Dave Willis’s The Lexical Syllabus (1990) and the COBUILD English Course started from the most frequent words (do, get, it, way), three years before Lewis’s Lexical Approach (1993).
Key points
- The COBUILD corpus showed “the enormous power of the common words of English” (Willis 1990: 46). The post cites ~700 words covering ~70% of text.
- English is minimally inflected, so “word meaning and word order are central” (Willis 1990: 23).
- The passive, second conditional and reported speech are better treated lexically than as big structures.
- Thornbury’s Natural Grammar (OUP 2005) is built on Willis’s “small words”.
Limits
A tribute, not a critique.
Apply in my context (Claude)
- DELTA M1 history question material: Willis (1990) → Lewis (1993) → Thornbury (2005) → Dellar & Walkley (Teaching Lexically). Know the sequence and what each added.
Connections
The Lexical Approach - grammaticalised lexis, read critically · Grammar should be taught through lexis, not PPP rules