ABSTRACT
However, from a pedagogical point of view, which is our main focus, much work is necessary before we can say that collocations are fully incorporated in Foreign Language Teaching (FLT) [→ chapter 11 ]. Twenty years after the publication of Lewis’ works (1993, 1997, 2000), during which some of his claims have been corroborated, the heritage of the Lexical Approach (LA) is limited to some proposals as how to present and practice collocations in textbooks. Very little has been said about the criteria needed to analyze these activities in order for them to be coherent with a lexical approach or, at least, with a communicative approach. Our aim in this chapter is to shed some light on this issue, suggesting some pedagogical principles to teach collocations within the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) framework, bearing in mind the LA principles but moving a step forward and assuming theoretical and lexicographic progress in the understanding of collocations as non-arbitrary examples of lexical selection.
