{"id":2708,"date":"2012-05-28T05:03:08","date_gmt":"2012-05-28T05:03:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.eltweekly.com\/elt-newsletter\/?p=2708"},"modified":"2012-05-28T05:03:08","modified_gmt":"2012-05-28T05:03:08","slug":"vol-4-issue-22-research-paper-adopting-lexical-approach-in-esp-classroom-to-teach-the-nuances-of-business-meetings-by-meenakshi-raman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eltweekly.humbeestudio.xyz\/?p=2708","title":{"rendered":"Vol. 4 Issue 22 \u2013 Research Paper: ‘Adopting Lexical Approach in ESP Classroom to Teach the Nuances of Business Meetings’ by Meenakshi Raman"},"content":{"rendered":"

ELTWeekly Vol. 4 Issue#22 | May 28, 2012 |\u00a0ISSN 0975-3036<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong>
\n<\/strong><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

This paper is submitted for publication by Dr.Meenakshi Raman<\/strong>, Professor of English and Communication, HoD, Humanities and Management, BITS Pilani, K K Birla Goa Campus, NH17B, Zuari Nagar, Goa-403726\u00a0 email :<\/span> mraman@bits-goa.ac.in<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em>Abstract<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Teachers of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) adopt several approaches in their classroom to enable their students enhance their skills in using English for various specific purposes. For instance, teachers of business communication aim at developing the skills necessary for mastering the various forms of communication prevalent in businesses: conversation, meetings, conventions, conferences, interviews, group discussions, brainstorming, etc. Lexical approach is one of the most suitable approaches to teaching English required for conducting and participating in business meetings.\u00a0\u00a0 In fact, lexical phrases offer far more language generative power than grammatical structures.<\/span><\/p>\n

The present paper attempts to discuss the various sequential steps to be carried out during business meetings and to explain through examples how the lexical approach can be used in ESP classrooms to teach the nuances of business meetings.<\/span><\/p>\n

Key terms:\u00a0 ESP, Lexical approach, business meetings, sequential steps, chunks,\u00a0lexical phrases<\/span><\/p>\n

Introduction<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Business meetings serve as an excellent tool for transmitting and sharing information, making decisions, arriving at the best solution to problems, receiving feedback on a new venture, and so on. These meetings may be able to achieve their objectives only when they are conducted in an effective and efficient manner.\u00a0 Among the various factors that contribute to the effectiveness of business meetings, understanding the various steps involved in business meetings and the use of language both by the chairperson and the participants plays a significant role and has a pervasive impact on the outcome of the meeting.<\/span><\/p>\n

Teachers of business communication adopt several approaches in their classroom to enable their students master the various forms of communication prevalent in business \u2013 conversation, meetings, conventions, conferences, interviews, group discussions, brainstorming, etc. Whatever may be the approach, the emphasis on the use of appropriate elements of language remains as a common denominator. Among the various approaches to teaching English appropriate for business meetings, the lexical approach may be the most suitable one because it is based on the premises that language consists of meaningful chunks that when combines produce continuous coherent text and only a minority of spoken sentences are entirely novel creations. <\/em>In fact, lexical phrases offer far more language generative power than grammatical structures.<\/span><\/p>\n

Importance of business meetings<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

It won\u2019t be an exaggeration to say that the effectiveness of business meetings has an impact on an organization\u2019s bottom-line. They are huge investment of time, material resources and most importantly human resources (Drew, 1994:21). When the Chairperson and the participants make good use of their time during business meetings, there is a terrific return on the investment. If they are not focused on their target or spend their time in useless chatter and argument or don\u2019t achieve their objectives, then that is a prescription for no return on the investment. Nevertheless, business meetings are almost unavoidable despite the time they take away from your other work and the ineffective way in which they are often handled. There is no way of conducting business without occasionally participating in or leading a business meeting.<\/span><\/p>\n

Business meetings enable their participants to pool information, solicit feedback, clarify policy, seek consensus, and solve problems. ( Bovee 2003: 36). Besides these purposes, they represent opportunities. Because they are a significant tool for developing staff, they are career-critical. In fact if a manager is not able to orchestrate a meeting, he (she) is of little use to the corporation. At meetings crucial judgments are formed and careers are made. Therefore, instead of considering meetings as a waste of your valuable time, see them as golden opportunities to demonstrate your skills in leadership, communication, problem-solving and decision-making.<\/span><\/p>\n

Theoretical vs Practical approach in ESP classes<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Today\u2019s businesses provide ample opportunities for their employees to act as managers in various domains such as project, planning, engineering operations, marketing, human resources, etc. We are also aware that fresh graduates in engineering , management, medicine, commerce, etc., need to take care of several team activities as soon as they begin their professional lives in a national or an international organization. Hence it is necessary that they are well-equipped with communication skills\u00a0 to be employed by them in multifarious forms of organizational communication, namely, face-to-face conversations, meetings, conferences, interviews, brainstorming, group discussions, telephonic conversations, e-mails, reports, proposals and other publications.<\/span><\/p>\n

With the ever-increasing demand for the team operations in today\u2019s organizations, skills in handling meetings with effectiveness and efficiency ranks among the top requirements of a business person. Here comes the importance of teaching such skills at the college or university level as the students who are well-equipped with such skills would be able to carve a niche for themselves in their professional career. However, teachers of business or managerial communication adopt either traditional or practical approach in their ESP classes to train their students in the nuances of business meetings. For instance, the approach in discussion, namely, lexical approach, can be considered as a practical approach to teaching business English because it involves an easy way of grouping various words as collocations and chunks so that the learner gets habituated to using them fluently.\u00a0 Activity-based approaches being predominantly used in almost all curricula, it\u2019s important for the teachers of communication courses to adopt pragmatic approach to developing communication skills in their ESP students. The table given below may help you review the benefits of pragmatic approach to teaching:<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Traditional \/ Conventional approach<\/strong><\/span><\/td>\nPractical \/ Pragmatic approach<\/strong><\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Lecture-based<\/span><\/td>\nTask-oriented<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Teacher-centered<\/span><\/td>\nLearner-oriented<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Students as passive listeners<\/span><\/td>\nStudents as active participants<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
More opportunity to teachers<\/span><\/td>\nMore opportunity to students<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Emphasis on assessment<\/span><\/td>\nEmphasis on promoting learning<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
More theory, less\/no practice<\/span><\/td>\nLess theory, more practice<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

An overview of lexical approach<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Why do we say, \u2018 to do your homework\u2019 and not \u2018to make your homework\u2019? and why do we go somewhere \u2018by car\u2019 or \u2018by train\u2019 but \u2018on foot\u2019 ? The reason is collocation. Collocation means the way that words form predictable relationships with other words. Knowing the ‘meaning’ of a word is not only knowing its dictionary definition but also knowing the kind of words with which it is often associated.<\/span><\/p>\n

The lexical approach to second language teaching has received interest in recent years as an alternative to grammar-based approaches. This approach concentrates on developing learners’ proficiency with lexis, or words and word combinations. It is based on the idea that an important part of language acquisition is the ability to comprehend and produce lexical phrases as unanalyzed wholes, or “chunks,” and that these chunks become the raw data by which learners perceive patterns of language traditionally thought of as grammar (Lewis, 1993, p. 95). Instruction focuses on relatively fixed expressions that occur frequently in spoken language, such as, “I’m sorry,” “I didn’t mean to make you jump,” or “That will never happen to me,” rather than on originally created sentences (Lewis, 1997, p. 212).<\/span><\/p>\n

The lexical approach makes a distinction between vocabulary\u2014traditionally understood as a stock of individual words with fixed meanings\u2014and lexis, which includes not only the single words but also the word combinations that we store in our mental lexicons. Lexical approach advocates argue that language consists of meaningful chunks that, when combined, produce continuous coherent text, and only a minority of spoken sentences are entirely novel creations.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the lexical approach, lexis in its various types is thought to play a central role in language teaching and learning\uff0eNattinger (1980, p.341) suggests that teaching should be based on the idea that language production is the piecing together of ready \uff0dmade units appropriate for a particular situation\uff0eComprehension of such units is dependent on knowing the patterns to predict in different situations. Institution, therefore, should center on these patterns and the ways they can be pieced together, along with the ways they vary and the situations in which they occur.<\/span><\/p>\n

In particular, lexical phrases were seen as a productive resource for learners, aiding in the production, comprehension, and necessary analytical reflection on the forms and meanings of the target language. Lexical fields represent knowledge in a language, but there is much more to vocabulary than simple lists of words, nouns or verbs.<\/span><\/p>\n

Guiding principles of the Lexical Approach: (Lewis 1993,115)<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The grammar\/vocabulary dichotomy is invalid; much language consists of muti-words \/ chunks.<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. \u00a0Collocation is used as an organizing principle. We say, for example, ‘take a look’ and ‘have a look’ but not ‘make a look’ or ‘get a look’. There is no reason or rule that tells us why we use some words with ‘look’ but not others. Looking up the meaning of take<\/strong> or have<\/strong> in the dictionary won’t help us find the answer. Collocations, either fixed or more flexible, are the result of many years of habitual use by fluent speakers of the language.<\/span><\/li>\n
  3. Successful language is a wider concept than accurate language.<\/span><\/li>\n
  4. The Observe-Hypothesis-Experiment cycle replaces the Present-Practise-Produce Paradigm. Learners should be guided\u00a0\u00a0 to discover ir(regularities) themselves and experiment with new structures and contexts. This appraoch is called \u2018 learning through \u2019 discovery. In contrast to traditional teaching, learners formulate their own principles based on their own experiments.<\/span><\/li>\n
  5. \u00a0Most importantly, language consists of grammaticalised lexis–not lexicalised grammar. In other words, lexis is central in creating meaning; grammar plays a subservient managerial role. Following this principle, teachers should spend more time helping learners develop their stock of phrases and less time on grammatical structures. Advocates of lexical approch believe that the language came first, and grammar is our attempt to find order in language. If this is the case, then it is wrong to start with grammar and expect our students to “fill the gaps” by adding vocabulary. As grammar becomes more specific , choices are more and more realised by a choice of lexical item than a grammatical structure. ( Halliday, 1978:43)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Within the lexical approach, special attention is directed to collocations and expressions that include institutionalized utterances and sentence frames and heads\uff0eAs Lewis maintains, \u201cinstead of words, we consciously try to think of collocations, and to present these in expressions. Rather than trying to break things into ever smaller pieces, there is a conscious effort to see things in larger, more holistic, ways\u201d ( 1997 p.204). He distinguishes among the following lexical items\uff1a<\/span><\/p>\n

    Single words<\/strong> \u2013 most basic kind and the leargest category ; words of high and low information content (e.g. book\uff0cpen, with , in, out)<\/span><\/p>\n

    Polywords <\/strong>\u2013 small group (record player, by the way\uff0cin the mean time) compound and phrasal verbs; usually short consisting of two or three words; each word may belong to any word class; meaning of the whole group totally different from the component words<\/span><\/p>\n

    Collocations, or word partnerships<\/strong>– individual words expected to co-occur with others (e.g. prices fall, rancid butter, community service) non-reciprocal relation between the components- e.g. rancid butter: the word rancid suggests that the noun butter but the word butter does not suggest the adjective rancid with the same degree of certainty. Collocation is the readily observable phenomenon whereby certain words co \uff0doccur in natural text with greater than random frequency. Furthermore, collocation is not determined by logic or frequency, but is arbitrary, decided only by linguistic convention ( Wray 2002)\uff0eSome collocations are fully fixed, such as\u201cto catch a cold, \u201d\u201crancid butter, and\u201cdrug addict,\u201dwhile others are more or less fixed and can be completed in a relatively small number of ways, as in the following examples\uff1a<\/span><\/p>\n

    Blood \/ close \/ distant \/ near (est) relative<\/span><\/p>\n

    Learn by doing \/ by heart \/ by observation \/\u00a0 by rote \/ from experience<\/span><\/p>\n

    Badly \/ bitterly \/ deeply \/ seriously \/ severely hurt<\/span><\/p>\n

    Institutionalized utterances<\/strong> \u2013 differ in their length \u2013 short, hardly grammatically correct utterances\u00a0 ( e.g. just a moment please I’ll get it; We’ll see ;That’ll do ; If I were you; )<\/span><\/p>\n

    Sentence heads or frames<\/strong>– Sorry to interrupt; but I can just say\u2026; this is not as\u2026as you think; the fact\/suggestion\/problem\/danger was\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

    Text frames<\/strong> \u2013 (e.g. In this paper we explore\u2026; Firstly\u2026; Secondly\u2026; Finally\u2026)<\/span><\/p>\n

    Full sentences<\/strong>– Help the listener to identify what the language user doing- compalining, explaining, is contradicting; important part of fluency in a conversation.<\/span><\/p>\n

    (e.g. Would do like a cup of coffee?; I\u2019m afraid, I can\u2019t agree with you on this matter. ; Let me explain this through examples.;<\/span><\/p>\n

    Characteristics of lexical items<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

    Meaning is not totally predictable from form<\/span><\/p>\n

    Each is a minimal unit for certain syntactic purposes<\/span><\/p>\n

    Each is a social institution<\/span><\/p>\n

    (Dieter Kranz, 1997)<\/span><\/p>\n

    The Lexical Approach can be summarized in a few words: language consists not of traditional grammar and vocabulary but often of multi-word prefabricated chunks. Teachers using the Lexical Approach will not analyse the target language in the classroom, but will be more inclined to concentrate learners’ attention upon these chunks. This new approach is understood as a serious attempt at revaluation for the individual teacher and the profession as it develops many of the fundamental principles advanced by proponents of Communicative Approaches. The most important difference is the increased understanding of the nature of lexis in naturally occurring language, and its potential contribution to language pedagogy.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Lexical chunks and Collocations in English<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

    When we talk of Lexical approach, different commentators use different and overlapping terms – ‘prefabricated phrases’, ‘lexical phrases’, ‘formulaic language’, ‘frozen and semi-frozen phrases’, are just some of these terms. ( Carter 1988) Nevertheless all these can be grouped\u00a0 into two categories-\u00a0 ‘lexical chunks’ and ‘collocations’.<\/span><\/p>\n

    ‘Lexical chunk’ is an umbrella term which includes all the other terms. We define a lexical chunk as any pair or group of words which is commonly found together, or in close proximity.<\/span>
    \n ‘Collocation’ is also included in the term ‘lexical chunk’, but we refer to it separately from time to time, so we define it as a pair of lexical content words commonly found together. Following this definition, ‘basic’ + ‘principles’ is a collocation, but ‘look’ + ‘at’ is not because it combines a lexical content word and a grammar function word. Identifying chunks and collocations is often a question of intuition, unless you have access to a corpus.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Here are some examples.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Lexical Chunks (that are not collocations)<\/span> I mean, I think, and then, you know, by the way , up to now, If I were you, let me begin by, a long way off, out of my mind, and things like that, there\u2019s a lot of, or something like that, come to a head, have second thoughts, hit the sack, out and about, down and out, rough and ready<\/span><\/p>\n

    Lexical Chunks (that are collocations)<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0 company policy, sales figures, market share, job satisfaction, human resources, advertising campaign, brand awareness, staff turnover, consumer\u00a0confidence, quality control, interest rate, totally convinced, strong accent, terrible accident, sounds exciting , generate revenue, generate goodwill, generate electricity<\/span>
    \n brings good luck<\/span><\/p>\n

    Meeting steps and useful lexical phrases<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

    Teaching\u00a0the nuances of business meetings is a challenging task to ESP teachers. It\u2019s appropriate to initially introduce to the learners the steps involved and the functions carried out in business meetings and then train them in business \/ general English\u00a0 collocations and chunks that are used in these contexts. Adopting this approach would help the learners grasp easily the required vocabulary that in general, is more or less fixed.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Business meetings mostly involve the following steps and functions:<\/span><\/p>\n

    Introductions<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n