We are lexically indebted to him

Image source:

www.willis-elt.co.uk

I opened my Facebook yesterday morning and was saddened to see Chia Suan
Chong’s post about the passing of Dave Willis. I went over to Twitter and the
feed was already filled with RIPs and condolences. For most in the ELT world
Dave Willis’s name is associated with Task-Based Learning. But his contribution
to lexical approaches to language teaching is just
as outstanding. In fact, his pioneering work on the first Lexical Syllabus
predates Michael Lewis’s seminal book by three years, the main difference between
the two being words as a starting point for Willis and collocations for Lewis.

In the late 1980s Collins published a new EFL textbook
co-authored by Dave Willis and his wife Jane. The book was an outcome of the COBUILD
(Collins Birmingham University International Database) project – at that time
the biggest and most significant attempt to compile a corpus of contemporary English.
Simply titled Collins Cobuild English Course, the book was based on a very
simple premise: most common words in English, such as do, get, it, way carry most
important patterns in the language.

  

Instead of following the usual course of carefully sequenced, item-by-item
presentation of the verb To be, followed by the Present Simple, then
Present Continuous and other “usual suspects”, the book focused on the meanings
of the most frequent words and highlighted patterns associated with
them. At the lowest level – there was a total of three – it offered exercises
such as this:

Image source:

www.oxfam.org.uk

When I was in charge of the book stock and teachers’ resource room
at the British Council I was lucky to stumble across two dusty copies of the student’s books- Level 1 and 2 – and “save” them when the teaching
centre closed down. Looking at the coursebook now, more than 20 years after it was
published, one can see why the ambitious series wasn't the runaway
success it should have been. Authentic unscripted dialogues full of false
starts and pauses, interspersed with erms and mhms with native speakers
interrupting each other while engaging in various tasks was too radical a
departure from the conventional coursebook format. Add to that things like “At
eight o’clock I’m just leaving my house”, “At one o’clock I am normally eating
my lunch” (Oh horror! It should be Present Simple!) and the conspicuous absence
of traditional grammar labels would surely appear outlandish, if not bizarre, to an
ELT practitioner at that time. Mind you, it was the time when the Present Perfect didn’t appear until
Unit 6 of the Intermediate level and the texts were carefully vetted to make
sure an “unknown” structure hadn’t slipped in to distract the learner’s
attention from a specific grammar point being expounded.

A couple of years later, Willis published a book about the
book. The Lexical Syllabus (1990), which is a must read and re-read for any
English teacher, was basically about the process of writing the coursebook. Willis describes the rationale behind the groundbreaking coursebook and explains why they
chose to focus on 700 most common words – fresh corpus evidence had just come in
that these 700 words constitute 70% of English text. The fact that such a small number of words
accounts for a very high proportion of English text “shows the enormous power
of the common words of English”, states Willis (1990: 46). Using these as a
starting point and doing away with the grammar syllabus, the Willis's English Course still covered
all the “traditional” grammar points (Present Simple, Conditionals, Modal verbs)
and then some. It also highlighted many features of spoken grammar which were
absent from textbooks around that time, for example “that” for pointing back (So
we did that one first. That was the easy one), “as” for when/while (Chris
draws a rough map as Philip talks), such patterns as “go and…” (Shall
we go and see a film?), “to do with” (Anything to do with sport)
etc. And I hope it wouldn’t be speaking out of turn to say that the idea behind the coursebook was what
inspired Scott Thornbury’s Natural Grammar which was built around a similar
principle: focusing on the "small words" of English and highlighting patterns
associated with them.

The Lexical Syllabus, which you can find online in its entirety on the Birmingham University website, has a chapter which particularly stuck with me where Willis scrutinizes three
features of pedagogic grammars:  

• The Passive voice 


• The Second conditional


• Reported speech

and
concludes that they have needlessly been elevated to the status of syntactic structures and should instead be treated lexically. Three years later, Lewis (1993) would go
on to claim that these labels – together with Will as the future tense - should
be abandoned from grammar books altogether not stopping short of calling them
“nonsense”. But it was Willis who first pointed out that English is a lexical
language:

It is perhaps particularly unfortunate that
English has for so long been described in terms of a Latinate
grammar derived from a highly inflected language, when English itself is quite
different, a minimally inflected language. Obviously I would not claim that there is
nothing more to English than word meaning, but it does seem that word meaning
and word order are central to English in a way that may not hold true for other
languages.(Willis 1990: 23, my emphasis)

Dave Willis at IATEFL Glasgow 2012

Photo by Chia Suan Chong

In
his IATEFL Harrogate 2010 talk What do we mean by 'grammar''?, which I was lucky to listen
to live (I also enjoyed a nice chat with Dave at a reception that evening), he
insightfully noted that we spend an awful lot of time on teaching “easy”
aspects of grammar and largely leave the learner to work out truly difficult bits
by themselves. As an example he gave multi-part verbs which can be separable (look
smth up or look up smth) or inseparable (look after smb) - a real minefield
for a teacher! Interestingly, students somehow pick them up without our involvement
– have you ever heard a student say “look somebody after”? So can we really claim
that we teach grammar if all we do is select the easy bits – and spend on them an
unproportional amount of class time - while casually avoiding truly
complicated areas?

It
is for insights like this, his criticism of the grammatical syllabus and innovative approach to language teaching that I consider Willis a lexical pioneer to whom we
owe a debt of gratitude.

References

Lewis,
M. (1993). The Lexical Approach: The State of ELT and a Way Forward. Hove: LTP

Willis,
D. (1990). The Lexical Syllabus. London:
Collins