Lewis, 1997

What is lexical approach? Discuss Michael Lewis's four categories. How is this idea different from what you have known about language and language learning?

Michael Lewis (1993) challenged the standard view of dividing language teaching into grammar and vocabulary by arguing that language consists of lexical items. He treats them as belonging to four major categories.
A relatively small group of lexical items is the words and polywords. A second category is collocations. In Lewis's approach, a third category is fixed expressions, and a fourth, semi-fixed expressions.

Language fluency and accuracy is achieved largely by retrieving and combining ready-made chunks of language. ‘The ability to chunk language successfully is central to understanding of how language works' (Lewis, 1997).