Good use of idioms

Michael Lewis caused quite a stir in the world of ESL when he published his “The Lexical Approach” in 1993. Lewis’s point was basically thus: ESL students are force feed too much English grammar. The idea that grammar can be mastered and then students fill in the blanks with vocabulary is nave, according to Lewis, and makes it difficult for students to understand natural English phrases such as “Let’s have a coffee,” because students have only studied “Shall we drink coffee?” Having taught English to Japanese students, who are taught grammar and only grammar in high school, I found this to be a huge obstacle. Lewis’s book caused a huge sensation on the ESL teaching community, and many teachers thought they didn’t have to teach grammar anymore, it was fine just to teach idiom after idiom. Lewis followed up a few years later with a book on how to apply the lexical approach, saying that it is idioms, expressions and grammar are not so far removed from grammar. In other words,