a new approach to teaching lexical phrases

النوع : Mémoire

Lexical phrases, or simply put all types of formulaic language, have been found to be at the very heart of language on account of their ubiquity in discourse and/or the key role they play towards the achievement of linguistic proficiency in terms of fluency, idiomaticity or naturalness, and social appropriateness. However, lexical phrases, being forms of formulaic language of varying complexity, represent a difficult and challenging aspect of language acquisition which has often been addressed inappropriately. Therefore, a fundamental issue in language learning is to make learners acquire lexical phrases as effectively as possible so that they acquire productive as well as receptive control of a given language. The present thesis explores the centrality of lexical phrases to language learning and examines them in their semantic, syntactic, sociopragmatic, and universal aspects. It then proposes a threefold approach for teaching them based on interlingual transfer, mental imagery, and word play. A case study is then conducted in a school context with two groups of 30 sixteen-to-seventeen-year-old trilingual students whose first foreign language is English. The method used is rotational as the two groups alternately act as a control and experimental group. The experiment tests the acquisition of 24 lexical phrases, 12 of which are introduced using the traditional way while the other 12 are introduced using the experimental approach. The results are then recorded in a comparative chart which shows that the experimental groups generally performed better on the various skills tested, scoring a 1.46/20 higher general average than the control groups. The case study thus proves that the teaching approach proposed is effective in enhancing the acquisition of lexical phrases. Finally, despite its limited scope, this research opens up new horizons to explore in the lexically-driven approach.