The Lexical Approach: What Most Teachers Get Wrong
For more than thirty years, I’ve studied the Lexical Approach (LA).
For more than twenty-five years, I’ve trained English teachers, observed classrooms, analyzed coursebooks, and discussed methodology with professionals from every corner of the ELT world.
During that time, one thing has become increasingly clear to me.
The more popular the Lexical Approach becomes, the more simplified it becomes.
Social media deserves some credit for introducing thousands of teachers to concepts like chunks, collocations, lexical grammar, and formulaic language. That’s undoubtedly a good thing.
The downside is that many teachers stop there.
They come across a few Instagram posts, watch several YouTube videos, download a worksheet full of collocations, and naturally assume they now understand the Lexical Approach.
Unfortunately, that’s where many misconceptions begin.
In this article, I’d like to challenge some of the most common ones I hear from teachers.
What Is the Lexical Approach?
Before discussing the misconceptions, let’s clarify one important point.
The Lexical Approach is not a collection of classroom techniques.
It is not a vocabulary method.
Nor is it simply another way of teaching grammar.
Rather, the Lexical Approach is a way of understanding language itself.
When Michael Lewis published The Lexical Approach in 1993, he challenged a deeply rooted assumption in language teaching: that grammar is the primary organizing system of language and vocabulary merely fills the gaps.
Instead, Lewis proposed that language is largely made up of recurring lexical patterns and that grammar is deeply embedded within them.
His famous statement—
“Language consists of grammaticalised lexis, not lexicalised grammar.”
has probably become one of the most quoted sentences in ELT.
Ironically, it has also become one of the most misunderstood.
Misconception #1: The Lexical Approach Begins and Ends with Michael Lewis
Yes… Michael Lewis deserves enormous credit.
Without his books, many of us would never have started looking at language differently.
But treating his three major books as the final word on the Lexical Approach means ignoring more than thirty years of research.
Since the early 1990s, scholars such as Michael Hoey, Frank Boers, Alison Wray, Nick Ellis, Michael Ullman, Norbert Schmitt, Anna Siyanova-Chanturia, and many others have expanded our understanding of lexical learning, formulaic language, lexical priming, memory, and language acquisition.
The conversation never stopped.
Many teachers simply joined it much later.
Misconception #2: The Lexical Approach Is Just About Teaching Chunks
This is probably the misconception I hear most often.
Of course chunks matter.
Collocations matter.
Formulaic language matters.
But reducing the LA to chunks is like reducing Communicative Language Teaching to pair work.
Chunks are one visible feature of a much broader understanding of how language works.
The Lexical Approach also draws our attention to ideas such as:
- lexical priming
- colligation
- noticing
- repeated exposure
- retrieval
- discourse
- frequency
- salience
- authentic language
- memory and learning
Teaching chunks without understanding these underlying principles is like learning to drive without understanding how the engine works.
The car may move.
But you won’t know why.
Misconception #3: It Rejects Grammar! That’s Crazy!
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Lewis wasn’t asking teachers to abandon grammar.
He was asking us to rethink the role grammar plays in language learning.
Instead of presenting grammar as isolated rules followed by mechanical practice, the LA encourages teachers to begin with authentic language and help learners notice the recurring grammatical patterns embedded within it.
Grammar doesn’t disappear.
It simply returns to where it naturally belongs:
inside language.
Misconception #4: Teaching Collocations Creates Fluency
If only language learning were that simple.
Teaching collocations certainly helps.
But fluency isn’t built by collecting lexical items.
It develops through repeated exposure, retrieval, meaningful interaction, rich input, and time.
Knowing a collocation and being able to retrieve it naturally during conversation are two very different things.
This distinction is one of the central insights emerging from contemporary research into language acquisition and memory.
Misconception #5: If an Activity Contains Chunks, It’s Lexical
This is another misconception I see frequently.
A traditional matching exercise becomes a “lexical approach activity” simply because isolated words have been replaced with chunks.
The language changed.
The pedagogy often didn’t.
A lexical lesson isn’t defined by the expressions it contains.
It’s defined by the teacher’s understanding of language and the learning opportunities created around those expressions.
Changing the content doesn’t automatically change the approach.
Misconception #6: This Is an Old “Approach”
This one always makes me smile.
People sometimes describe the LA as something from the 1990s.
That’s true only if you stopped reading in the 1990s.
Since then, research has continued to refine, strengthen, and expand many of Lewis’s original insights.
Studies in lexical priming, formulaic language, cognitive neuroscience, usage-based linguistics, corpus linguistics, psycholinguistics, declarative and procedural memory, and second language acquisition have provided even stronger support for many of the principles behind the Lexical Approach.
The approach hasn’t stood still.
Our understanding of it keeps growing.
Why the Lexical Approach Matters More Than Ever
Ironically, the rise of short-form educational content has made the LA simultaneously more visible and more vulnerable.
More teachers have heard the term.
Fewer seem to understand its depth.
The solution isn’t to dismiss social media.
Social media is an excellent starting point.
But it should never become the destination.
The teachers who make the greatest difference in their students’ learning are usually the ones who never stop reading, questioning, experimenting, and refining their understanding of language.
The Lexical Approach deserves exactly that kind of curiosity.
Final Thoughts
The Lexical Approach isn’t about replacing grammar.
It isn’t about teaching chunks.
It isn’t about memorizing collocations.
And it certainly isn’t a collection of trendy classroom techniques.
It is a fundamentally different way of understanding language, learning, and teaching.
The deeper you study it, the more connections you begin to see—not only with vocabulary and grammar, but also with memory, cognition, discourse, interaction, and language acquisition itself.
That’s why, after more than thirty years, I still find the Lexical Approach one of the most exciting and rewarding areas of ELT to explore.
And if you’re serious about understanding it, don’t stop here.
I’ve put together a list of the books that have shaped my own thinking over the years. Some are classics. Others are more recent. Together, they paint a much broader picture of what the Lexical Approach has become.
👉 Read my article: 10 Books Every Lexical Teacher Should Read.
The more you read, the more you realize that the conversation didn’t end with Michael Lewis. In many ways, it was only the beginning.
The Lexical Teacher Program
If you’re ready to move beyond oversimplified explanations and truly understand the Lexical Approach, the LEXICAL TEACHER PROGRAM was designed for exactly that purpose.
Inside the program, we explore not only Michael Lewis’s ideas but also three decades of research that have expanded our understanding of language, acquisition, memory, lexical priming, formulaic language, and classroom practice.
Stop collecting tips.
Start understanding the approach.
