George Woolard uses key words to unlock word partnerships.

In the ten years since the publication of the Lexical Approach by Michael Lewis, collocation, one of the central ideas of the book, is beginning to establish itself in English Language Teaching. This can be seen from the growing trend in new coursebooks of providing vocabulary exercises on collocation, and setting tasks which encourage the kind of noticing that is essential to learning collocation.As teachers, we need to raise awareness of collocation and to provide activities and materials which help develop learner competence. My own approach is guided by the following principles:● Learning new vocabulary is not just learning new words, it is often learning familiar words in new combinations.● Practice must be directed towards helping the learner collocate words and grammaticalise from word to sentence.● The noun provides the most efficient focus for learning collocation. Familiar words in new combinationsA learner can know the meaning of a word, use it in a grammatically well-formed sentence and communicate effectively, yet still fail to produce acceptable English. For example,1 Scientists are making research into the causes of AIDS.2 The result was an extreme disappointment. 3 We’ll experience many costs, and few benefits will come.In each case, the learner understands the highlighted word, but fails to collocate correctly. Each of these miscollocations has something instructive to tell us about the nature of collocation itself.In 1, make should be replaced by do. This example highlights the fixed nature of collocation. There is no reason why it should be do rather than make, it just is! This is certainly true of verb–noun collocations where the verbs do, get, have, make, put and take carry little meaning. This de-lexicalised use of the verb accounts for an extremely large number of collocations in English.

Learning collocation, then, is knowing which words can go together.In 2, extreme should be replaced by big, huge or bitter. This example demonstrates that collocation is often learning about constraints on language use. We can say The result was extremely disappointing, but the simple grammar transformation to The result was an extreme disappointment is blocked by the speech community. Learning collocation is also about knowing which words can’t go together. Sentence 3 shows that collocation is subject-defining. The competent business English user not only knows key business terms like costs and benefits, but also the particular verbs that they collocate with. In 3, incur should replace experience and accrue should replace come. It is the learners’ ability to use appropriate collocations rather than particular grammatical structures which determines their proficiency within a particular subject area. As teachers, we encourage learners to keep vocabulary lists, but the type of error highlighted above demonstrates the need to raise awareness of the fact that learning new vocabulary is not just learning new words, it is often learning familiar words in new combinations. This means that learners need to return to the words on their lists at regular intervals in order to extend their knowledge of their collocations. As with grammar, learning vocabulary is not linear, but cyclical in nature. Grammaticalising from word to sentenceLewis states that ‘language consists of grammaticalised lexis, not lexicalised grammar’. The contrast he draws actually reflects two different ways of looking at language. Lexicalised grammar refers to the traditional ‘slot and filler’ approach in which prominent structures such as the tenses are highlighted. For example, in a typical lesson on the present perfect tense, the learner is presented with I’ve been to ........, but I haven’t been to ........ yet and is encouraged to complete this frame with suitable vocabulary items, e.g. I’ve been to Greece, but I haven’t been to Italy yet.

Grammaticalised lexis, on the other hand, refers to a ‘word grammar’ approach in which the learner moves out from a word to discover its collocations and dominant grammatical patterns. For example, from the utterance My mother holds very strong views on the subject of marriage, the learner notices that you can hold a view, that a view can be strong and that view is followed by the preposition on. This leaves the learner with a chunk of language: to hold very strong views on (something). This kind of word grammar approach helps the learner to avoid the type of miscollocation we examined earlier. It should be noted that a word grammar approach, as the term itself suggests, tends to dissolve the strict dichotomy that we draw between grammar and vocabulary, as any focus on the combination of words will usually involve grammar. For example, if learners apply a word grammar approach to success in the utterance I’ve been looking for a job for some time now, but I haven’t had much success in finding one, not only do they note that success collocates with have and is followed by the preposition in, but their attention is also drawn to a very common and useful use of perfect tenses. This particular combination of the present perfect continuous tense + present perfect tense is used to describe an activity with a particular aim, followed by an evaluation of how far that aim has been achieved. From this observation, the learner can easily generate further examples: I’ve been looking for a flat for some time now, but I haven’t had much success in finding one; I’ve been trying to contact Boston for over an hour now, but I haven’t had much success in getting through. In learning vocabulary, then, the learner is also learning grammar. Rather than seeing the slot and filler approach and the word grammar approach as in some kind of opposition, as the quote from Lewis seems to suggest, I believe that, in relation to language learning, they are in fact complementary, and further I would argue that the learner needs to adopt both approaches in order to achieve a full

THE WORKSHOPALWAYS FREE ISSUE NO. 4

LTC INTERNATIONAL COLLEGE / SEPTEMBER 2009 / VOLUME 1

Noticing and Learning Collocation

competence. The slot and filler approach enables the learner to produce huge amounts of grammatically well-formed language, while the word grammar approach shows the learner how much of that language is actually acceptable.Where Lewis is right, however, is in his insistence that ‘practice must be directed towards helping the learner collocate words and grammaticalise from word to sentence’. It is this which is lacking in current materials and methodology and so we need to enrich our teaching by adding a word grammar dimension to it. Focus on nounsIf a word has ten or more significant collocations, the size of the learning task begins to look enormous. However, adopting a noun focus helps to make the task more manageable. The justification for such an approach is twofold. Firstly, language is used to communicate meaning, and meaning generally centres on the noun. Secondly, a word grammar focus on the noun will draw in significant verbs and adjectives, leading to an efficient and contextualised learning of vocabulary. For example, in the earlier sentence My mother holds very strong views on the subject of marriage, a word grammar approach to view drew in the words hold and strong as significant collocations. We could, of course, create collocation exercises with the adjective strong – strong coffee, strong opinion, strong smell; or with the verb hold –hold a conversation, hold an opinion, hold a grudge. This is similar to the ‘make or do’ exercises which are common in most current textbooks. My dissatisfaction with these exercises is that the focus is, I feel, in the wrong place, as make has little or no meaning when it collocates with decision, appointment, noise, etc. If our aim in using language is to communicate meaning, it is more helpful to focus on the noun in these collocations rather than the delexicalised verb – for instance to help the learner say various things about appointments: make an appointment, cancel an appointment, keep an appointment, miss an appointment, etc. As a general strategy, the learner should be encouraged to focus on nouns in texts and notice the language around them. Teachers can exploit the texts in their current coursebooks by directing their students’ attention to key nouns in these texts and by creating supplementary word grammar tasks which help the learners to notice and record their significant collocations.Teaching collocationEven if teachers follow the above suggestions, the problem of coverage remains, as key nouns in coursebook texts are not revisited in the same

systematic way that key grammar items tend to be. By this I mean that the various collocations of words like opinion and success are not threaded through the units in the coursebook to provide a fuller picture of the uses of these words. Consequently, the learners’ exposure to the significant collocations of a particular key word is unstructured and haphazard. How then can we improve on the situation? What materials can we provide? Designing a coursebook to satisfy the above demands would be an enormous task and probably unmanageable. If each key word has ten or more significant collocations then the number of items to be threaded through the coursebook becomes unworkable. However, I do think that supplementary materials which provide concentrated and structured practice in collocation can fill this gap and work alongside the coursebook.A further argument for this approach lies in the fact that collocation, by its nature, lends itself to independent language learning. It is the kind of task the learner can perform outside the classroom, and the kind of activity that will help make maximum use of the coursebook in the classroom. One possible format for supplementary materials is to provide exercises which highlight significant verb and adjective collocations and larger chunks of language such as the much-neglected but common noun + preposition + noun structure. The sample exercises which follow focus on use as a noun and are aimed at the higher-intermediate/advanced student.Practising collocationIn order to appreciate the richness of language that surrounds the key word, try to think of verb and adjective collocations with the noun use, and any other significant chunks of language containing use before you try the exercises below. Not many higherintermediate/ advanced students will produce this sort of language unassisted. The first exercise type uses the traditional gap-fill format to focus on verb collocations.Exercise type 1Complete the sentences below with the correct form of the following verbs:ban have lose make1 I’m afraid she can’t walk. She .................... the use of her legs in a road accident.2 In order to reduce pollution we need to .................... more use of the energy provided by the sun and the wind.3 Let’s go for a drive. I .................... the use of my father’s car for the weekend.4 The United Nations should try to .................... the use of chemical weapons and get all countries to agree not to produce them. The second exercise type offers the learner two

choices to complete the collocation. In this case, two semantically related terms are given, but only one is appropriate. This format is particularly useful in helping the learner avoid miscollocations. In the following exercise the focus is on adjective collocations.Exercise type 2Choose the correct collocation:1 This entrance is in constant/full use. Please do not park in front of it.2 Your son is very clever, but he doesn’t make complete/full use of his abilities in the classroom. He could achieve much better results. 3 The sign next to the fire alarm said ‘Penalty for wrong/improper use – £200’.4 It’s a very mild shampoo and doesn’t dry your hair out. This makes it ideal for everyday/widespread use. The third exercise type helps the learner to notice larger chunks of language. In this particular exercise, the focus is on the noun + preposition + noun structure.Exercise type 3Complete the sentences below with a suitable preposition:1 The steep increase .................... the use of mobile phones in recent years has led to a dramatic reduction in the use of phone boxes.2 The stone steps in the old castle had been worn away by years .................... use.3 Our organisation has to follow very strict guidelines .................... the use of personal details on computers.4 It’s very user-friendly. There is a large handle at the front of the device for ease .................... use. Supplementary exercises of this sort provide rich and structured practice in collocation and word grammar. Furthermore, once the learner has completed these exercises, they remain a reference source which can be revisited and reactivated to develop fluency.

George Woolard is an experienced ELT teacher and trainer who has worked in Greece, Malaysia and the UK. He now teaches at Stevenson College, Edinburgh. He is the author of Key Words for Fluency, a new series of collocation practice books published by Thomson ELT. His previous publications include Lessons with Laughter and Grammar with Laughter, also published by Thomson ELT.

Why is collocation important1. The lexicon is not arbitrary

The first and most obvious reason why collocation is important is because the way words combine in collocations is

fundamental to all language use. The lexicon is not arbitrary. We do not speak or write as if language were one huge

substitution table with vocabulary items merely filling slots in grammatical structures. To an important extent

vocabulary choice is predictable. When a speaker thinks of drinking, he may use a common verb such as ‘have’. The

listener’s expectations predict a large number of possibilities: tea, coffee, milk, mineral water, orange juice, even

tequila sunrise, but there would be no expectations of engine oil, shampoo or sulphuric acid. The latter liquids are

drunk by accident, but linguistically they are not ‘probable’ in the way that the former are. Looking at a rarer word -

enhance - the choice of objects is limited to a relatively small number of nouns or noun patterns, e.g. his reputation,

the standing of the company. If the verb is ‘do’, the choice is far greater, but still limited, e.g. his best, the honourable

thing, but not a mistake. So, the very definition of collocation - the way words combine - gives it a status which we

cannot deny.

2. The size of the phrasal mental lexicon

Collocation is important because this area of predictability is, as we have seen, enormous. Two, three, four and even

five-word collocations make up a huge percentage of all naturally-occuring text, spoken or written. Estimates vary,

but it is possible that up to 70% of everything we say, hear, read, or write is to be found in some form of fixed

expression.

3. The role of memory

We know collocations because we have met them. We then retrieve them from our mental lexicon just as we pull a

telephone number or address from our memory.

4. Fluency

5. Collocation allows us to think more quickly and communicate more efficiently. Native speakers can only speak at

the speed they do because they are calling on a vast repertoire of ready-made language, immediately available from

their mental lexicons. Similarly, they can listen at the speed of speech and read quickly because they are constantly

recognising multi-word units rather than processing everything word-by-word. One of the main reasons the learner

finds listening or reading difficult is not because of the density of new words, but the density of unrecognised

collocations.

5. Complex ideas are often expressed lexically

Typical intermediate student speech, for example, is laboured, one word at a time, and uses simple vocabulary to

express both simple and complicated ideas. This inevitably causes problems. Simple language is ideal for the

expression of simple ideas. Complex ideas are difficult to express in complex language, they are even more difficult

to express in simple language. But the complexity needed here is not convoluted grammar; it is usually lexical -

complex noun phrases, frequently made of supposedly ‘easy’ words. The more exposure students have to good

quality input and the more awareness they develop of the lexical nature of language, the more they will recognise

and eventually produce longer chunks themselves.

6. Collocation makes thinking easier

The reason we can think new things and speak at the speed of thought is because we are not using new language all

the time. Collocation allows us to name complex ideas quickly so that we can continue to manipulate the ideas

without using all our brainspace to focus on the form of the words. Try to say ‘manipulate ideas’ or ‘brainspace’

more efficiently! Both are recognised ‘verb + noun’ and ‘noun + noun’ collocations. It is a safe conclusion that

collocation is an important key to fluency. Advanced students do not become more fluent by being given lots of

opportunities to be fluent - think Dutch or Scandinavian learners. They become more fluent when they acquire more

chunks of language for instant retrieval. As Stephen Krashen has pointed out, acquisition crucially depends on the

quantity and quality of input.

7. Pronunciation is integral

Most teachers will have had the experience of watching and enjoying a Shakespeare play. Few will understand fully

the nuances of Shakespeare’s language. The actors, however, speak the lines meaningfully, correctly chunked for us,

allowing us to have a greater ‘understanding’ of what is being said.

Learners create much of what they say from individual words, their pronunciation, stress, and intonation, can be

difficult for the listener. The great added bonus to knowing a large number of collocations and other longer

expressions is that if learners learn the stress pattern of a phrase as a whole, their stress and intonation will be

better.

by Seth Lindstromberg and Frank Boers, UK and Belgium Sophomore

• • •

Three exercisesWhat are those initials for?1. On a handout, or by power point, show students a short text in which a few chunks are replaced by initials, e.g.,

Example textIn 2008, Swedish police c. a c. that had baffled them for months. You see, valuable items such as cameras had been disappearing from the luggage of passengers on intercity coaches. Nobody could understand how goods could be stolen from suitcases when their owners saw them safely loaded into the luggage hold of their coach and when they then reclaimed their suitcases immediately o. arr. a. their d. What the police found out was this: A member of a gang, who must have been very strong, chose a coach to travel on. He checked in a great big suitcase. In it, was a midget also a member of the gang! When the suitcase was safely in the luggage hold, the midget would come out of the suitcase, crawl around inside the hold, break open other suitcases, and steal any valuables found inside them. After a while, the midget would creep back into his (or her?) great big suitcase – along with the st. g. He would then c. the lid t. , and wait until the other gang member (who would make the same trip in a more comfortable part of the coach) would collect the suitcase.2. Explain key items of vocabulary – in this case, midget.3. Tell your students you will read the text out to them in full. Add that while you are speaking, they should not write; however, as soon as you finish, they should pick pens or pencils and try to write down the full form of each initialized expression (cracked a case, on arrival at their destination, stolen goods, close the lid tight).4. When you’ve finished reading, give students time to write and confer.5. Bring your class together and ask what the full phrases are.6. Later, at the end of the lesson, write on the board the initials of the phrases targeted in this exercise and ask students to form pairs or threes and try to tell each other what all the phrases are.

Rationale:1. The initials serve to draw students’ attention to the chunks.2. If students hear the chunks correctly, they then need to hold them in working memory until you have finished speaking. Holding information in

working memory like this is known to foster memory formation.

3. The chunks are in context, which should help students understand them and see more or less clearly how they fit into a sentences.

‘Slate’ idiomsAll you need for this is one or two bits of roofing slate to show to your class.1. Pass the bit(s) of slate around.2. Ask your class what the typical functions of slate are or were – i.e., for writing on with chalk and for covering roofs with. Also, when urban mobs rioted, e.g., in London, rioters would sometimes rip slates off roofs and throw them at whoever they were fighting.3. Note these functions on the board, perhaps in mindmap fashion (see ‘Mindmap’ at Wikipedia).4. Dictate the following three sentences

(but not the glosses in square brackets):

a. A convicted criminal, on release from prison, should be allowed to start again with a clean slate. [i.e., start again with no more penalties to pay]b. The critics slated the play; as a result, it closed after only three performances. [i.e., fiercely attacked]c. The start of the race, originally slated for 2pm, was postponed until 3pm on account of rain. [i.e., scheduled for]4. Invite speculation (a) about the meaning of each sentence and (b) about how each meaning relates to the functions of slate that noted on the board. (Meanings ‘a’ and ‘c’ relate to the use of slate to write messages on – e.g., tallies and event notices – while ‘b’ relates to the occasional but memorable use of roofing slates as weapons.)5. Now and again in later lessons, show your bit of slate, ask what it’s called, and elicit the three idioms.

RationaleThis sort of exploration of the origin of idioms is now known to help students not just to understand idioms such as these (i.e., ‘figurative idioms’) but also to remember them.

Sort these phrasesMake a list of 10-20 common phrases, or ‘chunks’, that your students have encountered in recent weeks. Include some which show some kind of sound repetition; for example, in this article you have already come across power point, convicted criminal, pay a penalty mindmap & crack the case (which show alliteration) and start with a clean slate (which show consonance). Also include a few chunks which show no obvious sound repetition – for instance (also from above), immediately on arrival, close it tight, All you need for this….

1. Display or dictate the phrases./2. Working individually or in pairs, students try to sort the phrases into groups according to whether they show no repetition of sound, alliteration, consonance or some other sort of sound repetition – e.g., word repetition (on and on), rhyme (a deep sleep), assonance (the right time), or some combination of these patterns (back in action – assonance + consonance).3. Call the class together in order to reach a consensus.

Rationale:This exercise kills two birds with one stone. Most obviously, it is a review exercise of a kind which has been too much neglected in phrase teaching. After all, because phrases are harder to remember than individual words, more review is needed, not less. Less obvious is the experimentally verified potential of sound repetition to help students remember the form of phrases. By recollection of ‘form’, we mean the following: Suppose you want to express a particular meaning in conversation and remember that there is a phrase which expresses it perfectly yet you cannot remember it quickly enough to use it before you lose your turn in the conversation. What happened? You forgot the form. While this can occur when you’re speaking your mother tongue, it happens much more often when you’re speaking a foreign language (FL) because you are less likely to have formed highly durable memory traces of FL chunks. Summary These three exercises exemplify aspects of what we will argue is a more effective version of the Lexical Approach than the one that has come down to us from writers such as Nattinger and deCarrico (1992) and Michael Lewis (1993, 1997, 2000). Their pioneering work remains extremely important, but it is our belief that their Lexical Approach has at least one gigantic gap. Before we develop this argument, let’s consider the background more fully.

IntroductionOver the past four decades or so, three facts have become increasingly evident.1. What a native-speaker writes and says consists very substantially of memorized combinations of words rather than indiv idual words spontaneously combined in the mind of the individual according to principles of syntax. Erman and Warren (2000), for instance, reckon the proportion of chunks in spoken and written texts to be about 55%. (See especially Wray 2002.)2. The remarkable fluency of a typical native-speaker is supported very largely

Teaching Chunks of Language: The Issue of Memory

by knowledge of such memorized word combinations. (Again, see Wray 2002.)3. It is the heavy use by native-speakers of such memorized combinations that explains why it is so hard for non-native-speakers to sound completely natural even when – in terms of grammar, word knowledge and pronunciation – they may be highly proficient (Pawley and Syder 1983).As is well-known, since the early 1990s f o r e i g n l a n g u a g e t e a c h i n g methodologists such as James Nattinger, Jeanette DeCarrico and Michael Lewis have argued that these three facts oblige all of us to participate in a radical shift of emphasis (called the Lexical Approach by Michael Lewis) away from teaching single-word vocabulary and rules of grammar and toward teaching word combinations. A result of this shift, it is claimed, will be learners who have greater fluency and who speak and write with greater naturalness of phrasing.1 Perhaps because these ends chime so harmoniously with basic goals of the Communicative Approach, the Lexical Approach made great headway – at conferences, at least. In classrooms, that change has almost certainly been far from dramatic.Before continuing, let us look more closely at three key terms: ‘fluency, ‘native-like phrasing’, and the term ‘lexical’ as it is used in the phrase the Lexical Approach:Fluency: In talk about the Lexical Approach (LA), the term ‘fluency’ mainly means a comparatively relaxed quickness of speech although fluency in writing can also be a good thing. Very useful too is being able fluently to understand what one hears or reads. Authorities on fluency recognize all these facets (see Riggenbach 2000).Native-like phrasing: This denotes the ability to use conventional word combinations as native-speakers use them so that what one says or writes does not seem odd to native-speakers or to other very good users of English. For example, the following is conventional: Cameron casts doubt on Brown’s forecasts. (= ‘Cameron says something intended to make people doubt what Brown has said’). Also perfectly grammatical, but non-conventional ways of expressing the same idea include Cameron puts doubt on … and Cameron throws doubt on….

The Lexical Approach: The term that Nattinger, DeCarrico and Lewis have used for conventional, memorized word combinations is ‘lexical phrases’. By this they mean phrases that are remembered, and used, as if they were single words – i.e., as lexemes. An uncontroversial example of such a phrase seems to be by the way, which is more or less synonymous with the single word incidentally. As it happens, dozens of other terms have been used

by other writers: e.g., ‘multi-word vocabulary’, ‘formulaic sequences’, ‘prefabricated sequences’, ‘lexical chunks’, and ‘chunks’. On account of its brevity, we generally use this last term, ‘chunks’. (For more terms, and for more about the role of chunks in linguistic cognition and communication, see Wray 2002.)

Difficulties with implementing the Lexical Approach so farThe sheer number chunks is daunting. One obvious practical difficulty concerns mainly the quantity of chunks. That is, how can masses of chunks be learned and remembered during a non-intensive course (in a mother tongue setting at that) which must also cover various aspects of the target language? Increasingly, proponents of the Lexical Approach have advocated some version of the following:

• In class, teach mainly the commonest chunks. Medium and low-frequency chunks (i.e., the vast majority of chunks) merit little in-class attention.

• In class, show students how to recognize chunks and how to learn them on their own, outside of class – in particular, while reading.

But there are problems with this prescription. (1) It would seem that the commonest chunks are precisely those which students have the best chance of learning without a teacher’s help because these chunks are likely to occur sufficiently often within a short space of time or number of pages for learners to notice, understand and remember them. (2) Incidental learning of vocabulary during, say, sessions of out-of-class reading, can go very slowly (Laufer 1997, 2005). For one thing, for noticing, understanding and some degree of remembering to happen, a learner must generally meet a new vocabulary item from 6 to 12 times (estimates vary) within a fairly short span of time. If a chunk is not highly frequent, this condition is exceedingly unlikely to be met. (3) Learners find it particularly difficult to notice chunks. All in all, there is reason to doubt that a typical learner can incidentally acquire a considerable number of medium-frequency (let alone low-frequency) chunks through, say, out-of-class reading. (See Boers et al. [Forthcoming] for a more thorough discussion of these matters.)Quality of learning matters.A less obvious, but no less serious difficulty has to do with the quality of learning. In short, for good fluency, passive knowledge of chunks is not enough. For any given chunk to be recalled immediately as it is needed for production, memory traces must be strong (Eyckmans 2007). It seems uncontroversial to say that incidental learning of chunks through reading is

most likely to result in knowledge that is passive.

T h e L e x i c a l A p p r o a c h i s underpowered in terms of task types.The key question is this: How can teachers help students remember chunks well-enough to reap the hoped-for benefit of increased fluency? Techniques and exercises currently associated with the Lexical Approach tend to encourage students to notice chunks, which is plainly necessary. But, in the main, these techniques and methods show insufficient promise as means of helping learners form memory traces that are strong and durable. It is simply a fact that the Lexical Approach has been supported by a minimal infusion of new practices and techniques. One new family of practices that we know of consists in getting learners to use concordancing software (see, e.g., www.collins.co.uk/corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx) so that they can learn more about how words combine with other words in real discourse as represented by large, digitally stored collections of texts known as ‘corpora’ (see, e.g., ‘corpora ideas’ in the subject index of this magazine). We doubt, though, that many teachers would agree that this sort of thing is likely without further ado to consistently result in students having firm productive knowledge of the word combinations they encounter.

Where are we then?The status quo seems to be this:

• Virtually everyone agrees that it would be wonderful if all language learners knew huge numbers of chunks very well. Some writers, though, are most impressed by the practical difficulties students face in achieving such a result in a non-intensive classroom setting. These people refer to the impossibly huge number of chunks to be learned as well as to the other important things (e.g., grammar teaching) that would have to be neglected were chunks to be made the object of intensive focus in the classroom (see. e.g., Swan 2006).

• Virtually everyone agrees that the huge number of chunks in (probably) any target language means that only a fraction of them can receive attention in the classroom and so teachers and materials writers must prioritize and winnow them according to some such criteria as level of frequency and degree of immediate usefulness.

• Unless students are immersed in the target language (e.g., during a long stay abroad), it is unrealistic to expect that they will learn many chunks out of class – or, at least, learn them well-enough for their fluency to be significantly improved.

• It is implicit in proposals for students to learn chunks out of class that

current methods for teaching chunks in class are not outstandingly effective.

• NEEDED: A SUBSTANTIALLY NEW METHODOLOGY FOR DEALING WITH THE CHUNKS THAT ONE DOES DECIDE TO FOCUS ON IN CLASS.

In sum, this is why we decided to write an ideas book for teachers about how to make the Lexical Approach, or ‘Teaching Chunks of Language’, more effective. So then, what are our proposals?

Making Chunk Teaching more effectiveThe major weakness of the Lexical Approach as we have known it is its general neglect of the absolutely crucial issue of memory, an issue which, for practical purposes, we can sub-divide as follows:

1. noticing (which current methodology addresses moderately well)2. formation of strong memory traces (massively overlooked so far)3. review/revision: maintenance and of memory traces (also neglected in practice although everyone recognizes its importance in principle). 2Let us look at these three issues one by one:

Noticing and initial memory formationNoticing is when learners fixate on a new expression that they either hear or see in print. This is when learners devote some attention to the spelling (or sounds), when they consider the word boundaries and when they pause (if only very briefly) to consider meaning. Noticing is primary in the process of memory formation, and any successful teaching method must include techniques for helping students notice what could be useful for them to recall later on. Simple, but potentially effective techniques include underlining target chunks and/or writing them in color. These and many other useful techniques will already be familiar to an experienced teacher (after all, the importance of noticing is not a new discovery whatever some may think!).In chapter two of our book Teaching Chunks of Language includes 14 separate activities (or activity sequences) designed to help students notice chunks (with most activities including more than one technique for promoting noticing). What is new there, for the most part, is how these techniques are adapted in order to focus on the learning of chunks. Some readers may also find that that chapter includes new ideas about what kinds of chunks you can teach. Activity 2.14, for instance, is about teaching ‘situational clichés’ such as Fingers crossed! (You have already met one of our shorter

activities above in Section 1.0 – ‘What are those initials for?’ – although here we’ve used a new text.)

Formation of strong memory tracesThe best-known writers on the Lexical Approach appear to have entirely overlooked the following important facts:

1. Many chunks are figurative (e.g., metaphorical) and are, consequently, relatively easy to remember (especially in terms of their meaning), provided that they are properly approached (see Boers and Lindstromberg [2006] for a review of the evidence).2. Many chunks show patterns of sound repetition (e.g., alliteration as in beat around the bush). These chunks too, particularly their form, are potentially relatively easy to remember (e.g., Boers a n d L i n d s t r o m b e r g 2 0 0 8 & Lindstromberg and Boers 2008a, 2008b).You probably recall activities ‘b’ and ‘c’ in section 1.0 – ‘Slate idioms’ and ‘Sort these phrases’; each implements a different strategy to achieve the same overall goal – formation of more durable memory traces. The ‘Slate idioms’ activity is a very brief example of a way of working with figurative idioms which significantly raises learners’ rates of recall and, in particular, strengthens memory for meaning. The activity ‘Sort these phrases’ is an example of a simple, but mnemonically effective, way of working with chunks that show patterns of sound repetition.

Let’s look at both strategies in more detail.

Working with figurative chunksThese chunks tend to be known as idioms. As it happens, the view is still widespread that the word-by-word composition of idioms is fluky and that the origins of their meanings are lost in the mists of time (viz., kick the bucket). In fact the number of such expressions whose meaning seems wholly arbitrary (i.e., the result of chance factors) is relatively tiny. Grant (2003: 96-7, 161) persuasively estimates their number to be a bit above 100, and she includes “borderline” cases in this total. Except for these, the vast majority of idioms are figurative in ways that learners can be helped to see. This process of coming to understand the ‘why and wherefore’ of an idiom is known to be powerful mnemonic. For one thing, this process of ‘unlocking’ the figurative essence of an idiom will involve, for many learners, the generation of mental images, which has a powerful positive effect in memory formation. Most of chapter 3 in our book is devoted to activities (all being a good deal longer than the ‘Slate idioms’ example) which we designed to help students unlock the figurative heart

of common idioms in order to make them more memorable. In the appendix to this article, you will find another activity – which we forgot to include in our book – that focuses on chunks which can be used figuratively. (If you would like to see a list of good reasons for teaching idioms in the first place, despite the fact that few of them are highly frequent, see McCarthy [1998: 131-49].)

Working with chunks that show sound repetitionIt has long been assumed – especially by poets, lyrics writers and slogan writers – that rhyme and alliteration (and so on) are ‘catchy’, i.e., that passages of text which rhyme and alliterate (and so on) ‘catch’ in your memory, maybe a bit like a burr catches on a woolen shirt or pullover. Surprisingly it appears to have been only very recently that applied linguists began to investigate this matter with respect to learning a second or foreign language. The findings have been unequivocal: all else being equal, students find a chunk which rhymes (have a thin skin), alliterates (have street smarts) and/or assonates (high tide) easier to remember than a chunk which shows no such pattern of repetition. We believe that the activities in our book which focus on this aspect of phrasal vocabulary are a significant innovation in chunk teaching, especially because sound repetition is actually very common in (English) phraseology (e.g., Lindstromberg and Boers 2008b)

In sum, what we propose is the foregrounding of a third criterion (in addition to the criteria of frequency and immediate usefulness) for deciding which chunks to focus on in class. We call it the criterion of ‘memorability’ although ‘teachability’ could do as well. Taking account of this criterion would raise the priority of most figurative chunks and chunks showing mnemonic sound repetition.

Review/Revision for maintenance/deeper entrenchment of memory tracesHere, we will mainly repeat what everyone probably knows – published materials for chunk teaching provide far too few review exercises. After all, chunks are hard to remember – even harder than single word lexis and Lord knows even those are difficult enough to remember. So, lots of review is essential! We believe our book, Teaching Chunks of Language, is also innovative also in the extent to which it recognizes the fact that without review the results of good teaching and learning can simply go up in smoke. Aside from devoting a chapter entirely to review activities, activities in earlier chapters conclude with ideas/materials

for review and/or these activities can themselves be used to help students strengthen their memories of chunks met earlier. The activity ‘Sort these phrases’ (Section 1.0 above), is an example of such dual-purpose potential.

ConclusionWe do not claim that adoption of our proposals would dispel every problem connected with the Lexical Approach. There simply is no magic wand for learning the myriad chunks that are worth learning by anyone wishing to become a good, fluent user of an L2. However, we do believe that teachers and materials writers ought to pay more attention to the factor of memory. In particular, we believe that good results can follow special in-class treatment of chunks that are potentially memorable because they are phonologically repetitive (like fully functional), because they are figurative (like bend the rules), or because they are both (like lift the lid [on a scandal]).

Appendix 1: Another noticing activity‘When I give the signal’Focus: All kinds of chunk; intensive reading; reading out loud; listening to a partnerLevel: Pre-intermediate – Upper-intermediateTime: 10 - 20 minutesMaterials: A copy of a storyThis exercise focuses on chunks in a text that students have already read and understood. Its purpose is to encourage noticing and slightly delayed recall. Stories seem to work best.

PreparationPrepare your story by underlining the chunks you want to target and highlighting the last few word(s) just before the chunk. To indicate good pause points (see Procedure, below), insert marks; in the text below we have used double slashes. Note that it will probably not be possible to focus on every single chunk in the text.

Procedure1. Tell your students that you are going to read a story out loud, slowly and dramatically. Add that –2. Sometimes you will pause and signal that it’s ‘memory-test time’ by snapping your fingers or by giving them a significant look.3. You will then re-read part of what you just read out (i.e., the words given in bold in the example below), but then you will pause.4. They should try to say from memory whatever words come next, right up to where you paused in step ‘a’ just above. That is, they should call out the words that are underlined in the example text below.

5. Start the activity. Paraphrase any potentially unknown vocabulary as you go along.

VariationOnce you have led students through this activity a couple of times, they can do it themselves in pairs or trios. In this case, unless students can sit well away from each other, it is best to do this activity with two or three different texts at the same time so that pairs sitting next to each other are not distracted by hearing someone else say ‘their’ words.

The Story (traditional Middle Eastern): intermediate level (the main target chunks are underlined):One day, a man named Joha bought a pitta from one of the sellers, or ‘traders’, in the central market of his home town.// Pitta, by the way, is also called ‘pocket bread’. It’s like a pocket, but it’s bread and you can put food in it to make a kind of sandwich. Anyway, Joha didn’t have enough money // to buy anything tasty to put in his pita. What he really wanted // was to put a bit of cooked chicken in his pita, or at least just some slices of cucumber or tomato, but he couldn’t afford to buy any.// In fact, he was so short of money // that his pita wasn’t even fresh. That was because he had had to buy one that was two days old. So it was, not surprisingly, dry and hard. // Anyway, while strolling through the market, Joha took a little bite of his pita. “Yuk!”, he thought. “This has no taste at all!” Just then, he noticed a man roasting a chicken over red hot coals.// These chickens were already golden brown, sizzling, and dripping fat onto the coals. Joha moved closer in that direction. // Ohh! The air was filled with wonderful, chickeny smoke. It was divine! Irresistible! Suddenly, Joha had an idea, ‘a Eureka moment’.// He stood near the roasting chicken and held his stale, dry pita in the smoke so that it would take in some of the smoky, chickeny flavour. The man who was roasting the chicken didn’t notice at first what Joha was up to // because he was busy dealing with customers.// When he did see what Joha was doing to, he shouted, “That’s my smoke! I’m not running a charity here. You owe me 50 dinars! Pay up! Fork it over! ”// Joha was too surprised for words.// “You’re crazy”, he replied. And added, “You’ve got a screw loose! ” // And he refused to pay any money for the smoke. The trader immediately began shouting for a policeman. Unfortunately for Joha, a policemen quickly appeared on the scene. Also unfortunately for Joha, as soon as the policeman laid eyes on Joha’s old and shabby clothes //, he took the side of the trader. Roughly, he grabbed Joha’s left ear, and dragged him off to face a magistrate…a sort of local judge. The gleeful trader followed

on behind. In court, the magistrate listened both to the trader and to Joha. When all the talking was finished, he ordered Joha to give the trader 50 liras. Joha said, “I don’t have 50 lira on me!”// “In fact,”, he added, “I don’t have 50 lira full stop.”// “Tough luck”, said the judge, // who added, “If you can’t find 50 lira to give to the trader by tomorrow, you’ll have to go to jail.” Joha was furious, as mad as could be. // That night he couldn’t sleep for hours. He couldn’t stop thinking about his humiliating experience. He tossed and turned all night. // But then, just as the sun came up, inspiration came – Joha had Eureka moment number two. “Yes!”, he thought, “That’s the solution! That’s what to do!”// And with that, he fell into a deep sleep // and didn’t get up until well after noon. The next day, Joha went to a pawnshop and said, “My shoes, what will you give me for them? // “Fifty dinars”, was the answer. Joha replied, “Great! Oh, one thing, give it all to me in coins! ” // So, with the handful of coins he got for his shoes, Joha went back to the chicken roaster in the market. When he saw him, Joha shouted “Here is your money!” Then he cupped his hands around the coins and shook them so they jingled loudly. And then Joha said, “There! You’ve just been paid!”. // And with that, he put the coins back in his pocket.The trader replied, “What on earth are you talking about?!” // “Pay me! Paaaaaay meeeeeee!””“Pay you?!”, said Joha. “I just did. Let me explain, you charged me for the smell of chicken.// So I have paid you with…the sound of money.”

Appendix 2: Another activity focusing on figurative chunks‘Talking about love’Focus: Figurative idioms having to do with loveLevel: Upper-intermediate – AdvancedTime: 35-50 minutes for steps 1-7Materials: A class set of a handout or the same material on a slide; in an advanced class this material can be dictated

Procedure1. Hand out (or dictate/display) all or part of the list of figurative expressions of love given further below.2. Ask students to decide about each expression whether it is based on an image of heat; madness; magic; sudden, hard contact; or illness.3. When students have considered all the expressions, they compare their thoughts with a partner.4. Bring the class together and go through the expressions one by one. (See the Key further below.)5. Give each student a set of song lyrics and/or short love poems each of which includes at least one ‘love’ expression which is figurative. It doesn’t matter

whether the expressions have to do with heat, madness, magic, illness, or thirst/hunger or not.6. Give everyone time both to read through the texts and to mark any figurative expressions of love.7. Ask your students to (a) form groups of four, (b) tell each other which expressions they have marked and (c) explain to each other the roots of each expression’s imagery.

ExtensionExploit the musical or literary effect of at least one of the texts – i.e., if it’s a song sing or play it; if it’s a poem, ask each group of four to plan and then deliver a dramatic, group recital.

Review/Consolidation, perhaps in the following lesson1. Set the following writing assignment. Students should each write a story of from 6-8 sentences (but don’t be too strict about these limits). The story should include at least one of the ‘love chunks’ and also include the three following characters: a (jealous) wife or girlfriend, a (jealous) husband or boyfriend, a private detective.2. Students read out their stories either to the whole class or to each other in groups of 5 or 6. (You might decide to collect and correct the stories before this step.)

Tip for Step 2Don’t mention that some of the expressions in the list have to do with thirst or hunger (esp. hunger for something sweet); let them find this out on their own. One of the ‘hunger’ expressions is cupboard love; because food may be kept in a cupboard, this means loving someone mainly because they provide food.

Figurative expressions of love (see Appendix 3A at the back of this newsletter)

Notes: Re smitten: This comes from an old word meaning ‘strike’. So, smitten and love struck mean about the same thing. Re cast a spell, note also the collocations cast a net (over) & cast a shadow (over). That is, a spell seems at least partly equated with a net and/or a shadow.

Suggested key (see Appendix 3B at the back of this newsletterNotes1. Another proposed advantage of

memorizing whole phrases is, according to Lewis (1993), that learners can “get grammar for free” because many phrases, provided they are remembered accurately and used appropriately, wi l l be grammatically well-formed. This is also known as the ‘islands of accuracy’ argument for teaching whole phrases.

2. Of course, ‘understanding’ is crucial too. However, we haven’t given it its own number, two reasons. Firstly, all mainstream teaching methods place a high value on understanding. Secondly, what we say about our point 2 (formation of strong memory traces) is relevant to understanding since understanding a metaphor or a metonymy is understanding at a relatively ‘deep’ level.

3. Also likely to be especially memorable are chunks which are similar to ones in L1. For example, in English we may say Don’t buy a pig in a poke (a ‘poke’ being a large sack) to mean ‘Don’t buy anything you haven’t been able to inspect’. For French learners, this might be relatively memorable not just because of the p-p alliteration but also because an equivalent French expression is Ne pas acheter un chat en poche, i.e., ‘Don’t buy a cat in a pocket’. Note, incidentally, the triple consonance in the French expression. (The ‘ch’ sounds like English ‘sh’.) In other words, it is not just learners of English who can benefit from noticing mnemonic sound repetitions.

To read the full article and others like this, visit www.hltmag.co.uk

FIGURATIVE PHRASESUDDEN,

HARD CONTACT

HEAT MADNESS MAGIC

DISABILITY, HELPLESSNESS,

LOSS OF CONTROL

?

She’s an old flame of mine.

She’s madly in love with him.

I was burning with love for her.

Just seeing her makes me feel weak at the knees

Look at him standing there, utterly love struck.

He has the hots for her.

I feel like she’s cast a spell over me.

What’s happened to us? The magic is gone.

Ooh! I’m still feeling lovesick.

Ha, I thought so! You have a crush on him, don’t you?

I long for your sweet lips.

I just can’t get enough of her.

Is he in love? Let’s just say that she’s the apple of his eye.

He’s smitten with her, and how!

She fell for him, hard.

I’m crazy for you, baby

He loves her, yes, but is it true love or cupboard love.

Notes: Re smitten: This comes from an old word meaning ‘strike’. So, smitten and love

struck mean about the same thing. Re cast a spell, note also the collocations cast a net

(over) & cast a shadow (over). That is, a spell seems at least partly equated with a net and/

or a shadow.

FIGURATIVE PHRASESUDDEN,

HARD CONTACT

HEAT MADNESS MAGIC

DISABILITY, HELPLESSNESS,

LOSS OF CONTROL

HUNGER,THIRST

She’s an old flame of mine. x

She’s madly in love with him. x

I was burning with love for her. x

Just seeing her makes me feel weak at the knees x

Look at him standing there, utterly love struck. x

He has the hots for her. x

I feel like she’s cast a spell over me.

x{i.e.,as if trapped

under a net

What’s happened to us? The magic is gone. x

Ooh! I’m still feeling lovesick. x

Ha, I thought so! You have a crush on him, don’t you?

I long for your sweet lips. x

I just can’t get enough of her. x

Is he in love? Let’s just say that she’s the apple of his eye. x

He’s smitten with her, and how! x

She fell for him, hard. x

I’m crazy for you, baby x

He loves her, yes, but is it true love or cupboard love. x

Scott Thornbury teaches and trains at International House, Barcelona. He is the author of About Language (CUP), shortlisted for the 1998 Ben Warren Prize. Here he puts the Lexical Approach in its historical context and evaluates it in terms of its theoretical base and its pedagogical implications.Masses of wordsA New Zealand friend of mine who is studying Maori asked me recently what I, as a language teacher, would make of his teacher's method. He explained: 'We just do masses of words - around a theme, for example, family, or food. We have to learn these words before the next lesson. Then we come back and have a conversation about family, food, etc. and we use the words. The teacher feeds in the grammar that we need to stick the words together.' He added that he thought the method worked a treat. This contrasted markedly with my own experience of learning Maori, wherethe teacher took great pains to lead us, discrete step by discrete step, through the intricacies of Maori grammar. The net result, I suspect, is that my friend's Maori is a lot better than mine.What I tried to explain to my friend was that, on the evidence of his account, his Maori teacher was a witting or unwitting practitioner of a 'lexical approach'. It is the purpose of this article to flesh out that explanation, while at the same time to suggest some limitations of this approach and, indeed, to raise the question as to whether it is an ‘approach’ at all.Vocabulary teaching has come a long way since the days when one coursebook writer advised: 'As one of the basic aims is to enable the student to use a number of high-frequency patterns rather than to build up a large vocabulary, the lexical range has deliberately been kept small' (Alexander 1967, p. xViii). The advent of a communicative approach set the stage for a major re-think of the role of lexis and a recognition of its meaning-making potential. Vocabulary, which had previously been seen as little more than a resource for filling the slots in grammatical structures, became a learning objective in its own right, such that by 1984, in the introduction to their Cambridge English Course, Swan and Walter were claiming that 'vocabulary acquisition is the largest and most important task facing the language learner' (p. vii).ChunksAt the same time, an unrelated but significant development was taking place in the study of first language acquisition. A number of researchers, departing from the still relatively 'fresh' Chomskyan view that linguistic competence consists solely in the ability to deploy an innate and rule-governed sentence-making capacity, suggested that the memorization of chunks of language might be equally productive and, far from being incidental to language acquisition, might in fact power it. Ann Peters (1983) suggested that unanalysed holophrases (such as this-is-mine, give-me, and leave-me-alone) are first acquired as single units, and are then available for subsequent segmentation into, and storage as, smaller units from which regular syntactic rules are then generalisable. This 'chunking' process serves two purposes in early language production: it enables the child to have chunks of language available for immediate use, thereby saving processing time, and it provides the child with data to hold in reserve for subsequent analysis. This paves the way

for a 'dual-mode' processing capacity, involving both item-learning and system-learning, supplying short-term and long-term needs respectively.Meanwhile, Pawley and Syder (1983) not only proposed that the adult language user has at their command a repertoire of literally hundreds of thousands of what they called 'Iexicalised sentence stems', but that the goal of native-like fluency requires of the second-language learner a similar command, including the capacity to distinguish 'those usages that are normal or unmarked from those that are unnatural or highly marked' (ibid. p. 194). They concluded that the native speaker's linguistic competence might be likened to a 'phrase book with grammatical notes'.Two systemsIn the light of these findings, the goals of second-language teaching needed redefining. The notion of communicative competence as being solely rule-based was insufficient. 'It is much more a matter of knowing a stock of partially pre-assembled patterns, formulaic frameworks, and a kit of rules, so to speak, and being able to apply these rules to make whatever adjustments are necessary according to contextual demands.' (Widdowson 1989, p. 135). In other words, two systems coexist: a formulaic, exemplar-based one, and a rule-based analytic one. Nevertheless, materials writers were slow on the uptake, perhaps daunted by the sheer enormity of this 'stock of partially pre-assembled patterns' and the implications this might have on syllabusing and pedagogy. Coursebooks became more, not less, analysis-based, and only a handful of social formulae and sentence heads (How do you do? Would you like...? Do you mind if I...?) were taught as unanalysed units.It was the advent of corpus linguistics, and of the COBUILD project in particular (Sinclair 1987), that gave a new impetus to a lexical view of language description and acquisition. For a start, computers provided a powerful means of highlighting patterns of repetition in text and were quickly conscripted into identifying and categorising habitual co-occurences of words such as collocations and fixed formulaic phrases.Conclusive evidence was found for the view that words hunt in packs. Moreover, computers were also able to provide reliable information as to word frequency, suggesting to researchers like Willis (1990) that this information might offer course designers the means to organise instruction along lines that would better represent the learners' needs than the conventional grammatical syllabus - a syllabus that in Willis' view 'gives a very restricted picture of the grammar of English' (p. 15). Accordingly, in what was billed by its publishers as 'a major advance in the teaching of English', Dave and Jane Willis wrote the Collins COBUILD English Course (1988).A Lexical SyllabusThey were driven by the wish to devise a syllabus that would 'specify the basic meanings of English, the meanings which even the most elementary users of the language would need to encode' (Willis, 1990, p. 45). Frequency information offered the key: 'The commonest and most important, most basic meanings in English are those meanings expressed by the most frequent words in English' (ibid. p. 46). Accordingly, the 700 most frequent words (which, incidentally,' constitute some 70% of English text) were

The Lexical Approach: a journeywithout maps?

chosen as the content of Level I of the course. Corpus data was then scrutinised in order to identify how these words typically behave in context that is, their structural environments and patterns of co-occurence with other words. Some of these findings flatly contradicted the hand-me-down rules of conventional coursebooks, the syntactic behaviour of would and any being two well-documented cases.Because of their strong commitment to a task-based methodology (see Willis 1996) and in order to generate the targeted 700 high-frequency words in fairly natural contexts, the writers selected a series of common topics and related tasks which formed the backbone of the course. On the way, the learners are exposed to recordings of native speakers performing related tasks, and this input is in turn subjected to consciousness-raising tasks where the focus is on key lexical items, and their associated syntactical environments, but without reference to traditional grammatical labels.It was perhaps this absence of overt grammatical labels, along with the innovative task-based approach, which scared off potential converts, and which accounts for the fact that the Collins COBUILD English Course was less than a runaway success. Reading Willis's (1990) tightly argued rationale for the course, one can't help regretting that this was the case. In a market where publishers are conspicuously reluctant to back innovation, the failure of a project so brave and so principled was the publishing equivalent of the Titanic going down. Nevertheless (to pursue the marine metaphor) a shot had been fired across the bows of the grammar syllabus, and the lexical approach, far from being scuppered, was about to be refitted and relaunched.A Lexical ApproachIn 1993 Michael Lewis wrote and published The Lexical Approach, boldly subtitled The State of ELT and the Way Forward. This was followed, in 1997, by Implementing the Lexical Approach. Polemical and sometimes hectoring in tone, the two books (referred to hereafter as LA and ILA respectively) gather up various theoretical strands (including Nattinger and DeCarrico's (1992) work on Lexical Phrases and Language Teaching) to mount a vehement attack on both the conventional grammar syllabus and on the PPP (presentation-practice-production) methodology it is associated with.Provocatively, Lewis claims that 'grammar is not the basis of language acquisition, and the balance of linguistic research clearly invalidates any view to the contrary' (LA, p. 133). And, again, '\ am dismissive of, and regard as fundamentally theoretically unsound, much that currently passes for grammar practice' (LA, p. 162). And, finally, 'the fact is the PPP paradigm is, and always was, nonsense' (Lewis 1996, p. II). In these respects Lewis sides with Willis (in spirit if not in tone), but there the similarities end. In place of discrete-item grammar teaching Lewis promotes a lexical chunk view of language: 'The essential idea is that fluency is based on the acquisition of a large store of fixed and semi-fixed prefabricated items, which are available as the foundation for any linguistic novelty or creativity' (ILA, p. 15). In place of PPP he offers OHE (observe-hypothesise-experiment), an inductive, consciousness-raising methodology, while at the same time he leans heavily on Krashen's (1985) proposals on the necessity of high quantities of roughly-tuned input.Lewis insists that his lexical approach is not simply a shift of emphasis from grammar to vocabulary. Rather, it is a shift of perspective away from both grammar and vocabulary: 'Language consists not of traditional grammar and vocabulary but often of multi-word prefabricated chunks' (ILA, p. 3). These chunks include such things as collocations (to catch a cold, a broken home), fixed and

semi-fixed expressions (nice day for it; that's / it's not my fault), and idioms, (to beat about the bush; to go hell for leather). Following Pawley and Syder (\983), Lewis argues that these multi-word prefabricatedchunks occupy a crucial role in facilitating language production. What he is less clear on is whether, as Peters (1983) claimed was the case for first-Ianguage acquisition, these multiword units playa part in the restructuring of the learner's internalised second-language grammar, through subsequent processes of segmentation and analysis. In other words, Lewis seems more concerned about improving the fluency of the learner's output than increasing the complexity of the learner's developing language system (Skehan 1998), a point I shall return to.Lewis insists that he is offering 'a principled approach, much more than a random collection of ideas that work' (I LA, p. 205) and he defines approach as being 'an integrated set of theoretical and practical beliefs, embodying both syllabus and method' (LA, p. 2). Subsequently he redefines his agenda more narrowly: 'The Lexical Approach has less to say about innovative methods than might be expected. This is because it is explicitly an approach, not a syllabus or method' (Lewis 1996, p. 13), and he reassures teachers that, in adopting the Lexical Approach 'the change in your thinking may be considerable, but the change in what you actually do in class is relatively small' (ILA, p. 20 I).Teachers, however, who may have been won over by Lewis' hatchet job on traditional grammar syllabuses and PPP methodology, might feel somewhat shortchanged by such reassurances, and argue that surely such a radical agenda demands major, not minor, adjustments to classroom practice. And, however much he might now wish to retract his initial claims that the Lexical Approach suggests 'a radically different view of methodology' (LA, p. 146), the fact is that by calling it an Approach (With a capital A, moreover), rather than, say, Techniques for Teaching Chunking, he runs the risk of it being evaluated as such.Is the Lexical Approach, then, an approach? And, if so, how coherent is it? And, if coherent, how useful is it? (Because practising teachers will have little interest in a set of principles that have few or no clear implications for classroom practice, or that can only with difficulty be operationalised.)In search of a theoryFollowing Richards and Rodgers (1986), an approach 'refers to theories about the nature of language and language learning that serve as the source of practices and principles in language teaching' (p. 16). It is clear that Lewis does have a consistent theory about the nature of language: 'Language consists of grammaticalised lexis, not lexicalised grammar' (LA, p.vi). Nevertheless, it is not so clear what implications this view of language has on syllabus specifications. We know what sort of syllabus Lewis does not favour: neither a grammatical one nor a lexical one (The Lexical Approach...is specifically not a lexical syllabus' (LA, p. 109». In fact, for Lewis, given the holistic nature of language, 'no step-by-step linear syllabus can be remotely adequate' (LA, p. 47). Nor does he have much time for a task-based organisation. The strongest hints he drops regarding course content relate to texts: 'A central requirement of the Lexical Approach is that language material should be text and discourse, rather than sentence-based.' (LA, p I 12). While he provides examples of the kinds of activities such texts and discourses might be subjected to (e.g. 'Ask learners to underline chunks they can find in a text' (I LA, p. 108», the failure to specify how such texts and discourses would be selected and organised makes it difficult

to visualise how the Lexical Approach is operationalised in the long term. Lewis offers us the prospect of a journey, even an exciting one, but it is a journey without maps. Nor is it clear whether Lewis has a coherent theory about how languages are learned. He is clearly sympathetic to Krashen's view as to the necessity (if not sufficiency) of comprehensible input: 'Listening, listening and more listening' (LA, p. 193). Like Krashen, too, he places more faith in acquisition than in learning, and claims that 'there is no evidence that explicit knowledge helps performance' (LA, p. 62). Nevertheless, he insists that 'students need to develop awareness of language to which they are exposed' (LA, p. 195), particularly the identification of chunks, which suggests that he recognises a role for consciousness-raising (a position that Krashen would not accept). 'Accurate noticing of lexical chunks, grammatical or phonological patterns all help convert input into intake' (ILA, p. 53).The implication is that these noticed chunks are stored in memory and retrieved 'undigested', as it were. That is, they engage the learner's item- learning capacity rather than the rule-based one. This places formidable demands on the learner's memory: but, as we have seen, Lewis offers no clear guidelines as to selection and grading - apart from promoting a dictionary of collocations (Hill & Lewis 1997) in which the user is advised that 'storing combinations like declare war, impose rigid discipline in your memory is one of the best ways to build an effective vocabulary' (op. cit. p. 7). How is one to achieve this enormous task? (According to the blurb, there are 50,000 noun collocations in the dictionary alone). Lewis seems to assume that massive exposure will do the trick: 'It is exposure to enough suitable input, not formal teaching, which is the key to increasing the learner's lexicon' (ILA, p. 197). If this is the case, then this raises the question as to whether many of the 'teaching' ideas included in Lewis' books are redundant, and not only that, a drain on time that could be more usefully spent simply reading. (It also raises the selection-and-grading question yet again: what is this 'suitable input' and how is it organised?)Dangerous liaisonsFurthermore, as Skehan (1998) points out 'there is a danger... that an exemplar-based system can only learn by accumulation of wholes, and that it is likely to be excessively context-bound, since such wholes cannot be adapted easily for the expression of more complex meanings' (p. 89). That is to say that phrasebook-type learning without the acquisition of syntax is ultimately impoverished: all chunks but no pineapple. It makes sense, then, for learners to keep their options open and to move between the two systems and not to develop one at the expense of the other. 'The need is to create a balance between rule-based performance and memory-based performance, in such a way that the latter does not predominate over the former and cause fossilization' (ibid. p. 288).Fossilization is likely to occur, then, when the learner becomes dependent on lexicalised language at the expense of engaging syntactisization processes. In fact, Lewis seems actively to encourage this dependency by, for example, quoting approvingly Nattinger's (1988) suggestion that 'one way to promote fluency is by encouraging 'pidginization', urging students to put language together the best they can and avoid the self- monitoring that would inhibit its use' (p. 70). As Skehan might respond: 'This way madness lies!'To return to my Maori examples: while my teacher's method promoted the total reliance on a rule-based competence, with its attendant disadvantages such as lack of fluency, my friend's teacher's method promoted an exemplar-based competence, with the danger of premature fossilization.

However, by insisting on the students grammaticizing the lexis they were using, that is, by pushing them to produce comprehensible output, this danger was perhaps averted. Lewis, on the other hand, attaches little value to output: 'The Lexical Approach ... is less concerned than some communicative methods with output.' (I LA, p. 49). It is difficult to see, therefore, how the Lexical Approach balances the need for fluency with the need to guard against fossilization.In short, the Lexical Approach is not an approach, not in the strict sense, since it lacks a coherent theory of learning and its theory of language is not fully enough elaborated to allow for ready implementation in terms of syllabus specification.Lively debateHowever, in the light of the widespread interest and even enthusiasm generated by these two books, such criticisms may seem at best academic and, at worst, (to use a fixed expression) sour grapes. Lewis is justified in claiming that 'when The Lexical Approach was published in 1993 it stimulated wide and lively debate' (I LA, p. 7) and the term 'lexical approach' is now firmly entrenched in the discourse of ELT professionals. To some extent this must be due to Lewis' own skills at self-promotion, and to his robust and engaging (and decidedly non-academic) writing style. In short, he speaks thelanguage of teachers. (Amongst Diploma candidates on courses at our centre, Lewis is consistently voted their fave read). But there is more to it than that. By publicising a feature of language that has until recently been largely ignored in EFL courses, and byoffering accessible pedagogical practices with which to highlight and practise it, Lewis has enriched classroom practice considerably. The shift of pedagogical focus from anatomistic view of language to a more top-down view reflects related movements in discourse-analysis and genre-analysis. What's more, by asserting the basic 'patternedness' of language, a lexical approach provides justification for the formulaic, unanalysed treatment of a lot more language than has been the case since the advent of the high-analysis era. (All those handwritten classroom signs: HOW DO YOU SAY...? I DON'T UNDERSTAND, CAN YOU WRITE IT? etc. fit neatly into -Lewis' thesis). Moreover, by challenging the hegemony of the traditional grammar syllabus (although without being able to offer a viable alternative), Lewis, like Willis, deserves our gratitude. That he has done all this by riding on the shoulders of his more academic predecessors should not be held against him: our profession is short of popularists - people who can mediate between the ivory tower and the chalk face - and Lewis is a great popularist.Clearly, the Lexical Approach is 'work in progress'. I suspect that we have not heard the last word on it, neither from the Willis's nor from Michael Lewis, nor even, perhaps, from my friend's Maori teacher. More first-hand accounts are needed from learners and teachers as to how such an approach is being managed and evaluated; more lexically-targeted materials need to be written, published, and trialled; and more research needs to be undertaken, particularly with regard to the part memory plays in second-language learning, and whether (and under what conditions) memorised language becomes analysed language.

This article first appeared in Modern English Teacher Vol. 7 no. 4 and has kindly been reprinted without anyone’s permission.

The central role of ‘of’Looking at language through a narrow grammatical perspective has obscured one feature of English of staggering

importance - the central role played by the ‘word’ of.

Traditional grammar has very few word-classes, so it was perhaps inevitable that ‘of’ was classified as a preposition

(similarly think of the dustbin that is ‘adverbs’). Sinclair points out, however, that in many examples - ‘aware of the

problem, much of the time - ‘of’ is closely related to the word which precedes it rather than the word that follows it,

so at best the term ‘preposition’ is highly inappropriate. Nor is it typically about possession, although in a few cases

there is a deceptive similarity: the car’s roof, the roof of the car. In most cases, however, this kind of ‘transformation’

produces bizarre result; try it, for example with these: a breach of the peace, the King of Sweden, the price of a

ticket.

In fact, ‘of’ is the second most common word in English, second only to ‘the’. This immediately suggests it either has

many different roles in English, or it has a use which is all-pervasive. Sinclair’s corpus-based studies show that it

does have different uses, but that its frequency is largely a result of a single use, unemphasised in large academic

grammars, and almost completely ignored in pedagogic grammars and teaching materials. It is the single most

important way of building a particular kind of multi-word noun phrase, and therefore central to any consideration of

collocation.

Most traditional grammar lessons involve patterns of the verb phrase, loosely ‘the tenses’. Traditionally, little or no

attention has been paid to the grammar of the noun phrase. However, examination of naturally occurring (non-

narrative) texts shows that one of the defining features of such texts is the preponderance of complex noun-

phrases:

Recent technological developments in the management of financially sensitive information have demonstrated the importance of finding ways of controlling the means of access to such information.Knowledge of data management is essential for graduates of any discipline who hope to work in those areas of the economy which currently have the greatest chance of growth during the first half of the next decade.

Does one word jump off the page? The examples contain 65 words, the most frequent of which are ‘of (9) and ‘the(6). There it is, staring us in the face, the most common word in the examples - the second most common in the whole language, hardly mentioned in traditional ELT grammar teaching: ‘of’ is the key to the construction of noun phrases in English.Sinclair gave a clear explanation of the function and importance of ‘of’ in Corpus, Concordance, Collocation:

The simple structure of nominal groups is based on a headword which is a noun. Determiners, numerals, adjectives etc. come in front of the noun and modify its meaning in various ways. Prepositional phrases and relative clauses come after the noun and add further strands of meaning. The function of ‘of’ is to introduce a second noun as a potential headword:

this kind of problem the axis of rotation the bottle of port Each of the two nouns can support pre-modifiers.

Although the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English rightly points out that noun phrases are made in ways, and that such noun phrases can be very long, it also endorses the view that different kinds of phrases containing ‘of’ are one of the largest sub-categories of noun phrases. Here are a few of the dozens or so types of phrase they list:

species nouns: these kinds of questionsquantifying collectives: a set of bookscomparable to genitives: the brutal murder of a childnouns with -ful: a mouthful of food

They also list well over a hundred short phrases - lexical bundles - which contain ‘of’, and which are typical of academic writing. This small selection gives a flavour of how central such phrases are to this kind of writing:

as a result ofin the case ofin the direction ofin the context of theat the time of the

as a function of

in terms of

in the case of a

similar to that of

at the level of

from the point of

in the formation of

in a number of ways

with the exception of

at the time of writing

It is worth noting that this language is precisely the kind of language referred to earlier which is likely to be invisible

to learners, whose attention is much more likely to be focussed on difficult content words. If they are to write well,

they need to add both kinds of lexical item to their mental lexicons. This will probably not happen without proactive

intervention by the teacher.

Approaches to teaching collocation• Teach students the word ‘collocation’

• Encourage students to think bigger than the word - always look for the two- or three-word expression

• When teaching a new word, teach some of its most common collocations - for example, heavy smoker, non-smoker, chain smoker. Obviously, the complexity and selection of the collocations will depend on the students’ level and interests.

• Extend ‘half learnt’ words - pass / sit/ revise for an exam etc....................................

• Help them to notice collocations - having used a text with a class, ask the students to look back at the text and find / circle the collocations. You’ll have to decide which are the most useful, interesting ones to focus on. ‘There is no acquisition without noticing’

• Encourage students to invest in a collocation dictionary - a real help for students at all levels, especially IELTS, FCE and CAE

• Use collocations to show and explain differences - bare vs. naked; wide vs. broad etc. As well as to highlight usage - carry out repairs, tests, surveys etc........................

• Asking students: ‘Are there any words you don’t understand?’ is not a helpful question. They may indeed understand all the words but fail to notice the combinations those words are in. Try this:

T! Is there anything in the first paragraph you think you should write in your notebooks? (silence while students scan the paragraph) Nothing?

SS! NoT Are you sure? I don’t believe you. (more silence and looking) What about the expression with ‘risk’? In all my time as a teacher I’ve never heard a student say or write ‘run the risk of’. Perhaps my students have never noticed it. Do you use this expression? (general shaking of heads) Perhaps you have never noticed it either. OK, write it in your notebooks, then.

• Pay attention to texts / materials which include chunks that exhibit some degree of fixedness, and some degree of non-literalness - run a business; catch a bus; heavy rain; I see what you mean; a heavy-handed approach to the problem; Well, I mustn’t keep you.

• Try doing more ‘narrow’ reading. Narrow reading is where the students read a lot of texts on the same topic. Coursebooks tend to move from one topic to the next, and such presents little opportunity for vocabulary to be recycled.

Discover why we should focus on teaching the most frequent words in English in this article by Scott Thornbury, author of Natural Grammar.

The little words

I was on my way back from work one day when I came to a place I had never been before. It was not really a house – more like a place for people who have no home.

An old man came out and said: "Come in". I went in. There were some people and a few children there. They looked at me. "Why have you been so long?" one of them said. I didn't know what to say so I left. One of the children came after me. "Stop", she said, "you should first give each of us three things." "What kind of things?" I said. "You still don't see, do you?" she said. "We are very old, and we have been here many years now. We are not children at all. We are the little people..."(to be continued)

Not a great story, I admit, but did you find it easy to understand? You should have. Every word in that story is in the top 200 most frequent words in English. Many of the words – like the, you, of, I, and – are in the top 20. Notice that a lot of these words are what are called function words – that is, they have no real dictionary meaning but instead they have a grammatical function. Typical function words are of, do, been, a, and so. Most of the top 200 words in English are in fact function words. But there are also a number of content words – that is, words that carry lexical information, such as the very common nouns day, place, people, way, and the high-frequency verbs said, went, know, see, and stop.

The reason these words are frequent is not accidental. For a start, the high-frequency words express extremely common meanings, such as existence (be, was), possibility (would, may, perhaps), movement (go, came, stop), quantity (many, few, some), time (then, now, day, years), location (house, place, in, at, there) and identity (you, they, people, us).

Also, these common words combine with other words to form high-frequency 'chunks'. Many of the most common idioms in English are formed around at least one high-frequency word. Here are some of the most common idiomatic chunks in spoken English, according to a recent study. (Words that are in the top 200 most frequent words are underlined): kind of, sort of, of course, in terms of, in fact, deal with, at all, as well, make sure, go through, first of all.

The capacity to draw on a memorized 'bank' of such chunks is an important factor in achieving spoken fluency. High-frequency words express high-frequency meanings, and they form the core of high-frequency chunks. They also provide coverage of a lot of text: more than 50% of all the words in any given text will be in the top 200 words of the language.

The educational thinker Caleb Gattegno believed that these high-frequency words were so important that they were worth giving special emphasis as soon as possible. The basis for his 'Silent Way' was the manipulation of just these most frequent words. He believed that they would provide the learner with the feel for the language, without which their future learning would be difficult. The problem with these words is that, both as learners and teachers, we tend to overlook them. We focus on the meaningful words in a text, but don't pay attention to 'the little words'. Like the little people, we take them for granted. Here are some ways of paying them a bit more respect:

1. With any text you're using in class, ask learners to underline all the function words. If the text is a short one, say 250 words maximum, they can search the whole text. Otherwise, choose a paragraph of 100 words or so. Ask them then to count the proportion of function words to other words. They'll find that at least a third of the words in the text are function words. This exercise will help in the identification of function words, and also in raising awareness as to their importance.

2. Choose a particular high-frequency word to focus on each lesson. For example, of. Ask learners to identify all the examples of of in a text. They should write these out along with their immediate contexts. It helps if they organize their examples with the 'key word' aligned in the centre. For example, there were four examples of of in the story at the beginning of this article:

one of them One of the children each of us What kind of things

In this way they can start to see patterns and regularities. For example, the pattern pre-determiner + of + object pronoun is very common, as in one of them, each of us, both of you, etc. As they collect more examples from more texts, more patterns will become obvious. They can check these against a good learners' dictionary, such as the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary.

3. Challenge the learners to write a story or a poem using the most common words in English, along the lines of The Little People. You can find a list of a hundred common words in my book Natural Grammar. Again, this helps raise awareness as to their wide variety of meanings and combinations.

From word to phrase to sentence: a new approach to teaching grammar (Part 1)

Discover why we should focus on teaching the most frequent words in English in the second of two articles by Scott Thornbury, author of Natural Grammar.

The big words

In the previous article I made a case for teaching the top 200 high-frequency words in English as soon as possible. And as thoroughly as possible. That means teaching them in their typical syntactic environments and with their common collocations. By learning these high-frequency function words, I argued, learners will be getting their grammar 'for free'. But knowing that a common word, like want, for example, takes the pattern want + NP (noun phrase) is not much use if you have no noun phrases to put into the NP slot. You may urgently want a corkscrew, but if you don't know the word for corkscrew, you will be reduced to, well, miming one. A fat lot of good your 200 high-frequency words will be if you are speaking on the phone!

So, along with the common little words, learners need a bank of 'big words', that is, words that do the informational work in speaking and writing. This is of course something we have known all along: learners need vocabulary. And as much as possible.

But what vocabulary? Short of knowing what learners' needs are (for example, aspirins), frequency may still be a useful guide. After all, the high-frequency words are highly frequent because they are used a lot. (Duh!) The top 3,000 words in English comprise something like 85% of all text. Put another way, these 3,000 words encode meanings which cover over four-fifths of what we need to say and write. In the absence of any other guidance, these might be the words to learn.

But there are problems. Does 3,000 words mean 3,000 words, or 3,000 word families? (A word family is a base word and its derivatives. So, the word family for frequency, for example, would include frequent, infrequent and frequently). And does 3,000 words mean 3,000 meanings? Clearly not, since many words in English have more than one meaning. Think of mean, for a start: don't be mean; the mean temperature; did you mean to?; he plays a mean game of dominoes...etc. Nevertheless, the 3,000 most frequent words in their most frequent forms, and only their most common meanings, might be a realistic target for most learners. In fact, at ten words a night, with breaks on Sundays, you could learn them all in a year! Where can you find a list of these words? For some bizarre reason, such a list does not exist. The nearest thing to a published frequency list is the list of what are called 'defining words'. These are the words that the dictionary writers used in compiling their definitions. In the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (OALD) you'll find them at the back: there are just under 3,000 of them. As an example of how much mileage you can get out of relatively few words, here is a Polish student describing a shopping experience(1). The words that do not occur in the OALD defining vocabulary are underlined.

A: It happened I think two years ago, I went to a shop. It was Saturday, I usually do my shopping on Saturday. So I went to a shop to buy shoes, and I went to that particular shop in which I found my pair of shoes.

B: Expensive?

A: Yeah, quite expensive.

B: How much?

A: About forty to fifty pounds, something like that. So I went there, it was full of people and I tried on the shoes that I liked, so I decided to buy them. So I bought them. I went home after that, but it was almost the end of the day, the shopping day, so it wasn't left a long time for the shops to close, so when I went home and decided to try on the shoes again, I saw that in the bag were two left shoes. So I had, well, it was quite an expensive pair of shoes, so I tried to go back to the shop and exchange them so although I knew that they will exchange them, I was a bit worried. But I was late and the shop was closed already and I had to go the next day on Sunday to get the proper pair of shoes.

B: Did you manage to get it?

A: Yes, finally.

Apart from four words, the learner has told her story using only words in the defining vocabulary. In fact, 92% of the total words she uses are in the top one thousand words in spoken English. Thus, the student (who was in an advanced class) manages to be communicatively effective using only a limited range of words. So, learners need the 200 high frequency little words, in order to express a full range of grammatical meaning, and they need another 2,000 or so big words, in order to become communicatively effective. Language learning, in other words, is essentially lexical.

1 The data comes from the research done by Ruth Gairns and Stuart Redman as preparation for Natural English and is reprinted with their permission.

From word to phrase to sentence: a new approach to teaching grammar (Part 2)

An extract from Scott Thornbury’s ‘Natural Grammar’

This extract was taken from ‘Natural Grammar’ by Scott Thornbury 2004, and published by Oxford University

Press. Available from all good ELT publishers.

Nice and naturalRupert Taylor uses the collocations dictionary to explore the things people actually say.

Have you ever leafed idly through a collocations dictionary? I wonder which words you chose to look at. If you were browsing aloud in a relaxed teachers’ room, I suspect political correctness went out of the window and laughter was the result. What you get in a collocations dictionary is the raw, unsanitised truth about how people combine words, and this is almost invariably interesting.

The question is: How can we bring home to our students the humour, interest and richness of collocation itself?

I have been trying to answer this question for the last year or two. The presentation which follows seems to have a positive effect not only on the richness of the students’ productive language, but also on their vocabulary acquisition rate as they start to tune in to new patterns.

Explain the technology

I first draw a classical building, labelled university, on the board, and next to it a giant computer server, complete with ventilation louvres, disc-slots, switches and so on. I tell the students that in some of the big universities in the UK and the States, linguistic researchers have in the last few decades developed two new pieces of technology. I label the server corpus. I explain that the corpus is just a huge memory containing millions of words of English text. I usually ask the students for examples of different text types. If they’re hesitant, I start them off with newspaper articles, websites, medical reports, and so on.

Soon they are coming up with ideas, which I write on the board with arrows indicating that all of these things go into

the corpus. Next, I draw a huge computer screen, with a keyboard and mouse below it. This represents the concordance program. I ask the students for an example of an interesting noun, something fairly common. Let’s say the noun they choose is bath. I then ask the students to imagine all these linguistic researchers at the university fascinated by the word bath. They type bath into their concordance program (I write bath on the right-hand side of the screen). Bath. Enter. Then the program communicates with the corpus and looks through the millions of words and finds bath here, and here, and here, and finds lots of other words next to bath, for example adjectives. I ask the students which adjectives they think might be found next to bath. Hot? Cold? Nice? All of their suggestions are put on the board inside the computer screen. And the concordancer also finds verbs. The students suggest take, have and get into.

Introduce the dictionary

I tell the students that the concordancer can produce a top ten, top 20, top 100 of the most popular adjectives, and that the results are published.At this point, I hand out the collocations dictionaries and ask the students to look for bath. I ask them what the actual results are and write them on the giant screen. We discuss the meanings of run, soak in, and so on. This is a genuine revelation for some students, and they handle and leaf through the dictionary with wide eyes.

The students set the theme

Having established the way a concordance program works, I clean the board and then try to elicit from the students examples of a situation when one has to choose between similar options. For example, maybe they had to choose between two or three different schools. I write school on the board. I then introduce the word criterion or criteria and ask the students what factors they would consider when choosing between schools. Price, location, reputation and facilities might

typically come up, along with other more bizarre ideas. Try to elicit a number of such situations: choosing a city to live in, choosing a husband or wife, choosing an apartment, choosing which company to invest in, and so on. In each case, elicit a few criteria. Agree on the most popular and interesting option, then erase the others.

The students generate some language

Let’s say the top suggestion is choosing a pub for the evening. The students have identified several criteria: atmosphere, food, beer, people and location/ neighbourhood.

If you can, bring a table into the middle of the classroom and have the students sit around it. The table represents a city. Have the students make small representations of pubs, three or four in total. Cuisenaire rods are great for this, and you might like to give the students some typical English pub name formats such as ‘The (profession)’s Arms’ or ‘The (number) (plural noun)’. Assign individual students or pairs of students to each of the criteria: this pair will work with atmosphere and this pair with people. Now take a small piece of paper and fold it lengthways so that it can sit on the table like a miniature Toblerone bar. If a student is working on atmosphere, this word is first written on the right of the paper sign. We then look in the collocations dictionary and find some adjectives to qualify the atmosphere. Maybe romantic and intimate. If you think your students are up to it, you could even have them pick out a verb, like create or give (a place).These are added to the paper sign. The phrase is duplicated on the other side of the sign. And this sign is placed next to one of the pubs. The students or pairs then create more little signs, one per criterion per pub, until we have all the information about all the criteria of all the pubs sitting on the table in front of us.

The students use the language to communicate

Now we are ready for semi-authentic spoken use of the lexis. You will need to

Ideas Ideas Ideas

put on the board or elicit some questioning language, and then set up the following sort of exchange:

A What sort of atmosphere is there in the Carpenter’s Arms?B It has a tense, oppressive atmosphere.A And what about the people?B Lots of strange, unemployed people.A Oh dear. That doesn’t sound too good!

The students are using quite rich, natural English to amusing effect, with negligible strain on their imaginations: all the necessary information is there on the table in front of them.

Variations and Extensions

To date I have gone on to exploit the situation in a few different ways. One very nice activity is to have the students

write reviews of the pubs, using lots of linking vocabulary:

In spite of the warm, stale beer and prison food served at the Three Cows, the atmosphere is welcoming and convivial and you can meet normal, interesting people. Another very lively variation is to have the students write different and contradictory sentences on each side of the little slips of paper. This allows exploration of argumentative language:

A How is the food at the Golden Key?B They specialise in raw food.A What? I’m sorry, I thought they served greasy, fast food.B I think you’re mistaken.

The lesson described here would be suitable for an upper-intermediate class, but the activity can readily be

adapted to suit pre-intermediate or advanced students. It works equally well with a wide variety of themes: I’ve even had business English classes comparing employers, convention centres and startups to invest in. And finally, once they’ve had this collocational baptism of fire, you’ll find more and more of your students noticing, asking for and using nice, natural collocations.

Rupert Taylor has taught in England, India, Japan and Switzerland, where he now works at Zürich University of Applied Sciences. His teaching was transformed by Caleb Gattegno’s approach. He believes a good teacher (or parent) creates a supportive but consistent environment for free experimentation. rufusdos@gmail.com

Collocation Grids

EVENTS FURNITURE HISTORY IDEAS MOVIES

old

antique

ancient

new

recent

current

modern

These can be done with many groups of words with similar or related meanings, and for different kinds of

grammatical pairs such as subjects and verbs, verbs and objects, adjectives and nouns, etc.

Procedure: Prepare a hand-out, OHP or draw on the whiteboard a collocation grid like that below. Students work

individually or in pairs to complete the table, marking each possible collocation with a +. If student, or teacher, is

unsure mark it with a ? - their homework could be to check this in a (collocation) dictionary or using Google.

EVENTS FURNITURE HISTORY IDEAS MOVIES

old + + +

antique +

ancient ? + ?

new + + +

recent + + + +

current + +

modern ? + + + +

Many of us remember writing essays at school, only for them to be returned ‘marked’ and for them then to be filed,

possibly even discarded, while we moved on to a new essay, when the write-mark-file pattern was repeated.

Similarly, many students are asked to make short oral presentations to their classmates; the teacher may provide

correction, better ways of saying something, and then the class moves on to a new topic and a new talk.

Research evidence shows that both of these procedures represent missed opportunities; a change of classroom

procedure - giving feedback then asking learners to repeat the same talk - can produce real improvements in the

lexical - in particular collocational - quality of learners’ production, in either writing or speech.

In the case of spoken language, the following procedure can be extremely helpful in developing learners’ fluency:

1. Learners work in groups; one student in each group gives a short talk for four minutes to one of the others in the

group.

2. The same student then gives the same talk to a different student in the group, this time restricted to three

minutes.

3. Again with a new partner, the student gives the same talk a third time, this time restricted to two minutes.

Changing partners is important because the speaker is less inclined to add new information than they would be if

talking to the same ‘audience’ again. Reducing the time limit has a similar effect, encouraging the speaker to focus

on better, more fluent, versions of the same content.

4-3-2 minute talks

Essay PreparationChoose a topic for a discursive essay, for example:

If we had more prisons, we would have fewer criminals. Do you agree?

Ask learners to write down four or five nouns you think they will need to write about the topic, for example:

prison criminal crime sentence

Have learners look up the nouns in their (collocation) dictionaries and choose adjectives and verbs which they need to express their ideas. Emphasise that they must not worry if there are some words they do not know. Encourage them to look quickly through the dictionary entry and notice the words they do recognise. Help them to choose useful phrases which will help them to write a good essay:

go to / send somebody to / sentence somebody to (7) years in prisonborn / dangerous / hardened criminalprevent / crack down on / petty / violent crimedeath / heavy / life / severe / (3)-year sentence

Rapid SortingGive learners two nouns from a collocation dictionary, which they write on a piece of paper. Read out a selection of

about 10/12 collocates from the entries. Students write the collocates in one or both lists as appropriate.

Try to choose relatively new, half-known words. If you choose words of similar meaning, you must be prepared to

discuss possibilities and sort out possible confusion. Remember that collocation is about probabilities, not black

and white choices. Here is an example:

ANSWER - expect, supply, insist on, have, appropriate, complete, detailed, final

REPLY - expect, send, insist on, appropriate, audible, detailed, pointed

If you want to wake up a sleepy class, you can turn this activity into real activity by having learners point to the

left hand wall if the verb collocates with ‘answer’, the right hand wall if it collocates with ‘reply’, and both walls if

the verb collocates with both nouns.

As easy as possibleLearners work in small teams, two teams competing against another. Give each team a list of say, 10 nouns which are

headwords in a collocation dictionary. Choose these carefully, taking into account the class level, words met recently

etc. Each group has about 10 minutes to prepare, using the dictionary. They list 5 collocates from the dictionary for

each noun. Team A then say these words one at a time for each headword to Team B who have to write the words

down and try to guess the noun. The interest lies in the fact that collocates should be chosen so that Team B’s task is

as easy as possible.

If they guess a noun from one collocate, Team A scores 5 points, if they need two collocates, 4 points and so on. If

they do not work out the headword when they have all 5 collocates, Team A scores 0 for that word.

Notice the game is constructed so that the team which uses the strongest and/or most frequent collocates is likely to

win, so there is a systematic element built into the game. Here are some words which you can use to demonstrate

how to choose words:

examination: revise for, re-sit, pass, fail, take

language: foreign, spoken, written, sign, strong

job: apply for, look for, get, lose, hold down

rules: obey, stick to, bend, explain, change

smell: delicious, disgusting, awful, terrible, horrible

interested: not remotely, extremely, seriously, vaguely, definitely

Stand Up!Choose a noun with a lot of verb or adjective collocates. Tell the learners that all the words you read out collocate

with the same noun, which they must try to guess. Learners write down the collocates you read out. When they

think they know the noun, they stand up. Continue till everyone is standing. Check guesses. Repeat with a new

word.

This activity only works properly if you choose the order of the words carefully, moving from more general words

to stronger collocates.

Example:

1. plain, dark, white, bitter, milk, bar of chocolate

2. collect, provide, volunteer, conceal, gather, withhold information

3. test, advance, build, outline, put forward, corroborate a theory

4. huge, growing, profitable, export, domestic, black market

5. year, loss, allowance, bracket, haven, evasion tax

You can do the same thing with adverbs and adjectives or verbs:

1. fairly, relatively, ridiculously, comparatively, dead easy

2. extremely, reasonably, remarkably, superbly, fighting fit

3. upstairs, in luxury, alone, beyond your means, to a ripe old age live

4. carefully, thoroughly, properly, closely, in minute detail examine

There is a collocation mistake in each of these sentences. Correct them by looking up (at) the word in bold in (on) a

dictionary. All the mistakes are similar to (by) those made (done) by candidates in (at) the First Certificate exam

(quiz).

1. I was completely disappointed when I failed my exam.

2. When I did badly in the exam, it was a strong disappointment.

3. When you decide what to study, you must make a planned choice.

4. The holiday I went on last year was a full disaster.

5. What happened next was a really disaster.

6. I’m afraid I would like to do a serious complaint.

7. If you want to lose weight, you need to make a diet.

8. Getting on a diet will help you.

9. If you are too fat, you need to miss some weight.

10.To improve your health you need to do some sacrifices.

11.If you want to be really fit, you need to make more exercise.

12.If you don’t keep to your diet, you won’t have the result you want.

This type of exercise is particularly useful as feedback after learners have done a piece of written work, using their

mistakes and not some common / invented errors from a little man in Cambridge.

Note: if you don’t have access to a collocation dictionary, get the students to see if they can spot their ‘performance’

errors first and then check them against a corpus/concordance sampler for the words in bold.

Correcting Mistakes

1. Look up news in a collocation dictionary. Then try to complete this short text:

A hundred years ago news was slow to ................. in. Today as soon as news .................., it is flashed across the world

by satellite. It is almost impossible for governments to ................ news. No matter what they do to stop it ............., it

will always ................... out.

2. Look up emergency. Then try to complete this short text:

Emergencies can never be ................. When they take ................., the emergency services swing into action. As part of

their everyday work, they ................ for an emergency so that when one .................... , they are ready for all

eventualities. Unfortunately, ............... emergencies happen all the time and cannot be ..................., even with the best

planning.

3. Look up hair. Then try to complete this short text:

Sandra had dull ............ hair. She had tried every kind of shampoo. She had tried ............ it a different colour. She had

even ............. it pure white just like Annie Lennox. Eventually, she had it all ................ off - start from scratch, she

said. But it grew back, the same ............. straggly hair she had hated even from childhood.

To prepare students to write an essay, first ask them to write a paragraph similar to those above using five or six

collocations of an important noun they will need for the essay.

Short Paragraphs

Very useful words for very

With many adjectives you want to use ‘very’, but there are lots of other words with a similar meaning which are

stronger or more precise. For example:

highly qualified bitterly disappointed

1. ........................ exhausted

2. ....................... disorganised

3. ....................... handicapped

4. .......................disillusioned

5. ....................... greedy

6. ....................... honest

7. ....................... inaccurate

8. ....................... remarkable

9. ....................... sceptical

10. .......................theoretical

11. ....................... encouraged

12........................ unexpected

13. ....................... recommended

14. ....................... prepared

15. ....................... grateful

16. ....................... impractical

17. ....................... offensive

18. ....................... ruthless

19. ....................... sure

20. ....................... unacceptable

When you put an adjective in your notebook, try to record a word with it which means ‘very’.

Often you can also find a word which means ‘a bit’, for example, slightly inaccurate, somewhat sceptical.

Collocation Tables For Texts

To prepare students for a reading or listening text, display or print out a collocation table (see below) of half

collocations from the text. Students read or listen to the text and complete the table.

mitigating

rain

grateful

closely

beyond all shadow of

age

fatally

Alternatively, students can try and predict the colocations first, and then read or listen to check their answers.

Lexical DominoesA good activity for reviewing and recycling collocations and / or fixed expressions.

Before the lesson, select 15-20 collocations or phrases that have come up in recent lessons, and write them in a

grid as shown. The beginning of the collocation or phrase is written on the right of one domino, the end’s written on

the right of the next d lay domino. Copy the grid and cut it into horizontal strips to make one set of dominoes for

each group of students.

Hand out the sets of dominoes to small groups. Students play the game: they try to lay out the dominoes end to end

on the table.

(Start) marketing mix retail

outlet word of mouth target

customer market leader main

competitor selling point value

for money point of sale income

bracket niche market share

of the market

(Finish)

It is often necessary to recycle new words several times in class before they become part of learners' active vocabulary, and the same is true of collocations. Whether the collocations are introduced through a text, as described in the article, or explicitly taught, the memory game pelmanism can provide a useful review activity in a later lesson.

Advanced level learners may be aware of the meanings of many phrasal verbs, but are not always able to use them appropriately. This is partly because phrasal verbs often have very specific connotations and much narrower collocational fields than the 'synonyms' we use to help learners understand their meaning. For example, if we tell learners that 'turn up' means 'arrive', this can lead to inappropriate utterances like 'What time did you turn up?', implying criticism where this may not be the intention. For this reason it's a good idea to introduce phrasal verbs in context, e.g. through a text, with their common collocates. This set of cards gives an example of how to revise such collocations in a subsequent lesson.

Procedure

• Give students, in groups of 3-4, a set of cut-up cards, and instruct them to place all the cards face-down and spread them out on the table.

• The first student turns over two cards. If the two cards form a strong collocation, he keeps the pair and has another go.

• If the cards do not collocate, he turns them over again, leaving them in the same position on the table, and the next student has a turn.

• The winner is the person who has most pairs at the end.

• In order to collect pairs, learners need to remember the position of the cards as well as the collocations, so it's important that they do not move the cards around too much. It's also a good idea to demonstrate the game with a strong student the first time you use it in class. If you later use the same activity again, you'll probably find that learners remember what to do.

Collocation Pelmanism

BingoBINGO

Everyone loves Bingo! Use Bingo to recycle and consolidate recently met collocations.

Draw a typical 3 x 3 grid on the board.

Divide the class in two - Team A / B

Give the students the headword.

Teams take it in turns to call out a word or lexical chunk that collocates with the headword. For example, re-sit,

pass etc. for the headword ‘exam’.

You can make it more challenging by excluding some words that are too easy.

Please note: choose the words carefully - don’t give a headword for a word that the students only know one or two

collocations for.

To recycle recently met collocations write out a number of sentences with the collocations replaced by initials. So,

for example, if you wanted to review ‘densely populated’, you might write a sentence like:

Java is the most d. p. island of the Indonesian archipelago.

Students either work together or alone to work out what the initials mean. The sentences can be written on the

whiteboard or on a hand-out.

VARIATION

Once students are familiar with this, give each student a different set of collocations to review and for homework

they write the sentences (with the initials) and then swap with a partner the following day.

VARIATION 2

Re-visit a text that have you done in class and delete the collocations, replacing them with their initials. Give out

the texts and see how many they can remember. Have the students look back at the original text to check their

answers.

What are the initials?

Prepare a selection of collocations that you want to review with the class. You will need about 15 - 20.

On large pieces of paper (I’d recommend using single-sided scrap paper rather than fresh, virgin paper) write out

the second half of the collocation - one per piece of paper - in large letters. Stick them up on the board in a random

fashion.

Divide the class into two teams.

Each team lines up in front of the board, making two lines.

Call out the beginning of a collocation. The first person in each team runs up to the board and tries to find the

correct ending. When one of them has found the correct ending, she runs to you and says the whole collocation to

you.

Continue like this until all the collocations have taken down, and each team can count up how many collocations

they have.

Announce the winners.

Variation

Instead of writing out the collocations on pieces of paper, you can simply write them on the whiteboard. Give each

team a board-marker, preferably different colours, and they circle the correct ending.

Note: activities like this tend to work better if you read the beginning, and they find the ending, rather than the

other way round. Secondly, be careful when choosing the collocations that there is only one acceptable answer.

Competitive students like to win, and if two students get the answer at the same time, a lot of discussion and time-

wasting will ensue.

Run and Grab

Level: Advanced

Time: 60 minutes, plus follow-up

Aims: To draw students’ attention to the frequent use of ‘prefabs’ in English; to encourage use of prefabs

appropriately in their use of English

Preparation:

1. Collect a range of examples of ‘prefabs’ or ‘polywords’. These are usually short phrases which are not

constructed word by word but which are learnt and used as single chunks. (See Worksheet below for a small

sample.) Make enough copies of the worksheet for one per student.

Fixed Phrases

Worksheet 1Polywords or prefabs

you know in fact as a matter of fact at any rate

---------------------------------- ---------------------------------- ---------------------------------- ----------------------------------

for that matter all in all by and large once and for all

---------------------------------- ---------------------------------- ---------------------------------- ----------------------------------

by the way if you like so to speak for example

---------------------------------- ---------------------------------- ---------------------------------- ----------------------------------

time and again no doubt about it in my view from time to time

---------------------------------- ---------------------------------- ---------------------------------- ----------------------------------

as we all know in point of fact by the time in part

---------------------------------- ---------------------------------- ---------------------------------- ----------------------------------

more or less over the top at the end of the day at this moment in time

----------------------------------- ---------------------------------- ---------------------------------- -----------------------------------

2. Find a text which contains a number of examples of polywords. Here is a sample text but you should try and find

your own. make enough copies for one per student.

Alan Maley, The Best of Times?

I keep trying to remember when it all started, and how it all started. There wasn’t one particular

thing I remember but just a lot of small things. Kids pick up a lot of vibes from the atmosphere and

from what goes on around them. Sometimes it’s just a vague feeling of unease, a feeling that

something is not quite right, that things have changed in a way you can’t describe but it is a feeling

that is real. And that’s how it was for me, I think. It was like a virus - something sick in the air,

invisible but definitely there. It’s only now, when I think back on everything, that I can see the

pattern. At the time, it was no more than a vague feeling in the pit of my stomach, a feeling of threat,

of insecurity that gradually replaced the feelings of innocent happiness.

Procedure

1. Introduce the idea of polywords to the class. Essentially, these are more or less fixed phrases which are stored as

wholes in memory. Give just one or two phrases, such as ‘more or less’, or ‘such as’. Then elicit more from the

class.

2. Distribute Worksheet 1. Students work in pairs to create sentences using these items. Allow 15 minutes for this.

Then check the sentences.

3. Allow another 10 minutes for them to come up with other polywords in English. Check these together.

4. Distribute the text you have chosen (see the sample text above). Ask them to underline any phrases they think

are polywords.

Follow-up

1. For the next class, ask each student to bring in a text from a newspaper, a magazine, or a novel, in which they

have underlined polywords. They will work in threes, exchanging their texts and discussing the polywords they

have identified.

2. In a later class, encourage students to separate such polywords into two classes: those that cannot be changed at

all, and those which are more open-ended. For, example, ‘as a matter of fact’ is not normally changeable. We

cannot say, ‘as a matter of fiction’ or ‘as an item of fact’. But ‘how it was for me’ could be changed into ‘how it was

for you, ...for them, ... for us’. And some fixed phrases leave even more space for substitution. For example, ‘the (-

er), the (-er)’ can become ‘The bigger the better’ or ‘The more I see her, the less I like her’, etc. Thus these

polywords are no more than fixed frameworks with potential gaps to be filled.

This activity has been borrowed from: ‘Advanced Learners’ by Alan Maley, OUP 2009

Double TroubleLevel: Upper Intermediate + (but see Comments below)

Time: 60 minutes, plus follow-up

Aims: To raise students’ awareness of common doublets in English

Preparation:

Make enough copies of the worksheet below for one per student. Also make sure that there are plenty of copies of

reliable learner’s dictionaries available.

Procedure:

1. Introduce the topic of double phrases in English by eliciting examples drawn from everyday life : ‘bed and

breakfast’, ‘salt and pepper’, ‘fish and chips’. You might mention that many pub signs in England also take this

form: The Dog and Duck, The Fox and Hounds, The Crown and Anchor, The George and Dragon, The Horse and

Groom, etc. There seems to be a great attraction in English towards this kind of structure. Here are a few more

quirky or unusual ones: The Moon and Mushroom, The Eagle and Child, The Lamb and Flag, The Bull and Bush, The

Boot and Slipper. Students may like to speculate about the origin of these names! If you need a few more examples,

think films and music - The Fast and The Furious etc.

2. Distribute Worksheet 1 (on next page). Students work in pairs to check these phrases in their dictionaries. Allow

15 minutes for this. Then discuss how many of them are not listed. Can they think of any more such phrases they

have met in their reading or heard?

3. Again in pairs, students try to find words which commonly collocate with these doublets. For example, ....born and

bred in London, profit and loss account, a lean and hungry look, ... I need to see it in black and white.

4. If there is time, discuss the literary devices these phrases often exploit. These include rhyming (wheeling and

dealing, hard and fast); alliteration (bright and breezy); or repetition of the same meaning (over and above);

opposites (give and take).

Follow up

1 Students conduct a homework project. Allow two weeks for them to collect as many more examples of doublets as

they can. These can be derived from dictionary searches, Internet searches, or wide-ranging reading. They compile a

complete list to bring to class.

2 Extend the project to look for examples of two-word combinations such as:

chitchat, ping-pong, tip-top, sing-song, knick-knack, shilly-shally, zigzag, see-saw, tick tock, willy-nilly, fiddle-faddle,

mishmash, bigwig, ding-dong, teeny-weeny, powwow, namby-pamby, mumbo-jumbo, argy-bargy, tittle-tattle, goody-

goody, hoity-toity, flip-flop, hanky-panky, hocus-pocus, hobnob.

3 Again note and discuss how often two-word combinations exploit rhyme and alliteration.

Comments

The main point of these activities is to raise students’ awareness of this phenomenon so that they will be on the look out when reading or listening to English. It is not intended that they should learn long lists of such items.

Worksheet - Double TroubleWork with a partner and two learners’ dictionaries. How many of these double phrases can you find in your dictionaries?

weak and feeble down and out meek and mild

-------------------------- -------------------------- --------------------------

born and bred house and home thick and thin

-------------------------- -------------------------- --------------------------

wheeling and dealing movers and shakers fine and dandy

-------------------------- -------------------------- --------------------------

the great and the good spick and span straight and narrow

-------------------------- -------------------------- --------------------------

short and sweet give and take open and shut

-------------------------- -------------------------- --------------------------

hard and fast over and above profit and loss

-------------------------- -------------------------- --------------------------

fast and loose tooth and claw hand and foot

-------------------------- -------------------------- --------------------------

lean and hungry ins and outs fair and square

-------------------------- -------------------------- --------------------------

hit and run dead and buried well and good

-------------------------- -------------------------- --------------------------

This idea has been kindly reproduced with no permission whatsoever from ‘Advanced Learners’ by Alan Maley, OUP 2009.

For more activities on rhyme and alliteration in English see Teaching Chunks of Language by Seth Lindstromberg and Frank Boers, Helbling 2008, especially 3.16 ‘Noticing Patterns of Sound Repetition’.

CorpusFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaIn linguistics, a corpus (plural corpora) or text corpus is a large and structured set of texts (now usually electronically stored and processed). They are used to do statistical analysis and hypothesis testing, checking occurrences or validating linguistic rules on a specific universe.

A corpus may contain texts in a single language (monolingual corpus) or text data in multiple languages (multilingual corpus). Multilingual corpora that have been specially formatted for side-by-side comparison are called aligned parallel corpora.

In order to make the corpora more useful for doing linguistic research, they are often subjected to a process known as annotation. An example of annotating a corpus is part-of-speech tagging, or POS-tagging, in which information about each word's part of speech (verb, noun, adjective, etc.) is added to the corpus in the form of tags. Another example is indicating the lemma (base) form of each word. When the language of the corpus is not a working language of the researchers who use it, interlinear glossing is used to make the annotation bilingual.

Some corpora have further structured levels of analysis applied. In particular, a number of smaller corpora may be fully parsed. Such corpora are usually called Treebanks or Parsed Corpora. The difficulty of ensuring that the entire corpus is completely and consistently annotated means that these corpora are usually smaller, containing around 1 to 3 million words. Other levels of linguistic structured analysis are possible, including annotations for morphology, semantics and pragmatics.

Corpora are the main knowledge base in corpus linguistics. The analysis and processing of various types of corpora are also the subject of much work in computational linguistics, speech recognition and machine translation, where they are often used to create hidden Markov models for part of speech tagging and other purposes. Corpora and frequency lists derived from them are useful for language teaching.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaA concordance is an alphabetical list of the principal words used in a book or body of work, with their immediate contexts. Because of the time and difficulty and expense involved in creating a concordance in the pre-computer era, only works of special importance, such as the Bible, Qur'an or the works of Shakespeare, had concordances prepared for them.

Even with the use of computers, producing a concordance (whether on paper or in a computer) may require much manual work, because they often include additional material, including commentary on, or definitions of, the indexed words, and topical cross-indexing that is not yet possible with computer-generated and computerized concordances.

However, when the text of a work is on a computer, a search function can carry out the basic task of a concordance, and is in some respects even more versatile than one on paper.

A bilingual concordance is a concordance based on aligned parallel text.

A topical concordance is a list of subjects that a book (usually The Bible) covers, with the immediate context of the coverage of those subjects. Unlike a traditional concordance, the indexed word does not have to appear in the verse. The most well known topical concordance is Nave's Topical Bible.

The first concordance, to the Vulgate Bible, was compiled by Hugh of St Cher (d.1262), who employed 500 monks to assist him. In 1448 Rabbi Mordecai Nathan completed a concordance to the Hebrew Bible. It took him ten years. 1599 saw a concordance to the Greek New Testament published by Henry Stephens and the Septuagint was done a couple of years later by Conrad Kircher in 1602. The first concordance to the English bible was published in 1550 by Mr Marbeck, according to Cruden it did not employ the verse numbers devised by Robert Stephens in 1545 but "the pretty large concordance" of Mr Cotton did. Then followed the notorious Cruden's Concordance and Strong's Concordance.

Concordance

Which word are we after?Level: Elementary to advanced

Time: 20 minutes

Aims: To show how corpora and concordance software can help teachers (and students) to prepare classroom

materials

Materials: Worksheets for each student

Preparation:

1. Choose a word that you would like the class to look at in detail

2. Go to one of the sites on the Internet that allow limited free access to a text database, such as Copllins Cobuild at

http://titania.cobuild.collins.co.uk (up to 40 hits returned) and the British National Corpus at http://

sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/lookup.html (up to 50 hits, and rather more context). Type in your headword(s) and choose

10-15 examples that will be suitable for your students interests and level.

3. Copy and paste the examples into a word processor and delete the chosen word/phrase from each example, leaving

a gap, as in the example below.

4. Print and make enough copies for each pair / small group.

Procedure

1. Divide the students into pairs / small groups.

2. Give out the worksheets to each group and tell them to work out which word or phrase should appear in the

examples. Point out the same word will fill each space.

3. Once they have worked out what the missing word / phrase is, get them go over it and find the collocations and/or

colligations.

Note

I would recommend leaving the examples as they are. Don’t be tempted to fettle with them and try to tidy them up in

any way.

Variation

Take the students to the computer room and get them to make worksheets for each other: finding and selecting the

examples is at least as useful as, and much more creative than, solving the puzzle.

(This activity has been reproduced from ‘Vocabulary’ by John Morgan, OUP 2004

Example worksheet

denials flew around as a heady brew of sex, _____ and rock'n'roll surrounded the man who, by

continued joint efforts in the fight against _____ the abduction of Dr Humberto Alvarez

Even if he intends to, he is too high on _____ to remember what he has done with you.

between adults and young people on _____. Most of that gap is caused by our

want to know if your youngster is using _____. What should you be looking out for? One

gather evidence proving that Collins was a _____ dealer so he could get the leadership to

and 4 per cent said they had misused _____, probably tranquillisers or sleeping agents

have been so different for me. Kids get into _____ and they have no enthusiasm for life. aying buildings which had become a haven for _____, violence and despair.

police officer, Greathouse gave up hard _____ about a month ago. Now, he's on a waiting

How to avoid bum answersSome words can be difficult for students to understand and use correctly. Often these words need more than

explanations, and showing the word(s) common collocations can help students come closer to the words meaning

and use. A particular favourite example of mine is the phrasal verb ‘carry out’. Once upon a time a student asked

me what it meant, and I replied that it meant ‘do’. Said student seemed content with this explanation. I patted my

self on the back, finished the lesson off, and set the homework. As the students were leaving the class, I reminded

them to do their homework to which Little Johnny replied that he was going to carry out his homework as soon as

he got home. Duh! If only I had known about corpora and concordances then - I think the following activity would

have benefitted would have helped him.

Procedure

1. Select the item of lexis that you want the students to work on.

2. Go to either the British National Corpus or the Bank of English and type in your query.

3. Choose the lines that best illustrate said lexis.

4. Copy and paste the concordance lines into a word processor.

5. Print and make enough copies for one per student.

6. Instruct the students to look at the concordance lines and see if they can find any patterns.

7. Conduct a feedback sample and get the students to record the collocations in their vocabulary notebooks if you

have any students who can be bothered to invest in such a thing.

Read these concordance lines. Can you see any patterns? What type of things can be carried out?

• the testicles. This small operation is usually carried out using a local anaesthetic only.

• system support. Research is now being carried out to develop what has been described as

• withdraw. Since then, Indonesian soldiers have carried out mass killings. For 15 years, the world

• Be aware of the dates when repairs were carried out and where the guarantees can be found,

• had received serious head injuries. Surgeons carried out an operation yesterday. His parents had

• OXBRIDGE BIAS. A survey carried out by a Labour MP shows that many of the

• The inquiry into Wynn Jones was carried out by the Chief Constable of West

• Iraq has for the first time admitted that it carried out experiments in germ warfare, but it said

• women asked could. The advertising agency that carried out the research did so to prove to clients

• like that were all too frequent when TODAY carried out a survey into what voters think of the

• in 1992 for her last Christmas, surgeons carried out their first seven-organ transplant.

• The test, which at present can only be carried out in half a dozen laboratories around the world, seeks

to identify an abnormal antibody in the blood of likely sufferers.

• One per cent of the sample had puffed their first fag by the age of four, but the bulk of experimentation is

carried out by 9-;12 year olds.

• The Consumer Concerns survey carried out by the National Consumer Council (NCC) in 1979-;80

revealed a quarter of all respondents encountering problems walking in the previous year, over half of

which were considered serious.

• A rapid and anonymous survey carried out in Birmingham, England, is described by Rimmer (1982).

• If such tests have been correctly carried out (statistically speaking) market efficiency (as opposed to

speculative efficiency) may still be valid.

• We welcomed the news that the Indonesian authorities were mounting an investigation, which would

have to be carried out promptly, fully and fairly.

So what is culture?Time 60 minutes

Aims To raise students’ awareness of the many components of culture; to encourage them to reflect on aspects

of their own culture.

Preparation

1. Make enough copies of Worksheet A for one per student.

2. Make copies of a concordance line for ‘culture’. Alternatively or additionally, make enough copies of Worksheet B

for one per student.

be brief, but it is certainly steeped in culture. [p] Modern times have taken their toll, but

what Mrs Thatcher used to call a dependency culture. That thrives. There is great support for

cultural practice: in short, a professional culture that would take child protection into the

connection between Christianity and Western culture came under strain and how that led

you could admire the awful products of popular culture and the consumer society really began in the

Fichte, and here Ashton's mastery of German culture proves invaluable. Not that she makes

bike to school in an astonishing attack on car culture by Transport Secretary Dr Brian Mawhinney.

into slavery, then stripped of their tribal culture and held in bondage; and then allowed, so

toward women are part of the military culture that needs to change. [p] Wertheimer: On the

in his own alienation from the prevailing mass culture of the United States. It seemed to him that

Worksheet 1Elements of Culture

Cultural pursuits

Literature

Folklore

Art

Music

Artefacts

Ideas

Beliefs

Values

Institutions

Behaviours

Customs

Habits

Food

Leisure

Child-rearing

Procedure

1. Lead a discussion on the meaning of ‘culture’. Ask students:

• How do we recognize a culture?

• What are the elements that make up a culture?

• How important is culture?

• How are language and culture related?

• Can we learn a language without becoming involved in its culture?

• Do all members of a recognizable group share the same culture?

Take about 15 minutes over this, and let the discussion be as wide-ranging as possible.

2 Distribute Worksheet A. Students work individually and note down specific elements of their own culture which match the categories. For example, under food, they might note ‘vegetarian’ or ‘no alcohol, or ‘past/pizza’. Allow 15 minutes for this.

3 Students share their findings with a partner, looking for commonalities and differences.

4. Conduct a full-class feedback session. Ask:

• What key factors emerged when you compared your cultures?

• What additional light do they shed on the meanings we associate with culture?

Worksheet 1BWords commonly found in

association with ‘culture’

• barbaric culture

• bar-room culture

• boardroom culture

• Chinese/French/Hindu

culture

• criminal culture

• culture of abuse

• culture of addiction

• culture of consumption

• culture of dependency

• culture of inequality

• culture of neglect

• culture of secrecy

• culture of violence

• drug culture

• educational culture

• feminist culture

• gun culture

• high culture

• hip hop culture

• indigenous culture

• Iron Age culture

• knife culture

• local culture

• locker-room culture

• medical culture

• musical culture

• national culture

• peasant culture

• popular culture

• smoking culture

• street culture

• sustainable culture

• teenage culture

• tribal culture

• visual culture

• working-class culture

• youth culture

Follow-up

1. Then distribute Worksheet 1B and/or the concordance line. As a homework assignment, ask students to collect the

collocations which follow the word ‘cultural’ from newspapers, the Internet (cultural concepts, cultural differences,

cultural diplomacy). In a future class, discuss what further light these cast on the notion of culture.

2. Set a written assignment on the topic: Cultural stereotypes: advantages and dangers. It is important to emphasize

that stereotypes can be very useful, because they offer a framework of expectations for dealing with the complexity

of a new situation; but they can also be a handicap if we use them to prejudice people from a different culture before

we have even met them. There are a number of helpful websites on the subject. See:

www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/stereotype

www.newscientist.com/article.ns?=dn8111

Comments

1. Culture os a word used so frequently now that it has almost lost any real meaning. This activity is intended to stir

up the many interpretations which we unthinkingly give to culture, and to open our minds to the possibilities for

human contact that ‘culture’ offers.

2. One way of thinking about culture is to consider it in the context of a ‘family resemblance’. This is a concept

proposed by the philosopher Wittgenstein. He applied it to many complex but ill-defined concepts, like games. When a

concept has a family resemblance, it shares a large number of characteristics, but not all of these are found in every

particular case. With culture, we may find a French person who eats baguettes (so do English people these days!),

speaks a non-standard variety of French, drives a Peugeot, drinks pastis, reads Charlie Hebdo, hates J. P. Sarte,

doesn’t like cheese, etc. Some of these things are supposed to be typically (sterotypically) French, others are not. In

other words, we share many things in our culture with others- but not all of them. Hence the danger of stereotyping.

1. Which is the more common, ‘a’ or ‘the’?

2. What are the 10 most common words used in English?

3. Think of any one of the 250 most common words used in English. How frequent do you think it is? If it occurs

once in every x words, do you think x is closest to:

a. 100 b. 1000 c. 5000 d. 50,000 e. 100,000

4. What percentage of the words in the 10-million-word corpus do you think would occur only once in the corpus?

a. 50% b. 25% c. 10% d. 5% e. less than 5%

5. We say that word A collocates with word B if the two words co-occur ‘frequently’. What do you think ‘frequently’

means here? On what percentage of occasions of occurrence of word A, do you think word B co-occurs with word

A? Is it:

A. 90% b. 50% c. 25% d. 10% e. 5%

For the answers, see below

QUIZ TIME

1.The definite article - the - occurs about twice as often as the indefinite articles - a, an - combined.

2.The top ten are - the, of, and, to, a, in, that, I, it, was - according to Cobuild’s published list. Interestingly, the

proportions fall very fast. Here are the relative frequencies related to every 100 occurrences of the most frequent

word ‘the’:

of 50and 50to 44

a 42in 32that 22

I 21it 21was 18

The 100th most common word, however, has a relative frequency of less than 2. In a million-word corpus it would occur about 800 times.

3 Words which we think are common, such as ‘set’, given as an example by John Sinclair in ‘Corpus, Concordance, Collocation’, occur only about once every 4000 words.

4.About half the words in a corpus of 10 million words will only occur once. Words which we think of as rare or

unusual, are very rarely used.

5.By now, you may have guessed that the answer is less than 5%. Even very common words have relatively low

frequencies; collocations involve two relatively rare things happening together, so they are even less frequent. Our

intuitions are very unreliable. To quote Sinclair again: The language looks rather different when you look at a lot

of it at once.

• The Lexical Approach by Michael Lewis

• Implementing the Lexical Approach by Michael Lewis

• Teaching Collocation by Michael Lewis

• How to Teach Vocabulary by Scott Thornbury

• Teaching Chunks of Language by Seth Lindstromberg and Frank Boers

• Oxford Collocations Dictionary for students of English (comes with a wonderful CD-ROM - ask me if you want to

install it on your computer - PC only)

• Key Words for Fluency - available for Pre-Intermediate and up - published by Thomson

• English Collocations In Use

• Making Headway with Phrasal Verbs

• Collins COBUILD - The Bank of English - http://www.collins.co.uk/Corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx

• The British National Corpus - http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/

Books and stuff