ABSTRACT

Regarding the selection of linguistic content in the programs, the implementation of the communicative approaches in SLT suffers, generally speaking, from the infl uence of the Structuralism’s view of language, with a heavy stress on the grammatical sentence structure and a forsaking of the lexical content. It could thus be surmised that the old syntactic structures from structuralist methodologies have been replaced with notional-functional units in which vocabulary plays a supporting role. 3 As a consequence, the communicative approach might have been distorted, inasmuch as it offers a way alternative to that of the Structuralism for the activation of a learning process that rests on sound principles about the nature of language and its use. It could be the case that restoring the attention to lexis, favored by the infl uence of the LA, gave rise to the renewal of the communicative approaches, in the way that, as it is common knowledge, focusing only on vocabulary allows for linguistic communication, as opposed to what would happen if only attention were paid to grammar structures. 4 On the other hand, the LA’s questioning of a categorical division between grammar and lexis clearly contributes to an enhancement of the lexis’ role in language teaching, as it will be shown in this chapter. The chapter’s content is organized in the following sections, which are complemented with the conclusions and the appendixes:

• Review of the literature on the teaching of lexis in SLT • The lexical content in institutional documents for course design: the Plan Cur-

ricular del Instituto Cervantes (henceforth PCIC) and the Guía de los DELE . • The LA in textbooks.