As teachers, it is also important that we adopt relevant strategies to achieve our teaching goals

As language is the subject matter of our teaching, it is vital that we have an in-depth understanding of Grammar and Lexis, as they are key aspects of language, whichever curriculum or syllabus we are following, and whichever model of language we are applying.

As teachers, it is also important that we adopt relevant strategies to achieve our teaching goals. As Dave Willis’s opening sentence says: ‘Whenever we do anything in the classroom we are acting on our beliefs about language and language learning’ (Willis 2003:1).

So, for example, if you present your students with the item cat, and do not make any mention of the forms cats and cat’s, you (like most dictionaries) have implicitly made the judgment that cats and cat’s are to be considered as grammatical features rather than vocabulary items, and that these forms are to be learned from the grammatical rules about the formation of plurals in English, or the ways that possession is indicated in English. On the other hand, if you present learners with concordances from a corpus containing the forms cat, cats and cat’s, you are explicitly showing them the different forms that are associated with the item cat and the set of meanings which cat can evoke.

It is such underlying judgments and beliefs which will come under the spotlight in this module, and hopefully by examining them and questioning them, you will emerge with a better idea of why you teach the things you do, and in the way you do, and you should also find some interesting suggestions for new things to teach and new ways to teach them.

In this Unit, we will look briefly at the historical attitudes towards Lexis and Grammar, and their treatment in linguistics and language teaching, including an overview of the contributions of lexicography and the recent advent of electronic corpora. We will discuss some of the technical terminology used in the study of lexis, and consider to what extent individual words constitute an appropriate unit for the study of language. We will look at some of the problems in defining lexical units, and consider the process of vocabulary acquisition from a pedagogical viewpoint. We will then discuss the notion of grammar, and explore some of the different kinds of grammar.