The Lexical Approach by Michael Lewis: Book Review

 "Experiments with BookReviewing : Part 1." This is probably going to be a bit of a disaster.I've... First time I've done this in the video format. I'm not comfortable with ityet. I'm probably just going to be rambling on and on, but I'm going to give this a tryfor... I don't know, for a while at least, and- and see if I can become more comfortablewith it. As luck would have it actually, the book I'm reviewing today isone that's for professional development. It's "The Lexical Approach" by MichaelLewis. It's not of general interests to anybody else except English teachers--English as a Second Language teachers-- so sorry about that. That's just how theschedule happened to fall when I decided I was going to start off this project.But, yeah, anyone who's not teaching English, this is not going to be ofinterest. So, I actually-- I started this book like a year and a half ago. I thinkI started it like maybe in March 2015 and I think I finished it April 2015 orMay 2015, around then and I'm just getting the review up now, which is a bitembarrassing, but, like, there was a lot of stuff in this book and I felt like Iwanted to give my two cents on everything he touched on and it justmeant that the review became unmanageable. There was so much stuff tosay that I didn't even know where to begin, and I just got frustrated and thenI gave up, and I'm just kind of getting around to it now.So the- the book is called "The Lexical Approach"--lexis kind of an ELT terminology meaning... like it's similar to vocabulary, butit's not just vocabulary it can also be kind of phrases, like "Would you like..." or"It's raining cats and dogs" or something like that, that just kind of act as acoherent whole. But then within the book he really... he doesn't confine himself tothat he kind of talks about anything and everything. He spends a lot of time kindof talking about the nature of language, how we don't really understand grammarrules, how to a large extent grammar rules cannot be understood. He spends alot of time setting this up. In fact I have like... I made margin notes as I wentthrough this, and at a certain point... Where was it? On page 69 I wrote tomyself, "Wow, he is really getting abstract. When will this book get practical?" Atthat point he was talking about literature and art--- literature and artscience and mathematics chaos theory and how he thought that maybe they shouldrelate to our view of linguistics. So if you're picking up this book as like anEnglish teacher looking for practical ideas, you don't get a lot of that.Especially, like, in the first 100 pages. Then it does start to get more practicalto a certain extent. He talks about what needs to be emphasized more in Englishclasses, but he doesn't really give a lot of ideas for implementing how to do it,which is something I struggled with while I was trying to... where I was tryingto use some of these ideas in my own classroom. Now to be fair he has awhole separate book: "Implementing The Lexical Approach" which presumably isgoing to talk about practical ideas for how to implement that.I've not read that book, so I can't comment on that. All I can say for thisbook is there's a lot of interesting ideas, but I was kind of left a littlefloundering as to how exactly to implement them in the classroom. Then, thelast part of the book he gets into talking about basically how... howeveryone's teaching wrong, or the current methodologies are all wrong. Hecriticizes a lot of what's currently taught on the CELTA courses and Ithink other popular TEFL courses. For example he doesn't like the PPP approachwhich is kind of the, one of the the main CELTA approach where you present thegrammar point, practice it, and then produce it.He thinks instead student... he... I think "Observe, Hypothesize, Experiment" is theparadigm he wants to replace it with, where students kind of observe thelanguage, they make their own natural hypothesis, and they experiment with it.it's not as teacher centered as PPP and it's... I think it's kind of happening onthe learners time scale. Another thing is he doesn't like error correction. Evendelayed error correction which is what is currently taught in the CELTA. He'snot a fan of that and I can understand that to a certain extent. I suppose itdepends what the nature of the error is. For example, if the learner is making theerror unconsciously, like as part of their interlanguage system at thatpoint, then maybe explicit conscious correction is not going to fix that. Butto put this in Krashen's terms maybe, if-- if the learner is using their monitor toedit the language and they're making the error because they have a... because themonitor has the wrong ideas about the grammar rule,then maybe-- then maybe correction would be useful. So I... well the other thing Ithought as well, he... he doesn't... I think it's... he... sorry I'm getting my thoughtstogether. He doesn't talk at all about fossilization in this book, and obviouslythe advantage of correcting is to prevent--prevent fossilization fromhappening. Now I think he's under the impressionthat fossilization doesn't exist because he just, he doesn't talk about it at allin the book. But that's debatable. Maybe it does exist, and maybe if you correctearly enough on you can prevent fossilization. Also in my own just kind of anecdotal experience, pronunciation--pronunciation mistakes are an issue and those... I think, again just anecdotally, inmy classes they seem to fossilize very quickly. I'm not sure... I don't rememberhim making a distinction between kind of grammatical or lexical mistakes andpronunciation mistakes, but I think there's a case to be made for being... veryaggressively correcting pronunciation mistakes. Maybe even correcting themon the spot and even though, like I know CELTA, they teach delayed correction. Butlike I--I wonder maybe if you correct them on the spot, you could preventfossilization of pronunciation mistakes happening. It seems to be something I'venoticed in my class when I do on the spot correction of pronunciationmistakes, even during fluency activities, I think that does help with thepronunciation. The students do seem to get better pronunciation. Yeah, what else doesn't he like about theCELTA? Ah... CELTA and a lot of kind of other courses will teach teachers tominimize teacher talking time. He doesn't approve of that. I think he's on the samepage as Krashen with that where he thinks the teacher can be a valuablesource of input. Now he says, of course, like, there is some unproductive teachertalking time, and maybe we should distinguish between good teacher talkingtime and bad teacher talking time, but a lot of courses, like the CELTA, don't dothat. They just teach minimize teacher talking time as like an absolute, and hesays in this book, he says I've run into the teachers kind of fresh off thesecourses who believe that at all costs they should avoid teacher talking time,and he said that's just absurd. Students can benefit from listening to theteacher talk, and--and I think I'd agree with that, actually. So, yeah, he goes offon all sorts of tangents, but the main point, to return to what I started tosay earlier, is talking about the lexical approach--emphasizing vocabulary andemphasizing lexis like words and phrases, that students should--should memorize orshould be taught as opposed to kind of focusing on grammar. There's a couplereasons he's in favor of this. One is he is of the position that grammar rulesdon't really exist as the textbooks will commonly present them. The textbooks willkind of oversimplify them. I think the examples he uses are the differencesbetween "will" and "going to", which textbooks, you know, they'll say you use "will"in this case you use "going to" in this case, but actually a lot of these rulesare fairly artificial. He talks about direct [*MISTAKE* reported ] speech, which is something Icompletely agree with him on, when he says, like, the way textbooks teach direct [reported]speech doesn't reflect the way it is often used in real life, andhe talks about conditionals. He says the-- the way the first, second, and thirdconditional are taught reflects maybe one way that these ideas could beexpressed, but by making them too prescriptive-- too prescriptive you're--you're reallykind of presenting an inaccurate view of language to the students. And he says inthe book, like, the... our ideas of how grammar works is actually, like, even thelinguists right now don't have a full idea of the grammar of spoken language.They're-- they make kind of very provisional guesses, and for the ELT textbooks the--the English language textbooks to just turn these into prescriptions for thestudents, he's not in favor of that. Or at least he thinks that shouldn't be theemphasis. That's one of the problems with emphasizing grammar. Instead he wants toemphasize lexis and vocabulary, and I think he makes a very good point. Not all thisis his own ideas-- he's quoting a lot from Widdowson and from Krashen, but he makesa point that, you know, like, when communication breaks down, it's notbecause the students didn't correctly change the verb in reported speech orit's not because they didn't use the past tense in the conditional.Communication will break down because of vocabulary issues, where there's anunknown vocabulary that the students don't understand, where they they can'tconvey their message because they don't have the appropriate vocabulary. That'sbeen true in my experience, both as a language teacher and as a languagelearner, almost all of the instances I can think of over... where communicationbroke down in the classroom or, like, in real life, was almost always because ofvocab-- vocabulary issues. So, he says, vocabulary is what makes up the language.So why do we spend all this time teaching grammar? We should-- we shouldemphasize the vocabulary first, and foremost, and then-- the-- the... once theylearn the vocabulary they can infer the grammar rules often just because theyknow the vocabulary. But he says, like, the reverse doesn't work. If you know thegrammar, you can't infer unknown vocabulary just because you know thegrammar structure. And that made a lot of sense to mewhile I was reading it. It especially made a lot of sense to me because at the time Istarted this, a year and a half ago, I had been teaching a grammar based curriculumwhere I had to teach conditionals and reported speech to teenagers, and theywere expected to perform it perfectly on a test. They had to transform thesesentences from direct speech into reported speech, and it had to be perfector they lost the point, and almost none of them could get it perfect. So... that...after one term, I thought, "Well, okay, it's my fault I didn't drill it enough." So Istarted drilling reported speech a lot more, doing a lot more worksheets on it,and they still couldn't get it, and I think in retrospect they just weren'tready for that. You know, maybe the order of acquisition, and all of that. But I also...you know, it was also making a lot of sense what he was saying in this book,because all that time we spent on reported speech and getting, you know, thetransformation exactly rights did not add to their communicative ability atall, whereas if we had spent that time increasing the vocabulary, maybe thatwould have added a lot to their communicative ability. So-- so that-- thatexperience made me very sympathetic to what he was saying in the book and Ithought: "Yes! Absolutely! We should concentrate on increasing the students'vocabulary size, and not worry so much about grammar." And so I've beenexperimenting with different ways of doing that over the past year and a half.Like I-- like I said it's taken me forever to get this review together.And during that time, I've had some time to experiment. It's... yeah, I found thatit's not quite so easy in practice. I mean it sounds very simple, likeincrease a student's vocabulary, but actually, like, getting that vocabularyword off of the paper, and into the student's brain is actually not quite... Imean, that's-- that's where all the difficulty lies. And I think he-- heglosses over that difficulty here. Although to be fair, again there areother books on this which maybe have some better ideas.But I found it very difficult to to get the vocabulary into the students'long-term memory, for a number of reasons. One was just, like, the students weren'tmotivated to study these vocabulary lists at home, and there was, kind ofmaybe, a limited amount of time to do in the classroom, and that's, I don't know, isthat a fair criticism? I mean it has to do with student motivation, in an ideal  world, students would be perfectly motivated, and it wouldn't be an issue,but it seemed to be an issue in my classroom. Also it's, you know, it's a lotmore difficult to learn a word then--then you would think initially. Like, gettingthe pronunciation of the word right, that in itself can be quite a struggle forjust, kind of, one word. If you have, like, a whole vocabulary list of ten words thatyou're trying to get them to learn a week, or whatever... Now, some words are moredifficult than others, and again to be fair he does-- he does talk at lengthabout this in the book. There are some words that have a very strong one-to-onecorrespondence. Like, you know, basically anything thatcan be put on a picture. So like a dog. You can show a picture of a dog, everyoneknows it's a dog. I think in the book he uses the example of "ladder".I mean "ladder" has many idiomatic meanings in English,which he says in the book, but you can also draw a picture of a ladder, andeveryone knows exactly what that is, and then you attach a word to that picture,and that's like a... that's a one-to-one correspondence. But I think once you moveaway from nouns and maybe certain action verbs, I mean like: swimming runningsinging, then it's very hard to, kind of, match words up to pictures, to match thewords up to pictures, and then, getting the nuance of this word is extremelydifficult-- how to get that across to the students. It's... it requires more than justa dictionary definition and in the beginning, I was just trying to give themdictionary definitions and hoping they would-- would learn the word, and-- andthey-- they didn't. They didn't fully understand the meaning, or how it wasused, or the connotations or the collocations. Again he does talk aboutall this in the book: connotations, collocations, the importance of contextin determining meaning. But, if there were practical implications for how toapproach this in the classroom, then I missed it. It was just... it was afrustration I encountered. Now that's just for one word. He-- he actually, he's infavor of teaching, kind of, longer phrases. But for longer phrases, it just gets thatmuch more difficult. The... you know, like, for me, for native speakers, these phraseswill just roll off the tongue, as far as I know. But if you're teaching this tosomeone as a non-native speaker, then they-- they don't... they have a very hardtime remembering it, almost each syllable has to be remembered separately, and forthese long phrases, they tend to... it's very hard to get it perfectly into theirlong-term memory. They tend to get, like, in my classes they often got some sortof mangled version of these words into their head-- of these phrases into theirhead. They would mispronounce words, they would drop a lot of words, it wouldchange the order of the words. Which-- which is a problem. I mean, he saysin the book that errors are to be expected along the way, but he also makesa case... he believes that part of the way we learn our first language is not, kindof, universal grammar like-- like Chomsky would think of it. He thinks that weabsorb... we don't absorb words or grammar, we absorb, kind of, chunks like "What doyou want?" And then these chunks are, kind of, brokendown, and processed later after we've memorized them. And then we, kind of, getour grammar out of these chunks. So instead of using our grammar to formphrases, we absorb the phrases as kind of like a ready-made lexical unit, and thenwe analyze the phrases, and we can get our grammar from that. So, like, if that'swhat he's advocating, then if a student, kind of, misremembers a phrase, thenthey're... then that's not going to be helpful for them to, kind of, analyze toget their grammar from it. And I found it very difficult for... to get the students toremember these phrases perfectly without the phrases getting kind of mangled intheir heads. Um... yeah, so I-- I found in practice it wasn't quite as easy as itwas in theory, although the idea apeal-- appealed to me in theory. That reminds methough, speaking of his idea of phrases, I think... I... Everything he writes is quitedebatable, but the the idea that our... we don't... he advocates the idea that wedon't really make sentences from the bottom up. Instead we have a stock ofready-made phrases in her head, and we kind of-- kind of pull these up. Of course, we do sometimes producecompletely novel utterances, so for that we do need a grammar system. He advocatesin this book, and again he's quoting from some other writers, that we actually havetwo systems: we have a grammar based system, and we also have, kind of, a storedlexicon of phrases, and it's both systems are necessary, because you need thegrammar based system, because sometimes you want to say something completely new,but in real-time production, of course, processing time is a factor, and if youcan pull these ready-made lexical phrases out of your brain withoutspending time processing and putting them together, then that helps inreal-time production. So he says that's why evolution-- he doesn't use the wordevolution but I think that's what he's inferring-- that's why evolution has givenus these two separate systems. Um... which is... well I don't know, it's hard to argueagainst, because he's arguing that we have both. So if-- if you-- if you say, "No wecan't possibly rely on a storage base of lexical phrases, because grammar isimportant." Then he could say, "No, no, no, we'vegot the grammar system as well." So, like, I-- I think it's-- it's hard to disprove,maybe it might even be right. It-- it's different than some of the other bookson linguistics I've read, particularly "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker,which... he spends a significant amount of time in that book advocating against theidea that language is made up of nothing more than stored phrases. He advocatesfor more grammar based system. But again I guess that doesn't necessarilycontradict Michael Lewis because Michael Lewis would say, "No, we have both systems."Although Michael Lewis puts... he puts much more emphasis on thestored lexical phrases system, and he seems to think that that's much moreuseful. So, I-- I don't know. I-- I'm not... This is kind of above my level ofexpertise. I'd be interested how someone like Steven Pinker would respond to thisbook. For that matter, I guess I'd be interested to see how Michael Lewiswould respond to Steven Pinker. Yeah... Another thing about this book, as as longas I'm comparing it to other writers, Michael Lewis is a big fan of Krashen.He likes comprehensible input, and he doesn't think that the lexical approach isnecessary a contradiction to comprehensive input, and he quotes-- hequotes Swan here. Apparently Swan was the one who wrote it first, but MichaelLewis quoting Swan says when you look at what Krashen has written about thelimitations of conscious study, Krashen seems to be only... primarily concernedwith grammatical systems. You can't, in Krashen's view, you can't acquire grammarby consciously studying it. But Michael Lewis, and I guess Swan also, they feel thatKrashen has not written a lot about vocabulary acquisition. So they arguethat vocabulary acquisition maybe can be acquired consciously. So, the way I kindof thought of it when I was reading this book is it's kind of like Krashen plus--like you get to keep all your Krashen, but you just add on vocabulary studywith that. Which sounded appealing to me, because I like a lot of Krashen so Ithought, "Oh, right. I get to keep all that, and I just add vocabulary." And he advocates insome instances, you know, decontextualized vocabulary lists. So, again, it's notspelled out exactly how he envisions this, but I was thinking, like, the old idea ofgoing through flashcards or lists. Again some--some words are decontextualizedeasier than others, but the idea that you could do that, you could consciouslystudy that, and then you could-- that wouldn't be in contrast to using aKrashen... to to using Krashen's system. Again, in practice I found it, by... I foundit difficult to get  decontextualized.... to get my students to remember decontextualizedvocabulary. The idea was appealing, but I found myself wondering after a while ifmaybe Krashen-- Krashen's theory didn't need the addition. Maybe vocabulary wasbest learned just through the input, and you can... Michael Lewis would like to makea shortcut and get extra vocabulary by extra vocabulary studying, but I'm-- I'mwondering if you can make the shortcut. I found it very difficult to get thisvocabulary into my students head by just, kind of, drilling or explicit lists or.something like that. And reflecting on my own studies as well, like when I wasstudying Japanese, for instance, that... there was a point when I was studying itat the University, when I was living in Japan, and we would have like lots ofvocab that we would memorize every week. But like memorize it, like, off the list.And most of those words I just forgot, or they... if I remember them they're buriedin my brain somewhere. But the the words that I would remember were words thatafter I had studied them off the list, I would hear them in real life.  Eitherjust kind of around me-- I was living in Japan at the time-- or on TV--like I was... I made it... I was making at a point at the time to practice Japaneseby watching a lot of Japanese TV shows, and I remember actually there was---there was a couple times words we had studied it inthe list popped up on the TV show, and then it was like, "Oh right, these-- thesearen't just like words on a list, these are... this is something I'm hearing inreal life now, that is useful for using in real life," and it just... it stuck inmy memory. I mean like it was in my memory before, but it was in like adifferent part of my brain now. It was something-- it was something I could... Icould like hear that vocabulary being repeated when I would think back at thatmovie, and I thought, "Oh yeah, I remember that sentence." I could kind of hear anecho of it my brain, and then it was available for productive use when I wasin conversation. Whereas before like it wasn't availablefor productive use, it was just in a different part of my brain, and I could never recall it in in real time to use in a real time conversation. So, like I wonder...I wonder if maybe the only use that studying a vocabulary list might have is to promote noticing of vocabulary when you encounter it in the input. But I'mnot sure... my own experience learning and kind of teaching as well makes me a little bit maybe skeptical of the idea that you could teach this vocabulary and then have the students... have the students just... have it be available for productive use and the students just from teaching it off from a list. I don't know. I'm...Perhaps I'm being a little bit unfair to what he's saying. He may not actually be advocating that. Well... That was another problem with this book actually, is, I don't know, like it could be my problem. I should always preface every criticism I make by saying it could be my problem maybe I'm just a little.