Pedagogical implications of the lexical approach

PDF #146 – Michael Lewis – Pedagogical implications of the lexical approach

Language has traditionally been divided into grammar and vocabulary. Crudely, the former consisted of elements of the generative system of the language and the latter was the stock of fixed nongenerative ‘words’. Recently, this analysis has been challenged and shown to be seriously misguided from both strictly linguistic and pedagogical points of view (Lewis, 1993; Nattinger & DeCarrico, 1992; Willis, 1990).