THE LEXICAL APPROACH | ESL
What is Lexical Approach and how does it affect a learner’s capability to learn fast and easier?
According to the British Council, the lexical approach is a way of analyzing and teaching language based on the idea that it is made up of lexical units rather than grammatical structures. The units are words, chunks formed by collocations, and fixed phrases.
The lexical approach mostly revolves around the concept of learning and understanding certain topics through producing lexical chunks. This way, students may store the words easily as they are chunks. Because the lexical chunks are phrases and considered as an individual whole rather than separated words, they are easier to memorize and remember.
We use Lexical Approach in our everyday lives. Some of the common lexical chunks are greetings like ‘Good morning’ or ‘How are you?’ which we use on a daily basis. We remember these greetings not per word but as a statement and that is what is explained in the Lexical Approach.
Through this approach, learning a lot of words and information is easier since the brain has more short-term capacity than long-term capacity so making chunks out of words and phrases is an alternative to being able to store a lot of information and knowledge.
Moreover, through this approach, we may not need to read a whole statement to understand it fully. Lexical chunks are phrases that can be easily distinguishable when read at the first glance. For example, collocations. A collocation like a terrible accident found in a sentence may already depict the sentence to be talking about a misfortunate event that results in a person experiencing an unlucky situation. The person does not need to read the whole statement, just the chunks of it, to understand the message it wants to interpret.
One important aspect as well in the Lexical Approach is the pattern grammar. Lexis and grammar show a very important relationship with each other. Words like impact, influence, and effect are grammatically the same as having an impact/influence/effect.
The use of the Lexical Approach is easier for learners as they would not need to focus on understanding individual words and rather just focus on understanding the structure of the text shown.
