Introduction

When we examine a wide range of commercial course books, it is no surprisingly for

us to find it is the view of grammar (or view of structure) that dominates the contents
of these course books. Not only some writers of course books but also a considerable
amount of ELT teachers and language learners over a wide range of geographical areas
give their priority to grammar over vocabulary. Supporters of this view of language
claimed that language consists of grammar and vocabulary, and they believed that
grammar plays a dominant role. In other words, the language system is describes as
‘grammar providing the order into which you slot words’ (Dellar and Walkley, 2016: 9).

However, when we carefully take some important factors of language performance,

such as fluency or language conventions, into consideration, we can find that focusing
on grammar in ELT has caused a large number of language learners’ incompetence on
the above issues. As a result, after linguists found the defects of this view of language,
their attention naturally shifts to the other polarity of language, vocabulary.

Wilkins (1972) recommends that: ”without grammar little can be convey; without
vocabulary nothing can be conveyed”. When more attention to lexis has been paid in
the academia and language classrooms, applied linguists and language teachers
started considering the nature of vocabulary. In other words, is it right to regard
vocabulary as single word, or there must be something else supplemented. After two
decades, Lewis (1993) proposes a radical change in the view of language and
vocabulary, which regards language as ‘prefabricated chunks’ rather than a
combination of grammar and vocabulary. He (ibid) argues that syllabus should not be
strictly based on grammatical structures; instead, collocations and chunks should be
in the central place of syllabus. Except Lewis’s Lexical Approach, other linguists note
the great significance of focusing on ‘multi-words’. For example, Sinclair (1999)
proposes the concept of ‘lexical items’, and Biber (1999) states the term of ‘lexical
bundles’. The increasing concentration on ‘multi-words’ points out a new road in ELT.
Lewis’s theory, however, has been attacked by many traditional views of language.
Hoey (2014) comments that Lewis’ theory has been criticised for ‘ignoring how
language is learnt’, ‘having no theoretical underpinning’ and ‘trivialising the role of
grammar’, but he (ibid) strongly argues that the theory has been falsely criticised
because his Lexical Priming (2005) can provide a theoretical underpinning for it. The
aim of this assignment is to investigate the theory of Lexical Priming and explore its
implications in language teaching and learning for B1 to B2 language learners.