Lexical approach with young learners

1.2 Advantages of the Lexical Approach

The lexical approach speeds up language acquisition.

“Chunking” is actually a memory improvement technique. By grouping commonly co-occurring words and treating them as one larger whole allows the brain to process greater amounts of information.
Chunking allows your class to cover plenty of information quickly. Instead of your students individually processing every word in a sentence, what every word means and how each one grammatically relates to the word next to it, they’re dealing with chunks. Instead of building fluency one word at a time, you’re doing it one phrase at a time.
For example, instead of teaching “Hang in there!” as three meaningful words, you teach it as a canned expression which means “don’t give up.”
The lexical approach is communicative in nature. It’s how native speakers communicate with each other. Reflecting this in the language classroom results in students who sound natural and fluent in the language, fast!

It’s eminently practical.

“The green monkey jumped on the round table.”
When you were a student yourself, did you ever encounter sentence examples that made you think, “Yeah, I’ll never use that one in my everyday speech… ever.”
Maybe the teacher purposely crafted a unique sentence to highlight some point of grammar or show how individual words can change the meaning of a sentence. While this might have taught you the grammar concept, it didn’t teach you actual useful phrases you could use in everyday conversations.
With the lexical approach, your students get phrases and expressions that are good to go—pre-made expressions that native speakers readily understand and that can be used in daily conversations.

It teaches communication.

The lexical approach is practical and immediately relevant. Instead of learning things about the language that speakers themselves don’t even know about, your students learn how to communicate in meaningful terms. When your students find themselves face-to-face with native speakers, they’ll know how to greet them, how to ask them a question and how to tell a story or share personal facts.
Isn’t that something you want your students to learn?
So, what are some of the things you can do to facilitate that? We talk about that next.