The CATESOL Journal

Independent lexical development initiatives empower and equip language learners with skills to boost their lexical repertoires. Language instructors can train learners to be autonomous word learners. A sample activity, namely word of the day, is presented in this article. The activity is an independent lexical learning task, which aims to develop the lexical range of language learners through self-regulated endeavors. This activity builds on the lexical approach, which lays emphasis on expanding learners’ lexical base in the belief that grammar is embedded in lexis. Thus, the role of “word grammar” overshadows the sentence grammar instruction. The word-of-the-day task acquaints learners with unpacking the lexical information in a word or phrase and sharing their lexical discoveries with the class. The activity could be systematically integrated into the course syllabus. Learners will value lexis as a rich resource of syntactical knowledge and will realize that lexical development is directly proportional to linguistic fluency