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Introduction This commentary has been inspired by Michael Hoeys (2014) plenary
lecture at the Annual International IATEFL Conference in Harrogate in
April of this year. In his lecture, Hoey attempted to revitalize two old
approaches to foreign language (FL) instruction: Michael Lewiss (1993)
Lexical Approach and Stephen Krashens (1982) Monitor Model. By
providing psycholinguistic evidence in their support and by grounding
them in linguistic theory, Hoey (ibid.) tried to demonstrate that both
models are safe to use by teachers. In this commentary, however, it is
argued that even if Hoeys linguistic theory of lexical priming is correct,
lexis should still be subordinated to grammar in FL teaching.
Lexical priming According to Hoey (ibid.), the mechanism that drives language
and FL instruction acquisition is lexical priming. In short, whenever a language learner
encounters a word, he or she subconsciously registers its lexical,
grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic associations. These associations
are stored in the mental lexicon and are later drawn upon in language
use: for example words encountered in combination are stored as
combinations and are then reproduced as combinations.
In Hoeys (ibid.) view, both Lewiss (ibid.) Lexical Approach and
Krashens (ibid.) Monitor Model are consistent with an account of
language acquisition and use based on lexical priming. As for the
former, Hoey (ibid.) says that Lewis is correct in treating grammar as the
output of lexis and in recognizing that the successful language learner
is someone who can recognise, understand and produce lexical phrases
as ready-made chunks (ibid.: PowerPoint slide 3). From this, it follows
that in teaching, the emphasis needs to be on vocabulary in context and
particularly on fixed expressions in speech (ibid.: PowerPoint slide 3).
From explicit Thus, if L2 learners are to succeed in the task of FL learning and
grammar to lexical become competent L2 users, classroom time should be used as
priming effectively as possible and the cognitive learning load should be reduced
as much as possible. Such a reduction can be achieved if we focus more
on grammatical systems rather than lists of lexical phrases. As Brumfit
(1980: 1034) suggested, grammatical accounts of language systems
are often used as the foundation of language teaching because such
accounts are very economical and the systems are generative.
Further, there is recent empirical evidence that explicit grammar
teaching can be made to work very well. Spada and Tomitas (2010)
meta-analysis showed that such instruction is more effective than
implicit instruction for both simple and complex English grammar
structures. These results were obtained on both immediate and
delayed post-tests and the largest effect size was found on spontaneous
response measures that followed instruction on complex forms.
94 Pawe Scheffler
The types of explicit grammatical instruction that were investigated in the
studies meta-analysed by Spada and Tomita (ibid.) included explanations
of grammar rules, L1/L2 contrasts, and metalinguistic feedback. These
treatments helped learners to produce unplanned L2 output, which is the
goal that many L2 learners want to achieve. It seems, then, that we now
have solid empirical evidence that excluding teacher-imposed explicit
grammar explanations, as, for example, Lewis (op.cit.: 149) proposes, is
misguided: adult learners can benefit from an approach to classroom
teaching which capitalizes on their ability to absorb and practise explicit
knowledge. Two important questions, however, remain.
First, as Spada and Tomita (op.cit.: 287) themselves admit, it is not clear
what mechanism is responsible for the improvement in the learners
spontaneous performance. They consider two possible scenarios. In
the first scenario, the improvement could be attributed to learners
96 Pawe Scheffler