DIGITAL LIBRARY
LEXICAL APPROACH AS A COMBINATION OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS, CORPUS LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE TEACHING METHODOLOGY
Al-Farabi Kazakh National University (KAZAKHSTAN)
About this paper:
Appears in: INTED2015 Proceedings
Publication year: 2015
Pages: 6413-6420
ISBN: 978-84-606-5763-7
ISSN: 2340-1079
Conference name: 9th International Technology, Education and Development Conference
Dates: 2-4 March, 2015
Location: Madrid, Spain
Abstract:
The article looks at the Lexical approach as a practical methodology of teaching languages that traces the developments in linguistics.
Modern trends of linguistic research are characterized by the pragmatic tendency, since the main task of scientific research is to describe the language functioning in the real context. Furthermore, one of the main directions of research in the field of applied linguistics is corpus linguistics which deals with building electronic databases of language corpora.

Electronic corpora provide a rich linguistic material for educational and research purposes. A number of classic electronic foreign language databases have been developed; the most famous of them are the British and the American National Corpora of English, the Longman Corpus, Bank of English. The most available and widely used by teachers of English are British National Corpus Sampler, The Longman Corpus.

The paper studies the core elements of the methodology such as word combinations, phrases and expressions (lexical chunks) in the communication context. According to Lexical approach methodology the ability to speak fluently depends on storing in mind large amounts of words and phrases. A sufficiently large mental lexicon affects the “naturalness” of speech and teaches students to think in a foreign language, removing the phase of translation from mother tongue to a foreign language, and also allows learners to understand the laws of grammar (language patterns).

The article assigns a special reference to phrases, expressions and templates that serve to develop the ability to "recognize the pattern" in books, songs, movies. It studies how it is possible to master the learners’ ability to modify already known patterns, complementing them with new words. For example: meet somebody + at the weekend/ in the evening / next week/everyday; for advanced learners to use collocations for speaking: take / retake / pass / fail / scrape through an exam.

The Lexical approach to language teaching is closely connected with Dictogloss technique. This technique is aimed to focus learners on remembering useful phrases, expressions, key patterns of a teacher speech, from movies, video and communication with native speakers.
The growing awareness of the rich contextual relationships in spoken and written discourse means that collocation and word grammar need to become established categories for both teaching and learning languages.