The lexical approach to L2 teaching with special attention to Croatian

Leksiˇcki pristup vrlo se ˇcesto spominje i rabi u suvremenoj nastavi stra- nih jezika kao alternativa tradicionalnim pristupima, koji su viˇse usmjereni na gramatiku. Taj je pristup usmjeren na ovladavanje leksikom, odnosno leksemima i leksiˇckim sklopovima. Temelj je pristupa osposobiti studenta, neizvornoga govornika jezika da razumije i proizvodi leksiˇcke sklopove kao cjelinu, a ne kao zbroj leksema, te da ti sklopovi postanu uzorak na kojem ´ce se uoˇcavati gramatiˇcke pravilnosti i nepravilnosti. U ˇclanku se opisu- ju temeljne postavke leksiˇckoga pristupa s posebnim osvrtom na prednosti i nedostatke njegove primjene u nastavi hrvatskoga kao stranoga jezika.The lexical approach to second language teaching has received interest in recent years as an alternative to grammar-based approaches. The lexical ap- proach concentrates on developing learners’ proficiency with lexis, or words and word combinations. It is based on the idea that an important part of language acquisition is the ability to comprehend and produce lexical phrases as unanalyzed wholes, or “chunks”, and that these chunks become the raw data by which learners perceive patterns of language traditionally thought of as grammar. In this article the general principles of the lexical approach are described. In addition to that, the paper explores the possibility of using this approach in teaching Croatian as a foreign language are shown. The analysis reveals advantages and disadvantages in using this approach in teaching CFL to other speakers. As Croatian is a language with different language struc- ture than English, particularly in morphology, only some of the lexical ap- proach principles could be applied successfully, particularly at the beginning of learning. For example, while the English verb to come has only four different forms: come, comes, came, coming, its Croatian equivalent, verb do´ci, together with its aspectual pair dolaziti (which is used in the present tense) has dolazi, dolazimo, dolazite, dolaze (there are more for some less used tenses). On the other hand, the principle of memorising institutional- ized expressions could be easily used in Croatian FL learning to some extent too