The Lexical Approach 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 anurgent 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 fieldof 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 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. We propose, in this monographic issue of Mosaic dedicated to the Lexical Approach and its variations in the broader field of language lexicon teaching and learning, to reconsider its theoretical-practical bases, presenting, on the one hand, an articulate description of its theoretical framework and, on the other hand, its possible practical and methodological applications in the development of learners' lexical competence.