Who: Teacher trainer and lexical-approach practitioner (ex-British Council). His book Lexical Grammar (CUP) is referenced on the blog. Authorship not confirmed from the pages read.
What: “Activities, ideas and useful tips with a lexical touch”, plus reflections and rants. Busiest year: 2013.
Stance: Lexico-grammatical: words come with collocations and colligations; grammar works bottom-up from patterns; L1 and translation are deliberate tools. Explicit grammar can coexist.
Useful bibliography of Lexical Approach critics (post): Thornbury 1998 (MET 7), Lindstromberg 2003 (HLT 5/2), Swan 2006 (Teacher Trainer 20/3), Timmis 2008 (MET 17/3), Walter 2012, Scheffler 2015 (ELTJ 69/1). Thornbury confirms in the comments that “all chunks and no pineapple” is his phrase.
Processed notes
- Chunks are generative templates for grammar
- Colligation and bottom-up grammar
- Teach lexically - collocations as minimum units of meaning
- Ten paper activities for recycling vocabulary sets
- The lexical syllabus began with Willis and COBUILD
- Translation done well - four L1 activities
Next to process
- “The highway to fluency and a roundabout way to grammar” (2013) · “What corpora HAVE done for us” (2013) · “Explaining the difference between (near-)synonyms” (2012)
- “It doesn’t matter” worksheet: patterns after it ___s / it doesn’t ___