Lexical approach with young learners

5. Invest in listening and reading activities.

If you want to hone your class’ instincts of finding lexical “chunks” in the target language, you’ll need to give them a lot to read and listen to. (Even better if they can listen to something and have a copy of the text on hand.)
With repeated auditory exposure, their ears will become familiar with the rhythm and rhyme of the target language. Through a lot of reading, the naturally occurring phrases that pepper authentic material will begin to slowly pop out of the page and poke them in the eye (don’t worry, not literally).
Let them listen to language podcasts, audiobooks or songs.
Give assigned readings like newspaper articles, children’s books, even blog posts.
But don’t just let your class passively listen or read. Ask students to come up with a list of lexical phrases contained in the assigned material and go over them in class together.
These tips will help you work the lexical approach into your language classroom. With this approach, your students will acquire the target language faster, and they’ll sound more fluent, too! But don’t think this is the only tool in your box: all the other teaching strategies and approaches to foreign language teaching have a place in your repertoire as well. Used together, these tools will send your students hurtling towards fluency!

2.2 Methodological Implications

"The methodological implications of Lexical Approach are as follows:
- Early emphasis on receptive skills, especially listening, is essential.
- De-contextualized vocabulary learning is a fully legitimate strategy.
- The role of grammar as a receptive skill must be recognized.
- The importance of contrast in language awareness must be recognized.
- Teachers should employ extensive, comprehensible language for receptive purposes.
- Extensive writing should be delayed as long as possible.
- Nonlinear recording formats (e.g., mind maps, word trees) are intrinsic to the Lexical Approach.
- Reformulation should be the natural response to student error.
- Teachers should always react primarily to the content of student language.
- Pedagogical chunking should be a frequent classroom activity."

Limitations

While the lexical approach can be a quick way for students to pick up phrases, it doesn't foster much creativity. It can have the negative side effect of limiting people's responses to safe fixed phrases. Because they don't have to build responses, they don't need to learn the intricacies of language. 
"Adult language knowledge consists of a continuum of linguistic constructions of different levels of complexity and abstraction. Constructions can comprise concrete and particular items (as in words and idioms), more abstract classes of items (as in word classes and abstract constructions), or complex combinations of concrete and abstract pieces of language (as mixed constructions). Consequently, no rigid separation is postulated to exist between lexis and grammar."
These activities are only available as a download because they are fairly long and provide full reading texts. They are related to the article - Lexical Approach 1 - What does the lexical approach look like?
We recommend you look at these classroom activities after you have read this article and before you read the other article - Lexical Approach 2.
These classroom activities are based on reading texts and provide classroom materials that are informed by the lexical approach. There are also questions for you, the teacher, to answer that will help you reflect further on your understanding of the lexical approach.