore (Harwood 2000: 1416).
However, by dismissing some of the variations as inappropriate and hence not
being necessarily constrained by corpora, we are being what Summers (1996:
262) calls corpus-based but not corpus-bound.
PRINCIPLE 2: RECYCLE AND REVISIT

Nation (1990: 445) concludes that coursebooks lack of recycling provide[s]

considerable cause for alarm, before claiming that lexis should be recycled
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between 10 and 12 times for higher-level learners, and warning that teaching
vocabulary without incorporating the necessary recycling is wasted effort. Similarly, Kojic-Sabo and Lightbown (1999) stress that an EFL learners need for
recycling/reviewing is perhaps more acute than a non-native speaker who is surrounded by the L1 (i.e. an ESL learner): since EFL learners are not continually
surrounded by the target language they cannot be said to benet from any
spontaneous reviewing which may result. Regardless of the amount of practice
material which accompanies the initial presentation, what is needed is repeated
exposure over a given period, as opposed to exposing the learner to the lexis
once, practising it, and never recycling it again (Harwood 2000; Lewis 1997).

Problems of taking a lexical approach

PROBLEM 1: CORPORA AND TEACHING REAL ENGLISH

Real English, corpora, and learner overload

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 teachability and learnability
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. Learners will be overwhelmed and will fail to learn any
or at least learn fewer lexical strings less well than if they had been presented
with a smaller, more manageable list in the rst place. So implementing a
lexical approach requires a delicate balancing act: on the one hand, the teacher
will wish to consult the appropriate corpora to avoid the ersatz English of the
textbooks which reects little of the languages lexical variations and predominant patterns. On the other hand, however, teachers will be anxious to ensure
learners are not overloaded with too much lexis which would result from
exposing the class to as many lexical strings as the corpus describes (cf. Cook
1998). We should be aware of the dangers of teaching learners unusual or
deviant variations when, since we have neither the time (as teachers) or the
space (as materials writers) to include more than some variations in our lessons
or coursebooks, we should ensure these are the variations which will be most
useful to the learners. Hence intuition regarding both linguistic and pedagogical
matters needs to be exercised: in addition to asking ourselves whether any of
the attested corpus examples are untypical in the skill/genre we are attempting
to teach (e.g. academic writing: the research paper), pedagogical judgements
such as the accessibility/difculty/volume of material also require reection,
since, while corpora can tell us much, pedagogical concerns such as these are
clearly not addressed by the data (Cook 1998).
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Some additional limitations of corpora

Although corpora are no pedagogical panacea (e.g. Cook 1998; Widdowson
2000), I do not believe that corpora in themselves necessarily make the implementation of a lexical approach problematic. The key issue is rather how corpus
data is selected and manipulated. To take one example of the potential misuse
of data, there is a popular but mistaken belief that the frequency with which
lexis occurs in a corpus will determine its priority in our syllabus. In fact, I
would suggest that the more advanced the learners level, the more apparent it
becomes that something more than frequency counts is required. Although much
has been made of Willis (1990) assertion that the most frequent 700 words of
English constitute 70% of text, the problem of what one should teach subsequently remains. As Willis gures show, this is much less easily prescribable:
The 700 most frequent words cover 70% of text, but coverage begins to drop rapidly
thereafter. The next 800 words cover a further 6% of text and the next 1000 words
cover 4% . . . It is true that general frequency is not the sole criterion [for identifying the appropriate lexis for a syllabus]. (Willis 1990: 47)

Hence, while the frequency factor should not be ignored in our attempts to
mirror real English in the classroom, it is clear that frequency should not be the
only, or even the principal, factor in determining the lexis to teach. Relevant
also is work on text type (e.g. Biber et al. 1994) and genre analysis (e.g. Bhatia
1993; Swales 1990), showing that a research article, for instance, will feature
different types of structures and phrases when compared with a business letter;
and that to a certain extent such features are predictable. So we would do well
to bear in mind learners wants and needs (cf. Biber et al. 1994): it is evident
that the materials designer will have to consult very different corpora when
designing materials for pre-sessional postgraduate learners enrolled in Englishmedium universities who need to develop their academic writing skills, for
instance, compared to an intermediate-level general English group who wish to
explore some of the most common ways native speakers open a conversation
with their peers.
In summary, corpora in no way constitute a pedagogical quick x: while
corpora should undoubtedly stand at the centre of a lexical approach, the
teacher and materials designer will need to be aware of the many variables
which will inuence corpus selection and data manipulation.
From printout to handout
The materials designer needs to acknowledge that there is likely to be a degree
of learner (and teacher) resistance to corpus-based materials if the data is
handled insensitively, due to the fact such materials are untraditional and also
because, more generally, some perceive computers (and therefore computerbased learning) negatively. Such resistance will, of course, only increase should
an impenetrable amount of corpus data be simply reproduced straight onto the
textbook page (Cook 1998; Leech 1998; Widdowson 2000).
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Hence the requirement for the designer and/or teacher to do something

with the data. One example of what should be done, if communicative language
teaching is to be believed, is to ensure the learner feels involved, investing something of themselves in the material (e.g. cf. Allwright 1981; Coady 1997; Skmen
1997). The materials designer will need to present the (potentially impersonal)
corpus printouts in such a way as to stimulate the learners personal involvement
(cf. Aston 1995); and while various researchers have been developing Johns
(1991) practical ideas for exploiting corpus printouts in the classroom for some
time (e.g. Fox 1998; Lewis 1997; Milton 1998; Thurston & Candlin 1998; Willis
1998), the same ideas are crucially lacking in published commercial materials
(Harwood 2000; Moon 1997). Although this may have been more excusable in
the past, when corpus-based descriptions were harder to come by, these days
designers over-dependence on introspection and intuition is less and less justiable (Harwood 2000).
Existing published materials are not corpus-based
Since there is evidence that designers are failing to exploit corpus data to shape
coursebooks lexical syllabuses, the teacher who wishes to push lexis up the
agenda on their course is obliged to produce their own corpus-based materials.
This constitutes a serious difculty for the spread of a lexical approach: however willing the individual teacher may be to teach lexically, their institution
may well prevent them from doing so (Baigent 1999). In addition, of course,
time restraints and an excessive workload result in many teachers introducing
only a minimum of their own material onto a course. All of this suggests that the
inuence of a lexical approach will be negligible while there continues to be a
dearth of available published material which abides by its tenets.2
Corpus access
I close this section on corpora and a lexical approach by supposing that, in
spite of the difculties described above, a teacher wishes to consult the appropriate corpora to design lexically based materials. Assuming the teacher has
access to the necessary computing technology (a considerable assumption
most teachers around the world do not have such access), they will still be faced
with the fact that ELT publishers refuse to grant them access to consult many
corpora. Other corpora, such as the British National Corpus, require access
fees that the teachers institutions may be less than willing to provide. And
while it is true that there are now cheap corpora available such as the BNC
Sampler, teachers of EAP who require soft and hard science sub-corpora to
help students write across the disciplinary spectrum will continue to be denied
access because of publishers commercial interests.
PROBLEM 2: TEACHING AND LEARNING REAL ENGLISH

Whatever the problems involved in accessing the appropriate corpus data, a

more fundamental concern is whether it is desirable to even choose to teach
real (i.e. nativelike) English. The question is obviously enormously complex,
and I limit myself to sketching out four related issues.
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Respecting learners wishes

There is evidence to suggest that many learners have no wish to learn real lexis
and sound like an L1 (e.g. Anglo-American) user: despite the fact that many
teachers (consciously or unconsciously) hold the nativelike model up as the
ideal, the learners non-native variety can constitute a separate cultural identity, marking the L2 speaker out from the native community (cf. Beneke 1981;
Carter 1998; Dellar 2000; Hinnenkamp 1980; Kasper & Blum-Kulka 1993;
Littlewood 1983; Prodromou 1996; Wray 1999). Meanwhile the Anglocentric
coursebook continues to predominate, which presumes a degree of integrative
motivation on the part of the learner and implicitly denies or devalues local Englishes (Beneke 1981; Prodromou 1988). (Such problems, of course, necessarily
involve questioning the global strategy of the major ELT publishers: if local
varieties of English, which differ considerably, are to be the target, then perhaps
publishers should be more concerned with marketing local, rather than international, one product ts all coursebooks. This is discussed further below.)
In sum, however real the lexis is, teachers cannot assume that learners
will be prepared to learn lexis simply because native speakers say it or its
in the coursebook.
Perceptions of real lexis
Perhaps some of the objections to teaching real language arise from our perceptions of what exactly real lexis is: I suspect that to many teachers it consists of
what Leech (1998) tactfully calls the less admirable features of language,
which we may not wish our learners to reproduce.3 Alternatively, other teachers
may bring to mind the various idioms and idiomatic phrases that course and
resource books periodically dig up which could be described as parochial and
of limited relevance to the class: Hobsons choice; to send someone to Coventry
(Harwood 2000). Yet I would claim that such language, however real it may
be, is not the kind of lexis which a teacher would be contemplating teaching by
following a lexical approach: if learners needs remain to the fore, real lexis
does not have to be impolite, irrelevant or outlandish. As we saw above when
discussing corpus data, to identify a piece of lexis as authentic is not sufcient
justication for including it in the syllabus: what is essential, then, is to prioritize
(real) lexis according to need.
Non-native teachers
One of the objections to emphasizing real lexis is due to the fact that the majority
of English teachers worldwide are non-natives. How well-equipped are nonnatives to teach real current British slang? In any case, prioritizing this kind
of language would reinforce the alleged supremacy of the native speaker teacher
as expert (Prodromou 1996). However, take what is perhaps a more common
example: the non-native speaker teaching an EAP class. In this case, the real
lexis in question should present little problem for the non-native teacher who is
well-versed in the conventions of academia and is therefore no less expert than
a native speaker.
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Varieties of real English

Another key question is what we mean by real English and real lexis: do we
mean American, Australian, British, Caribbean, Indian, or South African English, to name but a few varieties? Are we striving to perpetuate an educated or
less-educated model? Where does the English of the millions of speakers of
English as a second or foreign language t in (Hyde 1998; Leech 1998; Prodromou
1996)? Again, I would suggest such questions are best answered by attempting
to address the learners needs and wants, although it is well for the teacher to
bear in mind that issues like world Englishes and intercultural pragmatics are
complex: being acutely aware that real lexis will vary immensely depending
on the user should help ensure the classroom atmosphere is not one of smallminded prescriptivism.4
PROBLEM 3: RECYCLING IN PRACTICE

Coursebooks fail to recycle lexis systematically

A recent study of 12 upper-intermediate and advanced coursebooks found that
none of the prefabricated language or metadiscourse examined was systematically recycled (Harwood 2000). As Littlejohn (1992) claims, ELT materials are
failing to keep pace with applied linguistics research, which in this case would
suggest that recycling should be a standard feature of the coursebook. And
while it should be conceded that recent studies of lexis (e.g. Sanaoui 1995) have
emphasized the importance of the learners managing their own vocabulary learning by means of skills the teacher has helped them develop, I do not believe this
exonerates materials (or those who design them) from responsibility for recycling. Rather, I would contend that many teachers in fact underestimate the part
recycling plays in language learning, and that the coursebook should engage in
recycling to underline its benets to learners but also to remind teachers to
incorporate recycling into their lessons regularly.5
Coursebooks have a role to play in encouraging teachers to recycle
However highly teachers rate the importance of recycling, in many classrooms
they have little power to ensure it features regularly. Since many institutions
worldwide oblige their teachers to follow the coursebook slavishly (cf. Baigent
1999; Dubin & Olshtain 1986), how can the teacher be expected to recycle if
recycling activities are left to their whim and are not included in the material?
Recycling needs to consist of more than doing the same thing twice
A possible explanation for the apparent reluctance of materials designers (and
teachers?) to recycle sufciently can be found in Lewis (1997: 51) assertion
that Doing the same thing twice is still widely considered time-wasting and
potentially boring. As Lewis implies, while a recycling/revisiting strategy should
be at the heart of a lexical approach, it is also vital that teachers and material
writers ensure recycling is done in an interesting and refreshing way, so that
the learners interest is still engaged. Variety and novelty, rather than rote
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learning and staid predictability, should be the cornerstones of the recycling

component in a coursebook.
PROBLEM 4: FACE VALIDITY FOR TEACHERS AND LEARNERS

Learners and teachers perceptions

I wish to reiterate that it is essential that a lexical approach is implemented with
sensitivity by the teacher: it is not a case of throwing out all established pedagogy.
With this in mind, I now turn to the question of face validity. Although the
term is normally associated with the eld of language testing, where it is used to
examine how acceptable and credible a test is to users (e.g. Alderson, Clapham
& Wall 1995), for this article I take it to mean what learners and teachers expect
to devote time to in the language classroom. I will now attempt to illustrate the
importance that face validity has when utilizing a lexical approach, and potential
difculties which may arise which can be traced to worries about face validity.
While material which takes a lexical approach can be built around many
conventional design principles which feature in more traditional grammarbased exercises, where there is material which is not conventional, not the stuff
of the standard ELT coursebook, the question of face validity is likely to arise,
since teachers and learners will not be used to the materials and may well
therefore question their validity. Because all materials feature a hidden agenda
(Nunan 1989), with what the writer sees as being the essential things to be
learned coming to the fore, by its very prominence, lexis is implicitly ascribed
an unprecedented degree of importance. But will the class accept this? Might
they not demand grammar in the sense in which it is normally presented?
While we have seen that the Chomskyan generative paradigm cannot be claimed
to describe language adequately and that the realms of grammar and lexis are
neither readily denable nor even necessarily discrete (and hence in teaching
lexis one can simultaneously be teaching grammar), this is not to say that many,
or even the majority, of teachers and learners would accept this and be prepared
to attach a higher priority to the acquisition of lexis. The prudent course of
action, then, is not to abandon grammar teaching in the traditional sense, but
to ensure that syllabuses and materials include both lexis and grammar (cf. Wray
2000). We should remember that there is a type of ELT which predominates in
many parts of the world which is radically different in its underlying assumptions (i.e. it values traditional grammar instruction more highly) when compared with the state-of-the-art Anglo-American type (cf. Anderson forthcoming).6
Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of these more traditional approaches,
and however sound the case for a more lexically-oriented approach to teaching
may appear, we must proceed carefully if those teachers and learners who see
structural grammar teaching as key are to be at all persuaded of the merits of a
lexical approach. Cooks (1998: 60) insistence that a preoccupation with lexis
will inevitably lead to a bewildering refusal to teach grammar on the part
of the teacher must be proved mistaken if face validity is to be maintained.
Perhaps one of the reasons the COBUILD course was not particularly successful
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was that teachers and learners had never seen anything like it before, and face
validity became an issue. In contrast, the most recent coursebook associated with
the lexical approach (Dellar & Hocking 2000) contains a traditional grammar
component and does not appear unduly different to the standard coursebook.
In sum, then, the way to assuage teachers and learners fears of a lexical
approach is to avoid an iconoclastic call to abandon all grammar activities. We
should instead simply call for the teaching of lexis to come higher up the agenda.
Implementation
Some of the difculties I have raised concerning the practical implementation of
a lexical approach can be connected to face validity. As Thornbury (1998) has
pointed out, teachers are unlikely to be interested in a set of pedagogical principles per se: it is only when the same principles can be applied to classroom
situations that their worth is evident. Given the lack of guidance available in
the literature at present as to how a lexical approach should be implemented,
then, the approach is unlikely to be adopted until it is seen by teachers as operationalizable. So although Lewis (1993) gives us an insight into the kind of syllabuses he does not favour and a range of classroom activities which bring lexis
to the fore (Lewis 1997), we are never presented with a comprehensive syllabus
based around a lexical approach that Lewis does approve of (Thornbury 1998).
Difculties such as these which hinder the implementation of a lexical approach
necessarily involve face validity: it may seem that either (i) the lack of available
commercial materials means the approach is misguided, and that lexis is not so
important after all; or (ii) that however legitimate teachers and learners believe
the approach might be, the lack of materials makes implementation impossible.
The lack of lexically based materials is now discussed further.
PROBLEM 5: THE WORLD OF ELT PUBLISHING

The lack of available pedagogical material claiming to take a lexical approach

can be used to critique the ELT publishing world. The conservatism of the
industry is well documented: ELT publishers fail to respond to ndings in
applied linguistics research quickly, and indeed often never apply these ndings
(Littlejohn 1992; Thornbury 1998). In order to maximize prots, materials are
developed for the global market, despite the fact that the many varieties of
international English being spoken suggests that products should cater for individual local markets instead (Prodromou 1988). All of this helps to explain why
at the time of writing, with the exception of Dellar and Hocking (2000), Powell
(1996), and the COBUILD series, coursebooks purportedly built around any
sort of lexical approach are conspicuous by their absence.

Conclusion: a lexical approach and the state of the art

While I have tried to outline what I see as a number of difculties regarding the
implementation of a lexical approach in this article, I wish to emphasize that I
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am in no way inimical to the approach per se. Hence I close by pointing out that
in many ways a lexical approach shares the concerns of the most current research
in a number of areas of applied linguistics.
Take, for instance, a lexical approachs insistence on abandoning the misleading grammar/vocabulary dichotomy which has continued to inform ELT
materials. The fuzziness of the grammar/lexis distinction is also currently being
underlined by studies in phraseology (e.g. Altenberg 1998; Glser 1998; Howarth
1996); while the emphasis on the importance of prefabs in a lexical approach is
conrmed by work on formulaic language (e.g. Aijmer 1996; DeCock 1996,
1998; DeCock et al. 1998; Granger 1998; House 1996; Moon 1997, 1998; Wray
1999, 2000; Wray & Perkins 2000) and metadiscourse (e.g. Crismore, Markkanen
& Steffensen 1993; Hyland 1998a,b, 1999; Intaraprawat & Steffensen 1995;
Mauranen 1993a,b). If a lexical approach is implemented appropriately, learners
will acquire lexis suitable for their needs, a priority which accords with the
recognition of the importance of genre analysis (e.g. Bhatia 1993; Swales 1990),
in that research in this area shows clearly that the lexis which is suitable for
EAP groups, say, may not be so suitable for conversation classes. Hence a
lexical approach recognizes that, in order to design material for an EAP class,
it is necessary to consult an academic, rather than a general English, corpus.
As it stands at present, the concept of taking a lexical approach to teaching
is work in progress (Thornbury 1998), since there are two main areas connected
with the approach which are in need of clarication: while some researchers
(e.g. Cook 1998; Thornbury 1998) have critiqued the approachs purported
lack of principled foundation, there is also concern about the practicalities of
the approachs implementation (e.g. Baigent 1999; Lewis 1997; Thornbury 1998).
It is hoped that this article has made a contribution to the discussions on both
these issues.

Notes
1.

2.
3.

This article is a version of a talk given at the 35th IATEFL conference. I am grateful
to Ron Carter, Alan Cunningsworth, and Gregory Hadley for their helpful comments on earlier versions, and to two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and
constructive feedback.
Apart from the COBUILD course, a recent exception is Dellar and Hocking (2000).
Leech (1998: xixxx) has various vagueness tags in mind here: and things, and
stuff like that, or something, which are, as he says, less admirable inasmuch as
such language tends to be stigmatized, since it is seen as devoid of real meaning
(see Schourup 1985). However, such formulaic chunks do serve a number of functions: for instance, since they are automatized, they afford the speaker additional
processing time (cf. e.g. Dechert 1984; Pawley & Syder 1983; Weinert 1995; Wray
2000; Wray & Perkins 2000). In addition, they serve to manage discourse (Aijmer
1996; Edmondson & House 1981; Keller 1979; Wray & Perkins 2000) and maintain
social harmony (Aijmer 1996; Coulmas 1979; Cowie 1994; Moon 1992; Nattinger &
DeCarrico 1992; Wildner-Bassett 1984; Yorio 1980). Hence the issue of whether we
should teach stigmatized language to learners when it may be useful to them in a

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4.

5.

6.

NIGEL HARWOOD
number of ways is a sensitive one which I obviously cannot do justice to here.
Nevertheless, I suggest it is less straightforward than Leech seems to be implying.
Focusing on learners wants and needs rather than all-round (nativelike) prociency has the added advantage of ensuring that much time is not wasted in attempting to instil prociency in, say, colloquial spoken British English when the learner
does not wish it. Hence Ramptons (1990) preferred term of expert, rather than
native speaker, which more accurately reects the fact that a learner may be procient (expert) in their chosen eld, rather than being obliged to be procient in all
elds (native).
I am well aware there is much behind the material which the designer intends
teachers to exploit (cf. Cunningsworth 1995; Cunningsworth & Kusel 1991; Littlejohn
& Windeatt 1989). So if a recycling activity has not been included in the students
edition of the material, this is not to say that the designer did not envisage the need
for it. Indeed, perhaps notes on a recycling stage are included in the teachers
edition. There therefore remains at least the possibility that we are being too precipitous in our condemnation if we have not consulted teachers books. The argument could, of course, be taken even further: there is much behind the material
which designers do not even include in teachers editions, whereby designers rely on
teachers experience and intuition to tailor the activity to suit the groups individual
needs and tastes. However, if this reasoning is followed to its logical conclusion, we
would never condemn material as being inadequate: we might decide, for instance,
that the designer was perfectly aware of the need for the teacher to expand on/
extend the activities in the students edition, but chose not to record this in the
teachers notes, as they believed teachers would rapidly identify the need for further
consolidation without requiring explicit instructions to this effect in the teachers
notes. My feeling is that a line must be drawn somewhere: the fact, for example, that
none of the data barring a single self-access exercise in the material surveyed in my
previous study (Harwood 2000) is recycled as a matter of course elsewhere surely
deserves comment and (qualied) condemnation.
One of the reviewers also pointed out that there are classrooms which have become
so communicative that any grammar teaching at all has become taboo. In any case,
the message for coursebook writers remains the same: proceed cautiously so as to
prevent alienating teachers and learners who favour a more structuralist, or a more
communicative pedagogy.

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[Received 10/10/01; revised 21/2/02]
Nigel Harwood
Department of Language Studies
Canterbury Christ Church University College
North Holmes Road
Canterbury
Kent CT1 1QU
UK
e-mail: nh19@cant.ac.uk

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