Lexical approach with teens: teaching grammar

Lexical approach is one of many ways of analysing and teaching a language. In the previous article we talked about using it for teaching vocabulary. It was mentioned that lexical chunks are of invaluable use for your students’ progress.

When children just start learning a foreign language, they deal with a lot of chunks without paying too much attention to grammar. ‘How are you?’, ‘It’s raining’, ‘I went to the shop…’ come out naturally. However, as learners get older they tend to memorise less. Teenagers need to use their analytical thinking and break up the language they meet into bits. Here comes the great and powerful Grammar which, as lexical approach says, should always start with the exploitation of lexical items.

In today’s article, we’ll take a look at how some principles of lexical approach can be used while teaching grammar.

Make students notice patterns

You can start with just a single word. Let’s take the word generous. After introducing an example like ‘They have been extremely generous to the church, now the renovation is possible,’why don’t you stop for a moment and ask your teens about their ideas of the forms used in this sentence? Some general elicitation techniques and questions like ‘Do you think it’s about the present, past, or future?’ or just ‘What tense is it here? Why?’ never get old. The more patterns like this they notice, the easier Present Perfect will seem when they come to it.

When you practise structures like ‘I’m fond of…’ or ‘I’m good at…’, you can draw teens’ attention to the form and ask for their ideas of why it is used. If they get the idea of ‘-ing-after-prepositions’ now, they might not struggle with it later when an overwhelming number of rules come up in the topic of gerund and infinitive.

The order word -> example -> grammar pattern can be used for proper and detailed teaching of some new grammar. But more importantly, it will help students collect enough examples of grammar in use.

Teach grammar as chunks

You don’t always have to introduce your teens to ‘gerund-after-preposition’ thing to teach them ‘we use it for +Ving’ structure for describing some objects. Some pieces of language, especially at lower levels, should be taken for granted and put into practice as they are.

While playing a game like Alias or Taboo, teach teens some structures like the following:

It’s made + Noun.

We use it for + Ving.

It can be + V3… (e.g. It can be bought in a pet shop / It can be eaten for breakfast)

Provided that we play such games quite often, these grammar structures will be learnt fast. Not without your help, of course.

As well, when the time to teach Present Continuous for future arrangements comes, it will be way easier if your teens are already used to the phrase ‘I’m +Ving’ to tell about their plans for tonight. Students can experience and understand grammar without knowing the rule in all the details.

Expand examples horizontally and vertically

Most grammar exercises from coursebooks focus on single sentences which drill the same structure. However, in real life we don’t usually end up with a conversation like:

-Have you ever been to China?

-No, I haven’t.

When we talk, we usually add comments, react to other people words, or explain what we mean. Why don’t you develop a two-line dialogue a bit? There are two types of such development which are mentioned by Hugh Dellar in his Teaching Lexically.

Horizontal development focuses on what might be said before or after the target phrase by the same speaker. For instance, ask your students to go on with the question and add one more idea of theirs:

-Have you ever been to China? I’m asking because …

-Have you ever been to China? I’m going next week, I need a piece of advice.

-Have you ever been to China? You know so much about this country!

Vertical development is about another speaker and his phrases before or after the main one.

-Have you ever been to China?

-No, but I’d love to.

-Yes, but I didn’t like it there.

-Yes, that’s amazing.

-No, and you?

All the examples above will help your teens get a better understanding of ‘…happened in the past, but the exact time it happened is not important. It has a relationship with the present’. In this way, you can not just drill the tense, but also construct some meaningful dialogues and teach extra vocab they find useful.

Encourage re-grammaring

After grammar input, drills and exercises, ask students to re-grammar a dialogue they’ve been working with. Here’s a simple version:

What / you / do / tonight?

I / just / go home / relax. You?

I / to my Spanish class.

Oh. How long / you / do that?

Not / long. six.

(taken from Hugh Dellar workshop)

Include extra input in correction

When you check the answers and give feedback, you can add some more collocations – and write fully grammaticalized, whole-sentence examples for some of them which you find the most useful.

All in all, YES, your students will get the things wrong. SURE, they will make mistakes. OF COURSE, you might be sick and tired of building a lesson around a couple of words. But one thing sure – you’ll be surprised with how memorable your lexical approach lessons will be for them and how much the speaking skills of even the most silent students will be boosted.

Are you on the lexical wave already?