Description
Language learners benefit greatly from mastering a large number of lexical phrases or chunks. However, few concrete suggestions have so far been made about how teachers can help their students meet the challenge of building a repertoire of chunks that is both large and available for active use in communication. And yet, the challenge is formidable, given the abundance of chunks in language. After assessing criteria for the pedagogical prioritization of certain classes of chunks, this book describes empirically validated techniques which guide students along the route from initial noticing of particular lexical phrases to committing them to memory. It demonstrates that pathways for insightful chunk-learning become available if one is willing to question the long-held assumption that lexis is arbitrary. Key semantic and formal features of many chunks are, in fact, motivated and can be exploited to accelerate learning. The authors have taken care to ensure that all recommendations for teaching are in accordance with insights from applied cognitive psychology, corpus linguistics and research into vocabulary learning generally.
