Criticism of the Lexical Approach

"All chunks and no pineapple?" Image by Andrew Malone via Flickr [ CC BY 2.0 ] Writing an essay or working on a paper on the Lexi...

Colligation and a bottom-up approach to grammar

Summary of Hugh Dellar's IATEFL webinar Following the patterns: colligation and the necessity of a bottom-up approach to grammar  - Sept...

Closely connected

Photo by Sudhamshu Hebbar on Flickr [CC BY 2.0] An article written by the British linguist Vyvyan Evans entitled “Language Instinct is a My...

Lexical Approach: a definitive reference list

Not a proper blog post this time but just a list of references and useful links I have compiled for a series of workshops I have been giving...

To confer or to concur?

Image by @sandymillin via eltpics on Flickr For the first time since it was last held in Harrogate (2010), I didn’t go to the annual IATEFL...

We are lexically indebted to him

Image source: www.willis-elt.co.uk I opened my Facebook yesterday morning and was saddened to see Chia Suan Chong’s post about the passing o...

The highway to fluency and a roundabout way to grammar

Photo by @GoldsteinBen via eltpics on Flickr A second lesson with two new pre-intermediate (A2) students (I usually put my private student...

The Lexical Approach: 20 years on...

This year sees the 20th anniversary of the publication of Michael Lewis's "The Lexical Approach", the book that has changed th...

What corpora HAVE done for us

Sinclair's seminal work - the bible of corpus linguistics In this post I would like to defend linguistic corpora and their relevance to ...

Grammar rules... again?! Chunks strike back

This is a somewhat belated reaction to Catherine Walter's article which appeared in the Learning English section of Guardian last autumn...

Start teaching lexically in 2013

Many readers of this blog have read my rants about badly designed coursebook or digital activities and heard me moan about preoccupation wit...