Lexical approach, Michael Lewis

Lewis believed in a different approach to that of teaching English as a set of grammar structures into which vocabulary could be placed. He shifted the emphasis through 180 degrees, suggesting that the basis of language should be ‘lexis’, i.e. groups of words which are naturally put together (collocations). By learning about the lexical chunks of language these could be used for real communicative tasks rather than striving for grammatical mastery.