PD with Michael Lewis
Does that name mean anything to you? It didn’t to me when I first saw the e-mail that the man was coming to do some professional development sessions with us during the two “study days” prior to the beginning of exams. It didn’t take long though for me to figure out that this is a person of some importance in the field of linguistics and ELT.
The session that I attended was his attempt to get his audience to start looking at language in a new way. Presupposing that we were all largely guided by the traditional belief that language is “lexicalized grammar” he attempted to get us to see language as “grammaticalized lexis”. I suppose this really means that instead of thinking of grammar first and training students to plug their vocabulary into the grammatical structures, we should be thinking of lexis (words and combinations of words) and then taking note of the grammatical structures in which they are found. While it was an interesting way to pass the time, I’ve not had that epiphany where I suddenly grasp how to improve my teaching by following this approach. Certainly there are some intuitively gratifying sentiments in this approach such as “forget explicitly teaching grammar” and “reading to students is good”, I don’t know how I’m going to let some of the other things I heard inform my classroom practice, but I feel like that if I continue to plumb this lexical approach, something good will come from it.
Lewis will be with us tomorrow for another session, so I hope that this one will give me something that I can practice in order to be able to use it in the classroom this coming fall.
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