The Application Of Lexical Approach In Teaching Formulaic Sequences: A Case Study Of A Primary School Student

The traditional view of language is that language is a system of lexical grammar. This view has dominated the language teaching for a long time. Recently, however, Michael Lewis, James Nattinger, Alison Wray, etc challenged this view. They think that language is not a system of lexical grammar, but a system of grammatical lexis. What is the most important is not grammar, but formulaic sequences (grammatical lexis), which pervade in language.Michael Lewis's Lexical Approach, emphasizes the teaching of formulaic sequences and ignores the grammatical analysis. In this thesis, this approach is adjusted to Chinese children's English teaching. The objective of the thesis is to illustrate whether Lexical Approach applies to Chinese students. In order to achieve the purpose, a case study was done by analyzing the data of the student's learning English. The subject of the case study is a primary school girl student aged nine who was taught by the author in Lexical Approach every Sunday afternoon. The case study lasted for 9 months. The data were collected by recording the student's speech in the author's class for 1 hour every four weeks. Altogether 9 hours' speech were recorded. Then the recordings were transcribed as the base for analysis. Some rules of the student's learning English were found.By analyzing the rules of the formulaic sequences and comparing the accuracy of the use of copula be as formulaic sequences and non-formulaic sequences, the study showed that the language the student learned as formulaic sequences was much more accurate than the language she generated according to grammatical rules. Formulaic sequences are judged in relation to the two aspects: the quantity of the input and the overextension of the language. If the quantity of input is large and there is overextension of certain utterances, they are considered to have been learned as formulaic sequences. The student was also very interested in learning the formulaic sequences as they could facilitate her communication beyond her grammatical knowledge. The study proves that the Lexical Approach suits Chinese childrenlearning English as a foreign language. However, although Lexical Approach applies to Chinese students, there are few good English textbooks applying Lexical Approach for Chinese children. The author pointed out some problems in the existing textbooks and put forward some suggestions for revising textbooks and teachers' practice in classrooms.