Teaching Lexically: Principles and Practice
2017; Oxford University Press; Volume: 71; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/elt/ccx043
ISSN1477-4526
Autores Tópico(s)Lexicography and Language Studies
ResumoEmil Zátopek, the great long-distance runner known, after winning three gold medals at the 1952 Olympic games, as the ‘Czech locomotive’ was reputed to speak eight languages. He taught himself these languages, apparently, by reading dictionaries because ‘learn enough words and the grammar looks after itself’ (Day 2016).1 It may have been all that dictionary reading that gave him his trademark expression of pain as he ran, but whatever motivated him to stay the course he would surely support the authors of Teaching Lexically with his insistence on the primacy of words over grammar. In their book—somewhere between a polemic and a methodology text (a point I will return to at the end of this review)—they try to recast Scott Thornbury’s bon mot about the Lexical Approach as being ‘all chunks and no pineapple’ (Thornbury 1998: 12). They are on the pineapple side of the argument here since ‘communication almost always depends more on vocabulary than on grammar’ (p. 10) and ‘taking a more lexical view would mean seeing fluency as generally coming from knowing, and being able to recall, appropriate language automatically’ (p. 29). They want to show how a lexical view of teaching should change—or at least reset—a ‘grammar + words’ view of what to teach. (This is the slot-and-filler model, where grammatical structure becomes the main focus of a lesson, into which we then ‘slot’ words to make content.) This leads them into areas of classroom procedure, skills teaching, syllabus design, vocabulary and grammar teaching, and teacher development amongst many other topics.
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