Teaching lexis
- Lexis and skills work
- Remembering lexical items
- Knowing a lexical item
Pre-teaching lexis
Pre-teaching tasks
Related to reading and listening tasks
Aim: to help ensure that the following activity will work
May teach and revise some lexis
Brainstorm words on a set topic
Divide these words into two groups
Match the words with definitions
Check the meaning of these words in the dictionary
Match the words with the pictures
Label the items in a picture with the right names
Complete gappe sentences with words from a list
Discuss a topic
Say which words (from a list) you expect to be in a text about...
Using short anecdotes for pre-teaching
Dealing with lexis during reading and listening work
deal with an item when a student specifically asks about it
offer help quietly to the one or two students who ask, rather than to the whole class
give brief explanations, rather than detailed presentations
sometimes refuse help and tell students to do their best without knowing some items
After the first phase of listening or reading work
Find words and sort them into three separate groups under these headings.
Why does the writer use the word… here?
In line X what does… mean
Find words in the text that match this list of synonyms.
Find some words in the tax connected with die subject of…
What words come before/after the word…?
Find some words in the text that mean…
Can you remember any other phrases you know with this word in them?
Can you guess the meaning of the world from the meaning of the text around it?
Can you find any multiword items?
What's the opposite of this word?
How many different words does the writer use to describe the….?
Lesson procedures
- Oral practice of lexis
- Reading to find specific information
- Written practice of lexis
- Further lexis work
- Pre-teach lexis
- Communicative activity
Student word lists
Alternative ways of recording lexis
Remembering
Keeping in storage
Retrieving
Putting into storage
Using
Lexical items list 
Labelling
Word or topic webs
Word page: collocations and chunks
Lexical item page: lexical item collector
Possible problems
How many different meaning does each word have?
There is nothing to help the students remember the lexical items
Are the words usable as nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc?
Who uses them?
There are no examples of the words in use, in sentences
Where might one typically come across these lexical items
How are they pronounced? Where is the stress?
Some words may be archaic or literary, not used in contemporary speech
Low frequency words-rarely used
Some of the lexical items are very specialized and would only be used in very specific context not necessarily very useful to learn for active use
The items have no connection with each other
What collocations are common?
No indication or warning of taboos
Encouraging students to keep a useful lexical item list is one way to ensure that the teaching of this LEXIS has a value after this lesson is over. It is also possible to integrate the teaching and the storing of LEXIS in a more direct way by introducing the LEXIS into the lesson in a way that enables the students to record not only the word but also the way in which they learned the word.
Involves grouping words so that a set is learned together. This is often more effective than studying unrelated individual words, for example you could present a set of words connected with kitchen by using a picture of a kitchen. The students each have a copy of the picture and write the words on it as they learn them.
Build a word web (or a memory map or a mind map) where connections in meaning or use between different words are visually indicated in the structure of the diagram. Obviously a completed word web could be presented to students, but it is probably more useful for the students themselves to think through the connections and to decide where each new word fits, thus the learning of the new word and the recording of them are part of the same activity.
This page is for recording lexical items that typically go together in patterns with a single key word. The learner writes the key word in the center box and then uses the columns before and after the box to write in phrases, sentences, chunks, etc.
This page can be used to record lexical items and then collect and relate items, classified as different grammatical types. For example, if the student has found happy, they could then go on to find and record happiness and happily. There is no need to fill in all columns. Different lexical items will let you to fill in different columns.
What can you know about a lexical item?
which stresses are stronger or weaker
what part(s) of speech it is
which syllables are stressed
grammatically related forms
phonemes
the basic, 'core' meaning
the number of syllables
other meanings
how it is spelled
the semantic space it occupies
metaphorical meanings
connotation
appropriacy for certain social situations, contexts, etc
restrictions on meaning
colligation
immediate collocates
collocational field
common chunks, phrases, idioms it appears in
lexical families
lexical sets
translation(s)
false friends
true friends
synonyms
homonyms
homophones
opposites
etc
Words that typically go with the word
Range of words that an item collocates with
Words which in translation suggest a wrong meaning
What can we do?
Collect lexical items
Sort and classify items
Revisit lexical item pages
Chunk and collocation spotting
Record lexical items in useful ways
Redesign your pages
When an error comes up, review a range of collocations
find phrases of three or more words long that seem to be a frequently used fixed chunk
underline ten nouns and then search out which verb is used in connection with each one
find pairs of words that seem to go together
Challenge students to upgrade language
Give collocations rather than definitions
Record real language
Quick choices
Chunk watching
Guess the collocation
Choose two or three nouns, eg food, cooking and meal, that have a number of collocations. In this case, the list might include baby, fast, slow, health, dog, home, evening, delicious, light, balanced, three-course, French, vegetarian, frozen, cat. Tell the students that you will read out the list item by item, and they must indicate which of the two or three words is the best collocate, or if the item goes with more than one word. Decide on how students will indicate their choices. You could go for quiet ways, eg students write their answers in a list, noisy ways, eg students call out their choice of words, physical ways, eg students point at the words written on the wall notices, action ways, eg designate different parts of the room for different words and students run to the right part of the room.
Students work in groups of three, two of whom face each other. The teacher gives them a topic to talk about and they simply chat naturally for a few minutes. The third person sits out of the of their line of sight and takes no part in the conversation, but listens carefully and takes notes of as many chunks as she can catch. At the end of the time, the listener shows her list to the speakers and they go through and discuss the items.
Divide the class into three or more teams. In each team, students are given a common word (eg town) and have to prepare a list of five common collocations (eg planning, hall, home, market, and center). Each team has a different starter word. When everyone is ready students read their list out one item at a time and the other teams try to guess the original word. If the word is guessed immediately on the first clue, both teams get ten points. For each extra word, the points go down by one. This scoring scheme encourages list-makers to find the most likely and distinctive collocations.