[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Language Teaching Methods
The move towards learner centered teaching which incorporates an individual's needs, learning styles and circumstances suggests that the student should be actively involved in vocabulary selection, personalization, storage and retrieval. While course book designers and teachers can select grammar and, to some extent, functions which are relevant to all learners, surely vocabulary is an area which should be most tailored to students' perceptions of need particularly if, as most experts agree, their acquisition is highly dependant on this need. In my view, low level business books often include lexis which would be considered too high for a general course. However, these text-books are catering to a specific and urgent need which means that lexical items are more readily acquired and internalized irrespective of the grammatical structures behind them.
Michael Lewis makes a strong and convincing case in this book for the primacy of meaning in language teaching. This approach should and will be welcomed by many teachers who emphasize lexico-semantic knowledge in their teaching and whose goal is successful communication over grammatical drilling and the ambiguous notion of correctness. These and other teachers and scholars will find in this book a lot of knowledge and common sense on language learning and the way language works, with carefully drawn distinctions, clear terminology, and valuable theoretical and practical ideas all towards building a tight argument for a switch from the present-practice-produce paradigm to an observe-hypothesize-experiment paradigm, with the lexicon and the generative power of words at its core .
Lewis (1997b) deliberately avoids the term 'lexical phrase' and speaks of ''multi-word items of different kinds" and then divides them into 'poly-words' (by the way, to and fro;) , collocations (catch a cold), Fixed Expressions............
