straightforward causal link between the increasing learners’ L2 mental lexicons work, and how they

focus on vocabulary acquisition, the resulting might be best guided to develop.

relevance of vocabulary tests, and the need, which
arises directly from this, to assess and analyse the This general movement from the practice of
tests themselves. fostering ‘collocational competence’ towards
discussing a theory of collocational learning is the
book’s strength. It avoids tagging on anodyne
References
‘Implications for the Classroom’ sections at the
Redman, S. 1997. English Vocabulary in Use: Pre- end of each chapter; rather, it respects teacher
intermediate and Intermediate. Cambridge: development as an incremental process of learning
Cambridge University Press. from both experience and grounded theory rather
Swan, M. and C. Walter. 1990. The New Cambridge than from background theory alone. Although the
English Course. Cambridge: Cambridge University bridge between practice and theory remains
Press. problematic, three central themes emerge through
the book: (1) the size of the mental lexicon, (2) the
The reviewer size of prefabricated chunks stored in the mental
Tess Fitzpatrick lectures in Language Studies and lexicon, and (3) collocational patterns as the core of
Teaching English as a Foreign Language at the word knowledge.
University of Wales, Swansea. With a background in In Chapters 1–5, the first half of the volume, various
EFL and TEFL training, she is particularly interested claims are made about both the size and nature of
in the application of research findings to the the L1 lexicon as a means of persuading the reader
classroom context. She is a member of the of the overriding importance of collocation in
Vocabulary Acquisition Research Group at language. Hill, for example, claims that ‘it is
Swansea, and her own studies investigate ways in possible that up to 70% of everything we say, hear,
which word association techniques can be used to read or write is to be found in some form of fixed
explore the second language learner’s active expression’ (‘Revising priorities: from grammatical
vocabulary. She is currently writing up her PhD failure to collocational success’ (Chapter 3: 53). By
thesis, which focuses on the design and application extending these L1-based arguments to the
of a new test of language learners’ productive learning challenges facing L2 learners, Morgan
vocabulary. Lewis states that ‘the more collocations learners
Email: [email protected] have at their disposal, the less they need to
grammaticalise’ (Morgan Lewis, ‘There is nothing
as practical as a good theory’ (p. 16), whereas Hill
Teaching Collocation: Further Developments in the further suggests: ‘A student with a vocabulary of
Lexical Approach 2,000 words will only be able to function in a fairly
limited way. A different student with 2,000 words,
M. Lewis (ed.) but collocationally competent with those words,
Language Teaching Publications 2000, 245pp., will also be far more communicatively competent’
£16.50 (p. 62).
isbn 1 899396 11x These arguments make good sense. What’s more,
the authors do not underestimate the difficulty for
And then there were three: this is the third and both teachers and learners of changing their
most recent book by Michael Lewis on what a attitude towards what vocabulary learning might
lexical approach to language learning may involve. best involve. One important need faced by an
Having solo-authored The Lexical Approach (1993), intermediate learner involves acquiring more
and allotted room for practical classroom reports medium-strength collocations. The term ‘medium-
by different teachers in Implementing the Lexical strength’ applies to collocations which are neither
Approach (1997), Lewis acts as both co-author and completely free nor completely fixed: that vast
editor of Teaching Collocation. The result is a hinterland of collocability for frequent words
volume that begins in a leisurely fashion, with moving from concrete to more abstract uses. For
teachers revisiting their own training and example, ‘claim luggage’ can be judged as a free
pedagogic routines as they analyse how they set out collocation, ‘claim attention’ and ‘claim lives’ as
to teach collocation. The second half of the book medium-strength collocations, and ‘lay claim to’ as
then gathers pace towards some of the more knotty an idiom (covered in greater detail by Hargreaves
questions in a theoretical understanding of how in Chapter 10: ‘Collocation and testing’ (205–23)).

Reviews 413
This acquisition of medium-strength collocations general consideration of Krashen’s Input
can be achieved on the basis of noticing in new Hypothesis, and from the accompanying debate
combinations the words which the intermediate around the theoretical distinction between
learner already partially knows (Woolard in Chapter unconscious acquisition and conscious learning,
2: 31 ‘Collocation—encouraging learner ‘Learning in the lexical approach’ (8: 155–85).
independence’). This will expand the learner’s Clearly, an approach that is predicated on learners
repertoire of ready-made language and foster processing texts and identifying collocational
greater fluency (Morgan Lewis: 25; Hill: 54; Conzett: patterning must find a key role for conscious
86; Hill, Morgan Lewis, and Michael Lewis: 95: learning. This role is assigned to the part that
‘Classroom strategies, activities and exercises’). ‘noticing’ plays in helping the foreign language
These teacher-researchers also repeat the point learner transform input into intake, which
that learners should not be expected to practice according to Lewis is ‘perhaps the most important
everything they record: learners should have their of all methodological questions’ (8: 159). Lewis
attention directed to, and record, as many takes ‘noticing’ to mean sensitizing learners to
collocations of common everyday use as possible. useful lexical chunks in the text, and fostering their
This is the way to enhance language development skill in observing and sorting phrasal patterns from
effectively, and in the longer term, to raise the texts that they meet. That approach provides for
awareness for transforming input into intake. increased proficiency, in both accuracy and fluency,
as well as in more complex lexical patterning.
These practice-derived arguments are further
elaborated by examining the third theme, the Much more of the theoretical background rests on
nature of collocations in the context of classroom Lewis’s interpretations of work done in corpus
learning. One challenge for both learners and linguistics in lexically conceptualizing language in
teachers is understanding that lexicalization is one terms of The Idiom Principle, The Open Choice
continuum on which collocations can begin to be Principle, fixedness and variability, and in
sorted. On this point, Woolard offers the describing the restrictions that different registers
contrasting example of ‘drugs’ and ‘penicillin’ (2: and genres place on collocational patterning and
32), explaining that the collocational range of drugs colligational complexity. However, most of the
is necessarily much greater than that of penicillin corpus research reported is L1-based, which points
because it is less lexicalized. It is thus with such to at least two potential and misleading
lower-content words that intermediate learners overgeneralizations.
need to develop collocations, rather than with more
The first is the risk of conflating L1 corpus evidence
specialized words. Conversely, Woolard (2: 33),
with L2 processing. Whereas it is clear that projects
notes that most EFL textbooks ‘tend to focus on the
such as COBUILD have demonstrated the powerful
more lexicalized words than these less lexicalized
and all-pervading nature of collocational patterning
words’ although, to be fair, the focus in mainstream
across long texts (see, for example, Hoey 1991), it is
textbooks is gradually beginning to change (see
less clear whether a learner’s L2 lexicon also stores
Walton and Bartram 2000, for a coursebook for
and sorts by collocation. Intuitively, the answer
advanced learners that prioritizes collocational
would seem to be ‘yes’, though it may well be that
vocabulary learning). The major virtue of Teaching
L2 learners need to reach a critical mass in their
Collocation from a practical point of view lies in the
lexicons before collocations begin to stabilize, and
rich abundance of concrete and contextualized
approach automatic processing. The second
procedures prefiguring the theoretical background
danger, it seems to me, is that of hoisting the native
in Part 2 of that book.
speaker standard as the ultimate collocational goal
Chapters 7–11, Part 2, ‘Background Theory’, start at every level of vocabulary development. Although
from a consideration of what terminology should Lewis argues that collocations should be selectively
be best used for categorizing different types of focused on from the word go, other researchers are
collocation (Lewis: 7: 126–54) with ‘Language in the more cautious, and tend to characterize
lexical approach’. The author is careful to collocational knowledge as ‘an advanced type of
distinguish different kinds of multi-word items in vocabulary knowledge’ (Schmitt 2000: 89). What,
terms of their patterns of fixedness and variability, though, is the learner’s point of view? Despite a
as he chips away at the false and misleading thoroughly engaging chapter by Michael Hoey
vocabulary/grammar dichotomy. He is also (Chapter 11: ‘A world beyond collocation: new
cautiously selective in proposing an incomplete perspectives on vocabulary teaching’) from an
theory of lexical learning, derived in part from a expert applied linguist on learning by collocation,

414 Reviews
semantic prosody, and colligation, the voices of Hoey, M. 1991. Patterns of Lexis in Text. Oxford:
typical language learners are largely omitted in this Oxford University Press.
volume. In my view, this is the missing bridge Lewis, M. 1993. The Lexical Approach. Hove:
between the reflective practice of the first half of the Language Teaching Publications.
book and the theoretical issues in the second. Lewis, M. 1997. Implementing the Lexical Approach.
Lewis chooses to bridge that gap by including a Hove: Language Teaching Publications.
short story in Calloway’s code (Chapter 6), showing Schmitt, N. 2000. Vocabulary in Language Teaching.
how collocations central to a particular theme carry Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
the weight of a text’s meaning. However, it is Walton, R. and M. Bartram. 2000. Initiative.
perhaps only by including more detail about actual Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
stages of learner collocational development that
deeper questions of how collocations are learnt and
The reviewer
mis-learnt may be better answered in the future.
Andy Barfield teaches general English and EAP to
The appeal by Lewis remains pitched, first, towards undergraduate and MA students at the University
using small native speaker corpora, concordances, of Tsukuba, Japan. He is also actively involved in
and collocational dictionaries as the central university English curriculum development, and in-
resources for training learners to notice service teacher development. He is currently
collocational patterns (Chapter 9 ‘Materials and working on a distance PhD in second language
resources for teaching collocation’); a second, vocabulary acquisition with the University of Wales,
weaker call is made for creating corpora of learner Swansea.
language-in-use for assessing collocational
Email: [email protected]
proficiency and typical blocked collocations or mis-
collocations that different groups of learners may
use (Peter Hargreaves, Chapter 10 ‘Collocation and
Vocabulary in Language Teaching
testing’). Here, Hargreaves’s account of the
research being done by UCLES into the Cambridge N. Schmitt
Learner Corpus is of particular interest, although, Cambridge University Press 2000, 224pp.,
surprisingly, no mention is made of Granger’s work £35.00 (hbk) £12.95 (pbk)
with the International Corpus of Learner English
(ICLE ) into collocations and lexical phrases isbn 0 521 66938 3
(Granger 1998). One other minor quibble with
Teaching Collocation is the incomplete cross- Vocabulary in Language Teaching is one of a number
referencing between works cited and the final of books on vocabulary to have come from
bibliography (pp. 244–5), where, for example, the researchers at Nottingham University. Starting with
reference for the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Ron Carter’s Vocabulary (1988, 1998) and continuing
Written English (cited several times in Chapter 7) is with books such as Carter and McCarthy’s
missing; a number of page numbers for journal Vocabulary and Language Teaching (1988),
articles are not included. An index would have been McCarthy’s Vocabulary (1990), and Schmitt and
useful, too. McCarthy (eds) Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition
and Pedagogy (1997), the Nottingham authors have
All in all, the picture that Lewis presents is of an shown us the importance of vocabulary within the
exciting pedagogic challenge, and an accessible English language. This may sound like a trite
research agenda. In his call for teachers to carry out statement, but too often the main focus of the
their own action research into a lexical approach to language has been on grammar, with vocabulary a
language learning, Lewis seems aware that applied kind of added-on, optional extra. Working mainly
linguistic research on its own will not change how with corpora, they, along with others such as Sinclair
teachers ask their learners to learn lexis. Test for (1991) and Lewis (1993), have been among the first
yourself the claims made of collocations, he to point out that words do not exist in isolation, that
appeals. Observe, hypothesize, experiment: it is a the ‘open choice’ or ‘slot-and-filler’ theory is not
confident appeal, and one well worth teachers and tenable: you cannot just put any word in any place in
learners addressing and answering together. a sentence, even if the grammar is correct. Your
choice of words frequently dictates what follows, as
References far as both grammar and other vocabulary items are
Granger, S. (ed.) 1998. Learner English on Computer. concerned.
Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman.

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