e creative in language production because most of what we say is made up of pre-fabricated chunks, but there is room for creativity in remembering chunks. We need to make links between existing language and new. Links can be through meaning but also form.
We could try linking new language to places. We have a better memory for images than any other type of data, so if we can visualize where we put new language it helps us remember it. One useful way is to link expressions to a route when walking.
- Jumbled sentences with chunks
Put jumbled sentences on board for students to unscramble.
It’s difficult to unjumble:
smokers like heavy looks jam think traffic
because our mind is primed to notice chunks.
- Poems with chunks help with memory
Put a number of chunks on the board. Students choose a number from 1-however many chunks you’ve written. Then show chunks and students have to write a poem with the chunk corresponding to their number, in this form:
By the way
I want to say
That from today
I’m going to stay
By the way
- Keep/Let classification activity
Teacher puts stickies of expressions around the room (e.g. fingers cross, off steam). Students walk around and memorize them. Then walk back to desk to record in the correct column.
(answer to jumbled sentence: Smokers think traffic looks like heavy jam.)
Teaching Grammar Lexically–Hugh Dellar
In this talk Hugh criticised a structural, PPP (present, practise, produce) approach to teaching because focusing on structures in isolation distorts the reality of how language is used in conversation. Following this kind of syllabus where grammar and vocabulary are separate actually makes it harder for students. Students feel just because they’ve seen it once, they’ve done it, but being able to speak about English is not the same as being able to speak in English. They need less metalanguage and more real-life , frequently-used sentences like
How long have you been doing that?
or I’ll see you later.
or Why did you decide to do that, then? Well, I was thinking of…
rather than studying present perfect continuous, will versus going to, past continuous, conditionals, etc. They need to experience how conversations develop, not look at structures in isolations.
It’s not grammar, but lexis, that makes someone’s language more advanced.
Lower levels need to learn ‘grammar-as-lexis,’ whereas higher levels need practice ‘grammaticalising’ and on rare occasions looking at more obscure structures but only in clear contexts.
He’s not saying to ignore teaching grammar but to focus more on language patterns than verb tenses and teach the lexico-grammatical chunks that go with the grammar. For example:
Just because I’m single it doesn’t mean I’m desperately lonely!
Do you fancy going out somewhere tonight?
I agree with him but it makes me wonder how much I actually do this in my own teaching and how much I teach more traditional grammar because it’s easier–it’s what is presented in the book and how I first learned to teach. It’s what students expect. It gives, especially lower levels, something to build on. It makes things more manageable for the students and like he said, gives them a feeling of progress. I’ve never been a fan of PPP. I have a problem with the word ‘present’ and much prefer ESA (engage, study, activate) because it puts the emphasis more on the student, getting them involved in the learning, but still I have trouble seeing these as isolated stages. Surely the learners should be engaged and activating their language at all times in their study. But maybe like grammar can be comfort for insecure newbie learners, PPP (or ESA) is the same for novice teachers. Should teacher training be more lexically focused?
Q & A with Michael Lewis
Michael Lewis was truly brilliant making us all laugh.
Changes he said we should all make:
- get grammar out of our heads–studying structure is an inefficient way to learn language
- get individual words out of our heads–it’s all about chunks
- students should stop practising grammar to ‘get it right.’ They need to get it wrong to learn. We don’t learn by pr