ALWAYS FREE
ISSUE NO. 4
THE WORKSHOP
LTC INTERNATIONAL COLLEGE / SEPTEMBER 2009 / VOLUME 1
Noticing and
Learning
Collocation
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 combinations
A 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
Grammaticalised lexis, on the other
hand, refers to a ‘word grammar’
together.
In 2, extreme should be replaced by
approach in which the learner
moves out from a word to discover
big, huge or bitter. This example
demonstrates that collocation is
its collocations and dominant
grammatical patterns. For example,
often learning about constraints on from the utterance My mother holds
language use. We can say The very strong views on the subject of
result was extremely disappointing, marriage, the learner notices that
but the simple grammar you can hold a view, that a view can
transformation to The result was an be strong and that view is followed
extreme disappointment is blocked by the preposition on. This leaves
by the speech community. Learning the learner with a chunk of
collocation is also about knowing language: to hold very strong views
which words can’t go together. on (something). This kind of word
Sentence 3 shows that collocation grammar approach helps the
is subject-defining. The competent learner to avoid the type of
business English user not only miscollocation we examined earlier.
knows key business terms like It should be noted that a word
costs and benefits, but also the grammar approach, as the term
particular verbs that they collocate itself suggests, tends to dissolve
with. In 3, incur should replace the strict dichotomy that we draw
experience and accrue should between grammar and vocabulary,
replace come. It is the learners’ as any focus on the combination of
ability to use appropriate words will usually involve grammar.
collocations rather than particular For example, if learners apply a
grammatical structures which word grammar approach to success
determines their proficiency within a in the utterance I’ve been looking
particular subject area. for a job for some time now, but I
As teachers, we encourage haven’t had much success in
learners to keep vocabulary lists, finding one, not only do they note
but the type of error highlighted that success collocates with have
above demonstrates the need to and is followed by the preposition
raise awareness of the fact that in, but their attention is also drawn
learning new vocabulary is not just to a very common and useful use of
learning new words, it is often perfect tenses.
learning familiar words in new This particular combination of the
combinations. This means that present perfect continuous tense +
learners need to return to the words present perfect tense is used to
on their lists at regular intervals in describe an activity with a particular
order to extend their knowledge of aim, followed by an evaluation of
their collocations. As with grammar, how far that aim has been
learning vocabulary is not linear, but achieved. From this observation,
cyclical in nature. the learner can easily generate
Grammaticalising from word further examples: I’ve been looking
to sentence for a flat for some time now, but I
Lewis states that ‘language consists haven’t had much success in
of grammaticalised lexis, not finding one; I’ve been trying to
lexicalised grammar’. The contrast contact Boston for over an hour
he draws actually reflects two now, but I haven’t had much
different ways of looking at success in getting through. In
language. learning vocabulary, then, the
Lexicalised grammar refers to the learner is also learning grammar.
traditional ‘slot and filler’ approach Rather than seeing the slot and
in which prominent structures such filler approach and the word
as the tenses are highlighted. For grammar approach as in some kind
example, in a typical lesson on the of opposition, as the quote from
present perfect tense, the learner is Lewis seems to suggest, I believe
presented with I’ve been to ........, that, in relation to language
but I haven’t been to ........ yet and learning, they are in fact
is encouraged to complete this complementary, and further I would
frame with suitable vocabulary argue that the learner needs
items, e.g. I’ve been to Greece, but to adopt both approaches in
I haven’t been to Italy yet. order to achieve a full
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 nouns
If a word has ten or more significant
collocations, the size of the learning
task begins to look enormous. However, However, I do think that supplementary
adopting a noun focus helps to make
the task more manageable.
The justification for such an approach is can fill this gap and work alongside the
twofold. Firstly, language is used to
communicate meaning, and meaning
generally centres on the noun.
Secondly, a word grammar focus on the nature, lends itself to independent
noun will draw in significant verbs and
adjectives, leading to an efficient and
contextualised learning of vocabulary.
For example, in the earlier sentence My will help make maximum use of the
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 collocations with the noun use, and any
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 traditional gap-fill format to focus on
the learner say various things about
appointments: make an appointment,
cancel an appointment, keep an
appointment, miss an appointment, etc. with the correct form of the
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 2 In order to reduce pollution we need
nouns in these texts and by creating
supplementary word grammar tasks
which help the learners to notice and
record their significant collocations.
Teaching collocation
Even 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.
materials which provide concentrated
and structured practice in collocation
coursebook.
A further argument for this approach
lies in the fact that collocation, by its
language learning. It is the kind of task
the learner can perform outside the
classroom, and the kind of activity that
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 collocation
In order to appreciate the richness of
language that surrounds the key word,
try to think of verb and adjective
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
verb collocations.
Exercise type 1
Complete the sentences below
following verbs:
ban have lose make
1 I’m afraid she can’t walk.
She .................... the use of her legs in
a road accident.
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 2
Choose 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 3
Complete 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 important
1. 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.
Teaching Chunks of Language: The Issue of Memory
by Seth Lindstromberg and Frank working memory like this is known to
Boers, UK and Belgium foster memory formation. 1. Display or dictate the phrases./
Sophomore 3. The chunks are in context, which 2. Working individually or in pairs,
••• should help students understand them students try to sort the phrases into
and see more or less clearly how they groups according to whether they show
Three exercises fit into a sentences. no repetition of sound, alliteration,
What are those initials for? consonance or some other sort of
‘Slate’ idioms sound repetition – e.g., word repetition
1. On a handout, or by power point,
All you need for this is one or two bits of (on and on), rhyme (a deep sleep),
show students a short text in which a
roofing slate to show to your class. assonance (the right time), or some
few chunks are replaced by initials, e.g.,
1. Pass the bit(s) of slate around. combination of these patterns (back in
Example text action – assonance + consonance).
2. Ask your class what the typical
In 2008, Swedish police c. a c. that had functions of slate are or were – i.e., for 3. Call the class together in order to
baffled them for months. You see, writing on with chalk and for covering reach a consensus.
valuable items such as cameras had roofs with. Also, when urban mobs
been disappearing from the luggage of rioted, e.g., in London, rioters would Rationale:
passengers on intercity coaches. sometimes rip slates off roofs and throw This exercise kills two birds with one
Nobody could understand how goods them at whoever they were fighting. stone. Most obviously, it is a review
could be stolen from suitcases when 3. Note these functions on the board, exercise of a kind which has been too
their owners saw them safely loaded perhaps in mindmap fashion (see much neglected in phrase teaching.
into the luggage hold of their coach and ‘Mindmap’ at Wikipedia). After all, because phrases are harder to
when they then reclaimed their remember than individual words, more
suitcases immediately o. arr. a. their d. 4. Dictate the following three sentences review is needed, not less. Less
What the police found out was this: A (but not the glosses in square obvious is the experimentally verified
member of a gang, who must have brackets): potential of sound repetition to help
been very strong, chose a coach to a. A convicted criminal, on release from students remember the form of
travel on. He checked in a great big prison, should be allowed to start again phrases. By recollection of ‘form’, we
suitcase. In it, was a midget also a with a clean slate. [i.e., start again with mean the following: Suppose you want
member of the gang! When the suitcase no more penalties to pay] to express a particular meaning in
was safely in the luggage hold, the b. The critics slated the play; as a conversation and remember that there
midget would come out of the suitcase, result, it closed after only three is a phrase which expresses it perfectly
crawl around inside the hold, break performances. [i.e., fiercely attacked] yet you cannot remember it quickly
open other suitcases, and steal any c. The start of the race, originally slated enough to use it before you lose your
valuables found inside them. After a for 2pm, was postponed until 3pm on turn in the conversation. What
while, the midget would creep back into account of rain. [i.e., scheduled for] happened? You forgot the form. While
his (or her?) great big suitcase – along 4. Invite speculation (a) about the this can occur when you’re speaking
with the st. g. He would then c. the lid meaning of each sentence and (b) your mother tongue, it happens much
t. , and wait until the other gang about how each meaning relates to the more often when you’re speaking a
member (who would make the same functions of slate that noted on the foreign language (FL) because you are
trip in a more comfortable part of the board. (Meanings ‘a’ and ‘c’ relate to the less likely to have formed highly durable
coach) would collect the suitcase. use of slate to write messages on – memory traces of FL chunks. Summary
2. Explain key items of vocabulary – in e.g., tallies and event notices – while These three exercises exemplify
this case, midget. ‘b’ relates to the occasional but aspects of what we will argue is a more
3. Tell your students you will read the memorable use of roofing slates as effective version of the Lexical
text out to them in full. Add that while weapons.) Approach than the one that has come
you are speaking, they should not write; 5. Now and again in later lessons, show down to us from writers such as
however, as soon as you finish, they your bit of slate, ask what it’s called, Nattinger and deCarrico (1992) and
should pick pens or pencils and try to and elicit the three idioms. Michael Lewis (1993, 1997, 2000).
write down the full form of each Rationale Their pioneering work remains
initialized expression (cracked a case, extremely important, but it is our belief
on arrival at their destination, stolen This sort of exploration of the origin of that their Lexical Approach has at least
goods, close the lid tight). idioms is now known to help students one gigantic gap. Before we develop
4. When you’ve finished reading, give not just to understand idioms such as this argument, let’s consider the
students time to write and confer. these (i.e., ‘figurative idioms’) but also background more fully.
5. Bring your class together and ask to remember them. Introduction
what the full phrases are. Sort these phrases Over the past four decades or so, three
6. Later, at the end of the lesson, write Make a list of 10-20 common phrases, facts have become increasingly evident.
on the board the initials of the phrases or ‘chunks’, that your students have 1. What a native-speaker writes and
targeted in this exercise and ask encountered in recent weeks. Include says consists very substantially of
students to form pairs or threes and try some which show some kind of sound memorized combinations of words
to tell each other what all the phrases repetition; for example, in this article rather than individual words
are. you have already come across power spontaneously combined in the mind of
Rationale: point, convicted criminal, pay a penalty the individual according to principles of
syntax. Erman and Warren (2000), for
1. The initials serve to draw students’ mindmap & crack the case (which show
alliteration) and start with a clean slate instance, reckon the proportion of
attention to the chunks.
(which show consonance). Also include chunks in spoken and written texts to
2. If students hear the chunks correctly, a few chunks which show no obvious be about 55%. (See especially Wray
they then need to hold them in working sound repetition – for instance (also 2002.)
memory until you have finished from above), immediately on arrival, 2. The remarkable fluency of a typical
speaking. Holding information in close it tight, All you need for this…. native-speaker is supported very largely
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
foreign language teaching
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 far
The 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.
The Lexical Approach is
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
effective
The 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). 2
Let us look at these three issues one by
one:
Noticing and initial memory
formation
Noticing 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 of common idioms in order to make
are those initials for?’ – although here them more memorable. In the appendix
we’ve used a new text.) to this article, you will find another
Formation of strong memory activity – which we forgot to include in
our book – that focuses on chunks
traces which can be used figuratively. (If you
The best-known writers on the Lexical would like to see a list of good reasons
Approach appear to have entirely for teaching idioms in the first place,
overlooked the following important despite the fact that few of them are
facts: highly frequent, see McCarthy [1998:
1. Many chunks are figurative (e.g., 131-49].)
metaphorical) and are, consequently, Working with chunks that
relatively easy to remember (especially show sound repetition
in terms of their meaning), provided that
they are properly approached (see It has long been assumed – especially
Boers and Lindstromberg [2006] for a by poets, lyrics writers and slogan
review of the evidence). writers – that rhyme and alliteration
2. Many chunks show patterns of sound
(and so on) are ‘catchy’, i.e., that
passages of text which rhyme and
repetition (e.g., alliteration as in beat
alliterate (and so on) ‘catch’ in your
around the bush). These chunks too,
memory, maybe a bit like a burr catches
particularly their form, are potentially
on a woolen shirt or pullover.
relatively easy to remember (e.g., Boers
Surprisingly it appears to have been
and Lindstromberg 2008 &
only very recently that applied linguists
Lindstromberg and Boers 2008a,
began to investigate this matter with
2008b).
respect to learning a second or foreign
You probably recall activities ‘b’ and ‘c’ language. The findings have been
in section 1.0 – ‘Slate idioms’ and ‘Sort unequivocal: all else being equal,
these phrases’; each implements a students find a chunk which rhymes
different strategy to achieve the same (have a thin skin), alliterates (have
overall goal – formation of more durable street smarts) and/or assonates (high
memory traces. The ‘Slate idioms’ tide) easier to remember than a chunk
activity is a very brief example of a way which shows no such pattern of
of working with figurative idioms which repetition. We believe that the activities
significantly raises learners’ rates of in our book which focus on this aspect
recall and, in particular, strengthens of phrasal vocabulary are a significant
memory for meaning. The activity ‘Sort innovation in chunk teaching, especially
these phrases’ is an example of a because sound repetition is actually
simple, but mnemonically effective, way very common in (English) phraseology
of working with chunks that show (e.g., Lindstromberg and Boers 2008b)
patterns of sound repetition.
In sum, what we propose is the
Let’s look at both strategies in more foregrounding of a third criterion (in
detail.
addition to the criteria of frequency and
Working with figurative immediate usefulness) for deciding
chunks which chunks to focus on in class. We
call it the criterion of ‘memorability’
These chunks tend to be known as although ‘teachability’ could do as well.
idioms. As it happens, the view is still Taking account of this criterion would
widespread that the word-by-word raise the priority of most figurative
composition of idioms is fluky and that chunks and chunks showing mnemonic
the origins of their meanings are lost in sound repetition.
the mists of time (viz., kick the bucket).
In fact the number of such expressions Review/Revision for
whose meaning seems wholly arbitrary maintenance/deeper
(i.e., the result of chance factors) is entrenchment of memory
relatively tiny. Grant (2003: 96-7, 161) traces
persuasively estimates their number to
be a bit above 100, and she includes Here, we will mainly repeat what
“borderline” cases in this total. Except everyone probably knows – published
for these, the vast majority of idioms are materials for chunk teaching provide far
figurative in ways that learners can be too few review exercises. After all,
helped to see. This process of coming chunks are hard to remember – even
to understand the ‘why and wherefore’ harder than single word lexis and Lord
of an idiom is known to be powerful knows even those are difficult enough
mnemonic. For one thing, this process to remember. So, lots of review is
of ‘unlocking’ the figurative essence of essential! We believe our book,
an idiom will involve, for many learners, Teaching Chunks of Language, is also
the generation of mental images, which innovative also in the extent to which it
has a powerful positive effect in recognizes the fact that without review
memory formation. Most of chapter 3 in the results of good teaching and
our book is devoted to activities (all learning can simply go up in smoke.
being a good deal longer than the ‘Slate Aside from devoting a chapter entirely
idioms’ example) which we designed to to review activities, activities in earlier
help students unlock the figurative heart 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.
Conclusion
We 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
partner
Level: Pre-intermediate – Upper-
intermediate
Time: 10 - 20 minutes
Materials: A copy of a story
This 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.
Preparation
Prepare 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.
Procedure
1. 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 on behind. In court, the magistrate
potentially unknown vocabulary as you listened both to the trader and to Joha.
go along. When all the talking was finished, he
Variation ordered Joha to give the trader 50 liras.
Joha said, “I don’t have 50 lira on
Once you have led students through me!”// “In fact,”, he added, “I don’t have
this activity a couple of times, they can 50 lira full stop.”// “Tough luck”, said
do it themselves in pairs or trios. In this the judge, // who added, “If you can’t
case, unless students can sit well away find 50 lira to give to the trader by
from each other, it is best to do this tomorrow, you’ll have to go to jail.” Joha
activity with two or three different texts was furious, as mad as could be. //
at the same time so that pairs sitting That night he couldn’t sleep for hours.
next to each other are not distracted by He couldn’t stop thinking about his
hearing someone else say ‘their’ words. humiliating experience. He tossed and
The Story (traditional Middle turned all night. // But then, just as the
Eastern): intermediate level (the sun came up, inspiration came – Joha
m a i n t a r g e t c h u n k s a r e had Eureka moment number two.
“Yes!”, he thought, “That’s the solution!
underlined):
That’s what to do!”// And with that, he
One day, a man named Joha bought a fell into a deep sleep // and didn’t get up
pitta from one of the sellers, or ‘traders’, until well after noon. The next day, Joha
in the central market of his home went to a pawnshop and said, “My
town.// Pitta, by the way, is also called shoes, what will you give me for
‘pocket bread’. It’s like a pocket, but it’s them? // “Fifty dinars”, was the answer.
bread and you can put food in it to Joha replied, “Great! Oh, one thing,
make a kind of sandwich. Anyway, Joha give it all to me in coins! ” // So, with
didn’t have enough money // to buy the handful of coins he got for his
anything tasty to put in his pita. What shoes, Joha went back to the chicken
he really wanted // was to put a bit of roaster in the market. When he saw
cooked chicken in his pita, or at least him, Joha shouted “Here is your
just some slices of cucumber or tomato, money!” Then he cupped his hands
but he couldn’t afford to buy any.// In around the coins and shook them so
fact, he was so short of money // that they jingled loudly. And then Joha said,
his pita wasn’t even fresh. That was “There! You’ve just been paid!”. // And
because he had had to buy one that with that, he put the coins back in his
was two days old. So it was, not pocket.
surprisingly, dry and hard. // Anyway, The trader replied, “What on earth are
while strolling through the market, Joha you talking about?!” // “Pay me!
took a little bite of his pita. “Yuk!”, he Paaaaaay meeeeeee!””
thought. “This has no taste at all!” Just “Pay you?!”, said Joha. “I just did. Let
then, he noticed a man roasting a me explain, you charged me for the
chicken over red hot coals.// These smell of chicken.// So I have paid you
chickens were already golden brown, with…the sound of money.”
sizzling, and dripping fat onto the coals.
Joha moved closer in that direction. // Appendix 2: Another activity
Ohh! The air was filled with wonderful, focusing on figurative chunks
chickeny smoke. It was divine! ‘Talking about love’
Irresistible! Suddenly, Joha had an
idea, ‘a Eureka moment’.// He stood Focus: Figurative idioms having to do
near the roasting chicken and held his with love
stale, dry pita in the smoke so that it Level: Upper-intermediate – Advanced
would take in some of the smoky, Time: 35-50 minutes for steps 1-7
chickeny flavour. The man who was Materials: A class set of a handout or
roasting the chicken didn’t notice at the same material on a slide; in an
first what Joha was up to // because advanced class this material can be
he was busy dealing with customers.// dictated
When he did see what Joha was doing Procedure
to, he shouted, “That’s my smoke! I’m 1. Hand out (or dictate/display) all or
not running a charity here. You owe me part of the list of figurative expressions
50 dinars! Pay up! Fork it over! ”// Joha of love given further below.
was too surprised for words.// “You’re 2. Ask students to decide about each
crazy”, he replied. And added, “You’ve expression whether it is based on an
got a screw loose! ” // And he refused image of heat; madness; magic;
to pay any money for the smoke. The sudden, hard contact; or illness.
trader immediately began shouting for a 3. When students have considered all
policeman. Unfortunately for Joha, a the expressions, they compare their
policemen quickly appeared on the thoughts with a partner.
scene. Also unfortunately for Joha, as 4. Bring the class together and go
soon as the policeman laid eyes on through the expressions one by one.
Joha’s old and shabby clothes //, he (See the Key further below.)
took the side of the trader. Roughly, he 5. Give each student a set of song lyrics
grabbed Joha’s left ear, and dragged and/or short love poems each of which
him off to face a magistrate…a sort of includes at least one ‘love’ expression
local judge. The gleeful trader followed 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.
Extension
Exploit 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 lesson
1. 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 2
Don’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 3. Also likely to be especially
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 newsletter
Notes
1. 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, will be
grammatically well-formed. This is
also known as the ‘islands of To read the full article and others like
accuracy’ argument for teaching this, visit www.hltmag.co.uk
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.
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.
 DISABILITY,
SUDDEN,
HELPLESSNESS,
FIGURATIVE PHRASE HARD HEAT MADNESS MAGIC
LOSS OF ?
CONTACT
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.
 DISABILITY,
SUDDEN,
HELPLESSNESS, HUNGER,
FIGURATIVE PHRASE HARD HEAT MADNESS MAGIC
LOSS OF THIRST
CONTACT
CONTROL

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

x
weak at the knees

Look at him standing there, utterly

x
love struck.

He has the hots for her. x

I feel like she’s cast a spell over x

{i.e.,as if
me. trapped
under a net

What’s happened to us? The

x
magic is gone.

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

x
she’s the apple of his eye.

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

x
love or cupboard love.
The Lexical Approach: a journey
without maps?
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 words
A 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, where
the 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).
Chunks
At 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 systems
In 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 Syllabus
They 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
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 Approach
In 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 prefabricated
chunks 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 theory
Following 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 liaisons
Furthermore, 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 debate
However, 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 the
language 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 by
offering accessible pedagogical practices with which to
highlight and practise it, Lewis has enriched classroom
practice considerably. The shift of pedagogical focus from
an
atomistic 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 questions

quantifying collectives: a set of books
comparable to genitives: the brutal murder of a child
nouns 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 of as a function of from the point of

in the case of in terms of in the formation of
in the direction of in the case of a in a number of ways
in the context of the similar to that of with the exception of
at the time of the at the level 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! No
T 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.
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 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 2)
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.
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.
 Ideas Ideas Ideas
Nice and
natural
Rupert 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 typically come up, along with other
computer screen, with a keyboard and
mouse below it. This represents the
more bizarre ideas. Try to elicit a
number of such situations: choosing a
concordance program. I ask the city to live in, choosing a husband or
students for an example of an
interesting noun, something fairly
wife, choosing an apartment, choosing
which company to invest in, and so on.
common. Let’s say the noun they In each case, elicit a few criteria. Agree
choose is bath. I then ask the students on the most popular and interesting
to imagine all these linguistic option, then erase the others.
researchers at the university fascinated
The students generate some
by the word bath. They type bath into
language
their concordance program (I write bath
on the right-hand side of the screen). Let’s say the top suggestion is choosing
Bath. Enter. Then the program a pub for the evening. The students
communicates with the corpus and have identified several criteria:
looks through the millions of words and atmosphere, food, beer, people and
finds bath here, and here, and here, location/ neighbourhood.
and finds lots of other words next to
If you can, bring a table into the middle
bath, for example adjectives. I ask the
of the classroom and have the students
students which adjectives they think
sit around it. The table represents a city.
might be found next to bath. Hot? Cold?
Have the students make small
Nice? All of their suggestions are put on
representations of pubs, three or four in
the board inside the computer screen.
total. Cuisenaire rods are great for this,
And the concordancer also finds verbs.
and you might like to give the students
The students suggest take, have and
some typical English pub name formats
get into.
such as ‘The (profession)’s Arms’ or
Introduce the dictionary ‘The (number) (plural noun)’. Assign
individual students or pairs of students
I tell the students that the concordancer
to each of the criteria: this pair will work
can produce a top ten, top 20, top 100
with atmosphere and this pair with
of the most popular adjectives, and that
people. Now take a small piece of
the results are published.
paper and fold it lengthways so that it
At this point, I hand out the collocations
can sit on the table like a miniature
dictionaries and ask the students to
Toblerone bar. If a student is working on
look for bath. I ask them what the actual
atmosphere, this word is first written on
results are and write them on the giant
the right of the paper sign. We then look
screen. We discuss the meanings of
in the collocations dictionary and find
run, soak in, and so on. This is a
some adjectives to qualify the
genuine revelation for some students,
atmosphere. Maybe romantic and
and they handle and leaf through the
intimate. If you think your students are
dictionary with wide eyes.
up to it, you could even have them pick
The students set the theme out a verb, like create or give (a place).
These are added to the paper sign. The
Having established the way a
phrase is duplicated on the other side of
concordance program works, I clean
the sign. And this sign is placed next to
the board and then try to elicit from the
one of the pubs. The students or pairs
students examples of a situation when
then create more little signs, one per
one has to choose between similar
criterion per pub, until we have all the
options. For example, maybe they had
information about all the criteria of all
to choose between two or three
the pubs sitting on the table in front of
different schools. I write school on the
us.
board. I then introduce the word
criterion or criteria and ask the students The students use the language to
what factors they would consider when communicate
choosing between schools. Price,
Now we are ready for semi-authentic
location, reputation and facilities might
spoken use of the lexis. You will need to
 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 prison food served at the Three Cows,
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 A What? I’m sorry, I thought they
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
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.
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
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

EVENTS FURNITURE HISTORY IDEAS MOVIES

old + + +

antique +

ancient ? + ?

new + + +

recent + + + +

current + +

modern ? + + + +
4-3-2 minute talks
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.

Essay Preparation
Choose 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 prison

born / dangerous / hardened criminal
prevent / crack down on / petty / violent crime
death / heavy / life / severe / (3)-year sentence

Rapid Sorting
Give 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 possible
Learners 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

 Correcting Mistakes
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.

Short Paragraphs
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.
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 11. ....................... encouraged

2. ....................... disorganised 12........................ unexpected

3. ....................... handicapped 13. ....................... recommended

4. .......................disillusioned 14. ....................... prepared

5. ....................... greedy 15. ....................... grateful

6. ....................... honest 16. ....................... impractical

7. ....................... inaccurate 17. ....................... offensive

8. ....................... remarkable 18. ....................... ruthless

9. ....................... sceptical 19. ....................... sure

10. .......................theoretical 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 Dominoes
A 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 (Finish)
market
Collocation Pelmanism
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.
Bingo
BINGO
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.

What are the initials?

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.

Run and Grab

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.
 Fixed Phrases
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.

Worksheet 1
Polywords 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.

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.

Alan Maley, The Best of Times?

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 Trouble
Level: 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 Trouble

Work 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’.
Corpus
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In 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.

Concordance
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A 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.
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.

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

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
 How to avoid bum answers
Some 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
what Mrs Thatcher used to call a dependency
cultural practice: in short, a professional
connection between Christianity and Western
you could admire the awful products of popular
Fichte, and here Ashton's mastery of German
bike to school in an astonishing attack on car
into slavery, then stripped of their tribal
toward women are part of the military
culture. [p] Modern times have taken their toll, but
culture. That thrives. There is great support for
culture that would take child protection into the
culture came under strain and how that led
culture and the consumer society really began in the
culture proves invaluable. Not that she makes
culture by Transport Secretary Dr Brian Mawhinney.
culture and held in bondage; and then allowed, so
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 1
Elements of Culture

Cultural pursuits
Literature
Folklore
Art
Music
Artefacts

Ideas Behaviours
Beliefs Customs
Values Habits
Institutions 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 1B • culture of inequality • locker-room culture

Words commonly found in • culture of neglect • medical culture
association with ‘culture’ • culture of secrecy • musical culture
• culture of violence • national culture
• barbaric culture • drug culture • peasant culture
• bar-room culture • educational culture • popular culture
• boardroom culture • feminist culture • smoking culture
• Chinese/French/Hindu • gun culture • street culture
culture • high culture • sustainable culture
• criminal culture • hip hop culture • teenage culture
• culture of abuse • indigenous culture • tribal culture
• culture of addiction • Iron Age culture • visual culture
• culture of consumption • knife culture • working-class culture
• culture of dependency • local 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.
Books and stuff
• 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/

QUIZ TIME
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

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eht ,ylgnitseretnI .tsil dehsilbup s’dliuboC ot gnidrocca - saw ,ti ,I ,taht ,ni ,a ,ot ,dna ,fo ,eht - era net pot ehT .2
tneuqerf tsom eht fo secnerrucco 001 yreve ot detaler seicneuqerf evitaler eht era ereH .tsaf yrev llaf snoitroporp
:’eht‘ drow

44 ot 05 dna 05 fo

22 taht 23 ni 24 a

81 saw 12 ti 12 I

dluow ti suproc drow-noillim a nI .2 naht ssel fo ycneuqerf evitaler a sah ,revewoh ,drow nommoc tsom ht001 ehT
.semit 008 tuoba rucco
,ecnadrocnoC ,suproC‘ ni rialcniS nhoJ yb elpmaxe na sa nevig ,’tes‘ sa hcus ,nommoc era kniht ew hcihw sdroW 3
.sdrow 0004 yreve ecno tuoba ylno rucco ,’noitacolloC
ro erar sa fo kniht ew hcihw sdroW .ecno rucco ylno lliw sdrow noillim 01 fo suproc a ni sdrow eht flah tuobA .4
.desu ylerar y rev era ,lausunu
wol ylevitaler evah sdrow nommoc yrev nevE .%5 naht ssel si rewsna eht taht desseug evah yam uoy ,won yB .5
ruO .tneuqerf ssel neve era yeht os ,rehtegot gnineppah sgniht erar ylevitaler owt evlovni snoitacolloc ;seicneuqerf
tol a ta kool uoy nehw tnereffid rehtar skool egaugnal ehT :niaga rialcniS etouq oT .elbailernu yrev era snoitiutni
.ecno ta ti fo