And lessons are short and classes are large. The teacher can sometimes help (as above), but it is essential that we try to help our students to become INDEPENDENT CONVERTERS OF

INTAKE TO OUTPUT. We should give them the ambition to improve, and maybe this should start with raising their awareness of their limitations and opportunities. These limitations are fundamentally lexical. The opportunities lie in the richness and extent of the texts that they are surrounded by.

Texts and materials

But what texts to offer or recommend? Traditionally, we've worked extensively with broadsheet newspaper articles, mainly dealing with social, political and cultural issues, on the grounds that our students need to be challenged intellectually. Their awareness of the world and conflicting values in it should be continually challenged. To interact with this world, they need better lexis.

Perhaps the most important principle underlying all our work is summed up by Neuner: "Foreign language teaching is more than shaping the learners linguistic behaviour. It con- tributes to opening up new horizons of experience and developing the learners personality" (Neuner 1988).

A lot of authentic language, in all types of text, however, contains lexis which is of little use as a model. One genre is highly figurative language like this (from an Observer article on the end of the British Empire):

1 ... the demise of the Raj in 1947 ...

2 ... colonies and colonists come in a myriad of forms ...

3 ... Let us hope that the departure from Hong Kong does not join the partition of India in the blackest of imperial chapters ...

Demise can be replaced by ending, fall, etc with little loss of ideational meaning, though with much loss of connotation, of course. The same sort of process can be applied to myriad. The metaphor in 3 is not one that could be expected of our students. In the classroom or in materials, this can be dealt with by excluding these formations from consideration, or by pre-editing, but it is difficult to know how to help students concentrate on more probable lexis when they are working with authentic language in the real world.

At the opposite end of this linguistic scale you sometimes find the uncomfortable phenomenon of the non- native speaker using slang and very informal language slightly inappropriately. Neighbours is an excellent source of spoken models, but East Enders isn't, for this very reason.

I must emphasise that this is far from patronising: our students read serious English language newspapers of all kinds, and watch a lot of soaps on the BBC!

Conclusion

Obviously, we have an intuitive need to help our students to develop and mature both linguistically and intellectually. The two are inextricably involved. And that means that some- how we should strive to find ways to help them, as individuals, to learn to go on using the language - the words and word combinations - they need to in-take and activate, to refine and empower their output.

References

Lewis M. 1993. The Lexical Approach. Hove: LTP.

Lewis M. 1997. Implementing the Lexical Approach. Hove: LTP. Longman Language Activator. 1993. Harlow: Longman.

Neuner G. Towards universals of content in the foreign language curriculum: a cognitive-anthropological approach' in Language, Culture and Curriculum, Vol 1/1.

Soars, John and Liz. 1989. Headway Advanced. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

John Strange is a teacher trainer in the Netherlands. At the moment his priority is to develop materials and methods which reflect more closely the real nature of language and language learning.

From :Teacher Development Newsletter Number No. 35 1997 pp17-20

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