At its best lexical approach means teaching grammar as chunks, set phrases which serve as models which help memorization. Combining chunks with real-life situations leads to real communication.

Teaching grammar to young beginners using the inductive method is not very common because the ability of youngsters to understand conceptual explanations and rules is often limited to the very best pupils in the class.

Therefore, in mixed-ability classes teachers tend to use the lexical approach in teaching grammar with occasional use of the deductive method. In both cases there is a lot of emphasis on chunks that serve as structure models.

My transparencies/slides below are from the 1990s. My apologies for what they look like but never mind. What you see on them is still valid even today.

Luckily the number of ‘demanding’ grammatical structures is not very big in the early years of teaching a new foreign language and most structures taught can be learnt as ’chunks’ ; i.e. word combinations, words, set phrases or set structures. In these cases there is usually minimum reference to any rules and the learning of structures is similar to that of mother tongue: a lot of oral repetition and practice as well as using examples as models.

Even if some early CLT enthusiasts were not eager to teach grammar at least here in Finland we never gave it up. Nevevertheless, communicative language teaching brought along a significant change in teaching grammar: CLT principles emphasized the idea that grammar was not to be taught in isolation but combined with real-life situations where natives actually use the structures.

Applying lexical approach in situations

I remember how I struggled with my low-achievers in the early 1980s. In those days we still divided our age groups into three streams according to their proficiency level.

How was I supposed to make my students use grammatical structures in situations that resemble real-life situations following CLT principles?

Gradually I developed a strategy that seemed to work, my own version of situational grammar. Sorry about the shape of this slide from the 1980s. I had to cut of the dirty bits from it. Result of my treasure hunt and how I got going.

Why am I having this approach now? Because it gives you some perspective to my line of thinking and besides everything below is still valid today!

At a restaurant – chunks ‘I’d like to …’ , ‘I’ll have …’

1. First I made a long list of real-life situations such as ‘at a restaurant’, ‘at a supermarket’, ‘at a police station’, ‘in an interview’ ‘explaing about future plans or past event’, ‘comparing things’ etc.
2. Secondly, I thought which structures were typical of these situations and gradually I ended up in having a list of situations with grammatical structures. ‘shopping – comparative and superlative forms of adjectives’, ‘at the police station or in an insurance company – was/were + -ing form – describing what was happening at the moment’
3. Thirdly, I realized that dramatizing the real-life situations was the only way to get close to reality at school. So, I told my students about the new ideas and why I’d like to try them out with them. In practice we chose role-play as our main method for dramatization. But …
4. Fourthly, I was pretty sure that I could not throw my low-achievers to these situations without suitable pre-tasks and proper preparation. Role-play was going to be the final stage of the practice.
5. Fifthly, I had to plan carefully the stages to be taken before the role-play. Sometimes it was a piece of cake since the students already knew the ‘chunks’ on the basis of the previous chapter in the textbook and could apply it right away.

At a dinner table – practising ‘could’, ‘would’. ‘ ‘d’ and ‘should‘

• The chapter related to the 1st conditional was studied in class.
• The exercise below was done in pairs at least twice. As you can see it is barely semi-communicative since most of the ideas are given ready-made.
• But there was an element for communicative creativity since the students were allowed to replace the words in the box with words of their choice if they wanted to.
• Finally we practised a similar situation at a ‘restaurant’ with real menus and a waiter/waitress taking orders with a white towel round the arm. Some of the key phrases were reflected on the screen with an overhead projector to help the weakest ones.

• With the advanced groups we went a bit further. Each 4-person group in class collected a vocabulary list: ‘cookware’, ‘kitchen utensils’, ‘kitchen verbs’ , ‘names of dishes’, ‘fruit, berries and vegetables’, ‘kitchen gadgets’ ‘spices and ingredients’ and made an exercise for the others to practise those words.
• We went to the school cookery class to actually open the drawers and closets and cabins to check if we really memorized the ‘kitchen’ words.
• Next each group made some food with ingredients they had brought from home (45 min) and we had a ‘RESTAURANT’ where we could dramatize the the highlight of the previous lessons, some students as clients and the others as waiters switching roles half way through.

Applying lexical approach in grammatical pre-tasks

It is rather common among CLT language teachers to start teaching a grammar point with a pre-task where the students use the new structure in an oral activity and have not got a clue about the rule they are applying. Usually the activity involves the use of a lexical chunk directly linked to the new grammar point. If the situations are ‘realistic’, the pair work or role plays, for example, can be very effective.

Games like ‘The Hot Ball’ or ‘Find someone who …’ are ideal as a pretask for a new grammatical point since the students get to use the structure up to 30 times correctly before the rule is formulated.

Pre-task: The hot ball game – the perfect tense

The teacher writes the sentence below on the board or screen

‘I have been to England/ Sweden/ Italy/ Germany/ Spain ...’

• The chunk to be learnt, the perfect tense structure, is ‘I have been to …’
• The students who are in a circle are supposed to say the same sentence by replacing the underlined country with any other country.
• The teacher throws a small ball to the next student, whose attention is on the ‘hot ball’ so that it does not ‘burn’ their hands. So there is no time to worry about the sentence.
• The student says his/her sentence and throws the ball to someone else.
• Note that what the students say do not have to be true and … means they can use their creativity to make the answer more commi´unicative.

The chunk ‘I have been to’ serves as an introduction to the perfect tense and can be replaced later on by ‘I / We have had a dog/ two cats / a red car/ a summer cottage …

Similarly you could introduce many other structures ‘I’d like to …’ without any talk about the 1st conditional, superlative forms etc.

Pre-task: ‘Find somone who …’ – the perfect tense

Instructions for the students:

Find someone who can answer ‘Yes’ to your question. Write the name in the second box. You can use the same name only once. You have max 5 minutes for the task.

1 Have you seen any movies this week?
2 Has your dad or mum done sports today?
3 Have your classmates spoken to you this morning?
4 Has your math teacher ever been late?
5 Has your friend ever bought you a present?
6 Have your granparents ever picked you up from school?	Anne
7 Have you talked to the head of the school today?
8 Has anyone given you money this week?
9 Have you been abroad this year?	Raimo
10 Have you told your parents a joke this month?

So this is the ‘Pre-task’:

• The students get this paper and walk about in the room asking these questions.
• It may be hard to get ‘Yes’ answers to some questions and that is why many questions have to be repeated many times.
• The key idea is that the students will have used the new structure correctly a lot before it is actually taught.
• And there is no chance to make mistakes.
• At the end the ‘results’ are explained in groups:’Raimo has been abroad this year.’

Pre-task: ‘Be able to’

This pre-task from the my early CLT years shows how a mechanical exercise can be changed to demand something more than reading aloud. In this case the student has to make links like ‘camera -photos’ ‘skates – ice-hockey’.

Besides students should be encouraged to make similar sentences creatively by replacing the words in the boxes with their own words. I should have added three dots … after the red boxes to indicate any words the students can come up with. Effortless differentiation!