PREROGATIVE OF THE LEXICAL APPROACH IN COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING

The development of the Lexical Approach through Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in TEFL has been hindered by disagreement as to the cause of L1 prior knowledge awareness of some lexis. The Lexical Approach theory claims that the most important difference is the increased understanding of the nature of lexis in naturally occurring language, and its potential contribution to language pedagogy. A review of studies investigating the effectiveness of the Lexical approach advanced by proponents of the Communicative approach (CLT) supported the validity of this phenomena. However, competing theories emphasise the importance of naturally occurring lexis features not addressed by CLT methodically. This article aims to critically assess and elaborate on how the emphasis on the lexical features of language use and learning are changing the methodology of TEFL nowadays. It was concluded that, while effective to some extent, the CLT is too restrictive to account for a full range of naturally acquired ‘chunks’, so cannot alone provide a comprehensive account of language practice.