The lexical method concentrates on teaching fixed terms that are common in conversations, which Lewis states make up a bigger portion of speech than original words and sentences.
The teaching of chunks and set phrases has become common in English as a foreign or second language, though this is not necessarily primarily due to the Lexical Approach.
Most language learners are accustomed to learning basic conversation starters in the form of lexical chunks, including: "Good morning," "How are you?"
Various vocabulary selection studies can be traced back to the 1920s and 1930s (West 1926; Ogden 1930; Faucet et al. 1936), and recent advances in techniques for the computer analysis of large databases of authentic text have helped to resuscitate this line of work.
Related work on collocation is reported by Sinclair (1987) and Kennedy (1989), and the Collins COBUILD English Course (Willis & Willis 1988) is cited as an exemplary pedagogic implementation of the work, though "in fact, however, the COBUILD textbooks utilize one of the more complex hybrid syllabi in current ESL texts" (Long & Crookes 1993:23).