‘lexisperience‘ (combination of the words lexis + experience) is a term I coined to refer to an individual teacher‘s idiosyncratic experience and impressions of lexical items that the person has gained throughout her entire lexis learning and teaching process.

One of the tentative speculations I made regarding the participating teachers‘ selection of lexical items is that both seemed to have had particular experience with some lexical items they taught in previous or current classroom(s). The phenomenon of lexisperience was also evidenced in teachers‘ attributes about lexical items as well as their views on students‘ characteristics, their motivation, receptiveness, and willingness to learn certain lexis. The term ‘lexisperience‘ is deliberately general in that experience could relate to individual students‘ and teachers‘ language learning, language teaching or social encounters. One interpretation could be that teachers‘ prior exposure and experience with certain lexical items triggers their memory to the extent that it surpasses the content-related or skills-focused-related concerns. It is important to note that they did not perceive this as time consuming but rather they thought that it was valuable in its own right. The notion of lexisperience may explain these ‘arbitrary‘ choices of lexical items, as driven by some sort of personal association. They seemed to make their instructional decisions on the basis of their own intuitions due partly to phonological or orthographical characteristics of certain lexical items. The present study tentatively suggests that lexisperience of classroom members can account for departures from the actual focus of a language lesson partly due to a strong triggering effect of some lexical items.