2 [about a family situation] There are all kinds of small arguments and discussions and stuff, and I'm in the middle and I don't want to be. I try to ignore it, but sometimes it's very difficult, and if you do it too often, someone will be, like., "Oh, you're choosing someone's point of view.'

3 That course is a bit of a sore topic. Nobody likes it.

Here are my interpretations of what the students actually wanted to say. Interpretations or guesses? It doesn't actually matter, because when I offer these ideas to the students, they seize on them, saying: "Yes, of course!" And this, of course, is a portrait in miniature of one sort of teaching/learning process.

1. what attracts me about / the opportunity / chance /exercise authority

2. liable / to accuse me / take sides / put .... in a difficult position

3. not exactly popular / (flavour of the month ?)

The extreme usefulness, and shortcutting nature, of what attracts me/ like / etc about and of not exactly is obvious. Take sides would seem to be more or less indispensable for the topic. One could admire the students' compensation skills, but the fact remains that they failed to communicate what they really wanted to, and it was their lexis that let them down.

An analysis of some of their carefully prepared presentations shows that they can find much more appropriate lexis, given time, though this genre tends to involve fewer fixed and semi- fixed expressions as such.

(in writing, we find the Longman Language Activator invaluable, but mostly for single words, of course.)

Tasks and exercises

For years, our approach has been exclusively task-based. Students are asked to read and react to articles, discuss social problems, carry out simulations, write essays and summaries, give presentations, and so on. Very often, models are offered, That is, as far as is possible in the classroom, all language is in a full context, and all language analysis is in the form of feedback. This in itself is a perfectly sound approach.

However, the lexical approach also suggests "exercises", as comprehensively set out in Chapters 6 and 7 of Implementing the Lexical Approach (Lewis 1997). For our students, perhaps the most useful basic

exercise type is of the "find five more typical slot fillers" variety. This implies examining lexical items without a real context, Lewis claims (1 993: 103) that "words may be perfectly adequately contextualised by learners in terms of their real world experience or imagination." This point needs research. At this stage, informal feedback from students suggests they don't find exercises of this type particularly useful.

it is essential that we try to help our students to become INDEPENDENT CONVERTERS OF INTAKE TO OUTPUT

However, if the items dealt with are lexically directly related to an item from a full context, and themselves given a fairly full context, this sort of exercise is perceived as very valuable. An example will make this clear.

The original text had:

The bride and groom head for their car under a hail of rice.

Students are asked to find other words that can replace hail in a hail of rice, and note them in fairly full and realistic contexts, giving sentences like:

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid died in a hail of bullets.

The Prime Minister resigned under a hail of criticism from all sides. etc

Intake to Output

The inability in our students to see and then use lexical patterns (and any other language features) is a very severe handicap. I can only conclude, with Lewis, that it is essential that learner's are taught how to chunk at a very early stage. However, I work with learners who probably mostly see themselves as at or near the end of the language learning process. Another problem.

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