This digest provides an overview of the methodological foundations underlying the lexical approach to language teaching and the pedagogical implications suggested by them. The lexical approach has received interest in recent years as an alternative to grammar-based approaches. It 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. Instruction focuses on fixed expressions that occur frequently in spoken language. Advances in computer-based studies of language, such as corpus linguistics, have provided huge databases of language corpora that have examined patterns of phrase and clause sequences as they appear in various texts as well as in spoken language. Lexical items include words, polywords, collocations or word partnerships, institutionalized utterances, and sentence frames and heads. (Contains 15 references.) (VWL)