The Internet TEFL Journal

January 2002, Volume 36

Are We Getting It Right?

David E. Shaffer
Chosun University, Korea

INTRODUCTION
As English teachers, we tend to settle into a certain type of teaching methodology
that seems intuitively correct and comfortable to us as our years of teaching experience
accumulate. When we detect a minor error in our teaching, we may alter our teaching
style slightly to accommodate it. However, the Lexical Approach to language,
championed by Michael Lewis, raises some questions about how we teach that cannot
be accommodated by slight modifications in our teaching. To accommodate them would
call for major changes in the way the great majority of us teach English. In a number of
ways, the Lexical Approach (LA) requires a 180-degree turnaround in the way we
approach the teaching of English as a second or foreign language. Here we will discuss
the major points of LA that require us to rethink how we can best go about the business
of teaching effectively and efficiently, and that will make us ask ourselves if were
getting the job done right by teaching English the way we do.

ANY WORDS YOU DONT UNDERSTAND?

Does this scenario sound familiar to you: After reading the dialogue in the
textbook to the students, or listening to a recording of it, once or twice with the students
reading along in their books, you ask the class, Are there any words that you dont
understand? This is what likely occurs in the vast majority of English conversation
classes before continuing on with having students practice the dialogue.
According to LA, however, weve got the question all wrong. Instead of asking
about individual words, we should be referring to chunks, or phrases, which LA
argues are the basic components of any natural text. It is suggested that language
learners learn language as chunks, rather than learning an individual word at a time.
Phrases like in the morning, excuse me, kick the bucket, and survival of the
fittest are learned as units of meaning. If this is the way language acquisition occurs,
teachers should then be concentrating on introducing and explaining phrases to students
and asking students if there are any phrases that they dont understand. Have we
gotten it all wrong?

IT BEGINS WITH A /f/ SOUND.

Any good conversation course, except for possibly the most advanced, spends a
certain amount of time on pronunciation. This is often approached by having students

practice making the individual sounds that they have trouble producing correctly.
Pronunciation books also concentrate on the mechanics of producing individual sounds.
If a student is pronouncing fashion like passion, it is quite common for a teacher to
tell the student, It begins with a /f/ sound and then model the /f/ sound several times
for the student to practice. After a certain amount of practice, the student is able to
repeatedly make the /f/ sound correctly. But then, in their next sentence the same student
says, I want to be a passion designer. Does this sound familiar?
LA argues that it is not the smallest possible unit of sound, i.e., the phoneme, that
we should be working with but the largest, i.e., the lexical item. A lexical item is an
individual word or multi-word units such as fast food, fan out, and fed up.
Phonemes undergo all kinds of metamorphic changes when situated next to other
phonemes. Therefore, studying and practicing them in isolation does not seem to
contribute greatly to efficiently learning to make sounds. Have we gotten it all wrong?

MAKE A SENTENCE, PLEASE.

Does this situation sound like a familiar one to you? You ask a student a question
such as What time is it? They answer, Seven. You say, Seven what? They say,
Seven oclock. Then you say, Can you make a sentence with that? And finally the
student says, It is seven oclock, which puts a satisfied smile on your face. Our
satisfaction is in guiding our student to produce a grammatical sentence. Our main goal
as teachers seems to be getting our students to produce grammatical sentences.
LA would say that such goals are misguided, that sentence grammar is only a part
of grammar. It argues that phrases are perfectly legitimate and perfectly correct
responses to questions and should be recognized as such. When you think about it, you
realize that more times than not, the native speaker replies to questions like What time
is it? with replies like Seven or Seven oclock. So shouldnt we be encouraging our
students to answer in this way? Have we gotten it wrong again?

YOU IS A TEACHER.
When you hear one of your students make a grammatically incorrect utterance,
what is your first reaction? More likely than not, it is to correct the student and have
them repeat the sentence the grammatical way, though the ungrammaticality may have
been ever so slight. This meticulous correction begins as soon as students begin to learn
English and lasts throughout the learning process.
LA would say that weve gotten it all wrong. It argues that grammatical
accuracy is a skill that is acquired late in the language-learning process. Therefore,
correcting student mistakes in the early and intermediate stages of language learning has
little effect on improving student grammaticality. Instead, it serves only to interrupt and
sidetrack a student, and thereby reduce their communicativeness. Should we allow
student mistakes to pass without even pointing them out? Are we wrong again?

USE SOME IN POSITIVES AND ANY IN NEGATIVES AND QUESTIONS.

There is probably not a one of us who has not taught the rule of grammar that

we use some in positive statements (I have some money.), and we use any in
negative statements (I dont have any money.) and in questions (Do you have any
money?). Or that in a passive construction, the agent is mentioned in the by-phrase
(The ball was kicked by the striker.). We teach these and many other rules as hard and
fast. But how hard and fast are they? How do we account for very common sentences
like Do you have some money, Will you lend me some money, and The ball was
kicked? You can imagine how confusing this can be to beginner and intermediate
learners when they meet such sentences.
LA maintains that most standard ESL/EFL (school grammar) rules are untrue
or at best only half-truths which are as likely to confuse the student as help them in the
language-learning process. It suggests that techniques such as noticing be applied to
learning how grammar functions, but not to describe grammar phenomena in the form
of overgeneralized rules. Wrong again, are we?

IM IN SEOUL TOMORROW.
Standard ESL/EFL grammar rules (use the be-verb was for past, am/is/are
for present, and will be for future tense) predict the ungrammatically of Im in Seoul
tomorrow, but its use is common when referring to something scheduled for the future.
Yet it is very unlikely that you will find sentences of this type appearing in any of the
standard textbooks. Textbooks contain contrived, made-up sentences that are to serve as
examples of what we want our students to learn.
LA points to authentic, often-spoken lexical examples as the best type for learning
a language. Such lexical examples are considered to be the most memorable and the
foundation of grammatical generalization, providing an easier, more efficient route for
the language learner to grammatical accuracy. It would seem that weve gotten it
wrong again, wouldnt it?

LOWER TEACHER TALKING TIME; INCREASE STUDENT TALKING.

In recent years, it has been almost totally accepted that we should reduce the
amount of time that the teacher spends talking in the English classroom in order to free
up more time for students to get speaking practice, the tenet being that you learn to
speak a language by practicing speaking. The rule of thumb has been that if a teacher is
doing more that 25 percent of the speaking in class, they are doing far too much.
LA sees it quite differently. It maintains that you do not learn to talk by talking;
rather you learn to talk by listening. Noticing and reflection, often silent, are considered
as important for language acquisition as the productive activities of speaking and
writing. Seems like were wrong again, doesnt it?

WEVE DONE THAT ALREADY.

When is the last time you repeated the same activity with the same students? It
was most likely a very long time ago, and probably then only by mistake. As teachers,
we are of the opinion that going over the same material a second time becomes boring
to the students and thereby lowers motivation to learn.

According to LA, repeating the same activity is, subject to certain conditions, the
most effective way of encouraging effective learning. In learning a language on ones
own, effective learning takes place through repetition, so classroom activities should
mirror this process. Could we have gotten it wrong again?

NOW THAT IVE PRESENTED IT, ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS PRACTICE.

Dont we try are best to describe different structural patterns to our students with
numerous examples to clearly show them how a pattern is used? And after we have
completed the description, arent we of the opinion that now that the students
understand how the pattern works, all they have to do to acquire it is to practice. The
distinction should be made here between knowing facts about the language and actually
acquiring it. To know something about a language merely entails storing it in ones
memory. Acquiring it entails the ability to access it automatically for use in the four
skills.
As LA sees it, teaching does not cause learning, and no amount of practice can
guarantee acquisition. Language learning or acquisition is said to occur through the
authentic use of the language. The classroom is thought to contribute very little to the
language-learning process, and students are advised to pursue autonomous learning
procedures. Have we gotten it completely wrong on this count, too?
These points that LA has raised call into serious doubt many of the things that
many of us do as second language teachers. They deserve to be given serious thought to
determine whether we are perpetuating some serious misconceptions in our teaching
methods or whether we are getting it right.