The Lexical Apporach in Teaching and Learning

The Lexical Approach is probably one of the most interesting proposals that educational linguistics has produced since the last decades of the twentieth century, at a time when there is an urgent need to recover the lexical dimension that had long been ignored. Research areas such as corpus linguistics and lexicongrammar studies also offer new ground for research in the field of language teaching. They provide important implications for the frequency of word usage, the pragmatic use of structures, such as high-frequency co-occurrences and collocations, and offer interesting insights into the possible overcoming of the established dichotomous conception between lexis and grammar. The Lexical Approach, based on these theories, represents an articulate and coherent didactic proposal, summarized in the essential concept of a language consisting of a grammatical lexicon and not a grammar with a lexicon, and organized according to lexical chunks with specific formation rules.