#52, Article: Google and the lexical approach

By Tarun Patel

Google is special among search engines in that it has become a starting point for enquiries and data searches of all forms. As most of this data is linguistic, it deserves special attention from language teachers, but until now, search has been largely ignored by most course writers.

In this article I give several practical examples of how you can use Gffoogle, combined with a lexical approach to teaching, to enrich your class material with authentic examples, as well as building learner autonomy.

Google and lexis
Lexis, as most of you will know, is simply another term for ‘vocabulary’. The Lexical Approach treats language as a series of prefabricated lexical chunks. Its methodology puts grammar in second place to vocabulary.

The approach I will outline here is based on inputting ‘lexical chunks’ (strings of vocabulary or phrases) into Google’s various search functions to find samples of real world text. These are split into different types.

How Google treats language

This is a little complicated. What you need to know is that…

Read the complete article at http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk

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ELT Newsletter, ELTWeekly Issue#52 commento

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March 5th, 2010

This author published 569 posts in this site.
Tarun Patel (http://tarunpatel.net/blog/) is an ELT and Communication skills teacher, working with Charotar University of Science & Technology (CHARUSAT - http://charusat.ac.in/). He has been dealing with the Language learning processes for last seven years. 'Technology in Teaching English' is his favorite domain and he has presented several research papers in national and international conferences on the same theme. He is the founder editor of ELTWeekly (http://eltweekly.com/), India's first weekly ELT eNewsletter which reaches in more than forty countries and benefits more than 1600d teachers of English and Communication Skills. Have a look at his personal blog http://tarunpatel.net/blog/.