Exercises in Lexical Approach

In Lexical Approach input is highly emphasised and it changes as one’s language level
increases. In L1 and L2 a mature lexicon can be acquired in similar ways via lots of
comprehensible listening and later by similar quantities of reading. One should do
listennings and readings as much as possible so that they can imrpove their own Lexicons. In
classroom Teacher should be ably to wholly consistent because contrastive people exist in
classroom just as it exists in social setting. It is impossible for a teacher if he/she takes a
doctrinaire approach such as audip-lingual or structural approaches. Variaty adds flavour
and better than dogmatic principles.

Exercises Designet on Lexical Principles

For Lexical Principles, the exercises need to be spesific. To lenght to sequencing of examples
sometimes need more thought. For example, “You have to show your ticket and your
passport when you … …” this sentence much easier then “When you … …, you have to show
both your passport and your ticket.” Because English usually constructed from the known
information or topic to new information. And also predicting endings of the sentences is our
Daily linguistic experience. **Gap Should not occur in the topic element.
Also between “She told me to take a few days t o .........his job offer.” And “There’s no need to
decide now. You might need a couple of days to .........the offer.” The latter is more comprehensible
because it is contextualized.
For matching exercises we must take into account these 4 things:
1-Collocations must be strong.
2-The order of the examples should be from easiest to most likely to be confused.
3-There must be much less ambiguity
4-Some pairs can be mixed up so when giving strong collocations we must be careful.

Basic Exercise Types

a.Identifying Chunks: Word – Word Assumption, If learners are good at this they can make better use
of dictionaries, translate better and avoid certain kinds of mistakes.
b.Matching: It is for matching Collocations, Expressions, Stereotypic Dialoge etc.
c.Completing: Traditional gap-fill is giving with relatively fixed Collocation and double-gap filling
aswell.
d.Categorising: Perception of patterns is an aid to memory so it is helpful for learners to sort words
or expression according to categories they perceive.
f.Sequencing: It takes advantage of the learners’ real-world knowledge and it helps us recognise
events and gives us spesific expressions.
g.Deleting: Odd One Out is a great examplary of Deleting and it helps us when we are learning a
words because it makes us think which word goes with which.
Adapting Activities in the Lexical Approach

Adapting Activities to Provide a Lexical Focus

If one claims that his teaching is eclectic but cannot state the principles of eclecticism he
cant be eclectic but merely confused. So all activities should have Lexical Focus. For example
Jigsaw reading is a simple example. What Lexical Approach provides is a principled way of
deciding where the breaks should be made. Lexical Perspective provides a principled way of:
-gapping a text
-stopping in pause reading
- selecting lines for deletion/translation in dialogue.
Fundamental principle is that Activities should be encouraging. So students can record new
language in their lexical notebooks in ways which emphasise Collocation, Fixed Expressions,
Patterned Expressions etc. And this way they build Phrasal Lexicons.
Long story short this chapter discusses the use of various activities and exercises in the
implementation of the lexical approach to language teaching. The lexical approach
emphasizes the importance of vocabulary and lexical chunks in language acqusition and
communication. The chapter provides examples of activities that teacher can use to focus on
lexis and raise learners’ awareness of the basic chunks of the language. It also emphasizes
the importance of considering the social and practical realities of the language classroom
and the need for a blanced, eclecticism approach that takes into account a variety of factors
such as the nature of learning, motivation, learner expectations and social requirements.

My Experiences
I mean I don’t have any experiences in teaching a class but I get the main idea. I remember
lots of exercises I’ve done and I can distinguish good and bad one now. I wish I read this
passage way before because during our IP and FP’s when preparing an example for the class
I did not take into account what I’ve read now. It was good seeing whats well made and one
is bad or incomplete. Lexical focus for each exercise and activity made me understand how
one emphasises the intented pattern. For example in “Listening” our lexical focus is that we
can build gaps anywhere we want. If we remove strong Collocations or Fixed Expressions
listener can easily pick up the words missing. So in short it was an eye opener.

Overall Thoughts and What to Do Next

I will definetely take into account when preparing for an exercise for my students. I mean
when I tried to do both of the examples given, contextualized one were always more
pragmatic because I can easily find the answers expected from me. Seeing even as basic as
listening, it can be much more complex than my thought before. For listening I was a-okay
for any word that can be removed from convo but now, no. If I can find strong Collocations
and Fixed Expressions in a convo I should remove them so that my students can easily
identify whats needed. I mean for example If I remove weather from “Ali said that the
weather was crystal clear.” It is not optimal because “crystal clear” will be more interesting
than wheather so I should be careful. It was an enjoyable reading, wish I’