The highway to fluency and a roundabout way to grammar

Photo by @GoldsteinBen via eltpics on Flickr

A second lesson with two new pre-intermediate
(A2) students (I usually put my private students in pairs). In the first
lesson we read three stories about immigrants (from Innovations
Pre-Intermediate) and underlined useful bits of language (I hadn't introduced
the word "chunk" yet). For our second lesson they were asked to prepare a short talk about
their lives using as much "useful language" as they could – no
writing! They did a pretty good job and successfully integrated some chunks into
their stories:

Back home…

When I came over here…

I didn't have enough money

To support my family

Naturally, their attempts to produce their own,
novel utterances almost invariably caused disfluency as they searched for the
right words to express their ideas and the right grammar to frame their words.

Fluency is not so much speaking fast as pausing
less, as Thornbury (2005) aptly observes. To avoid pauses, competent language
users draw on a range of multi-word combinations, i.e. chunks, stored in the
brain as holistic units. Rather than building sentences from scratch every time
every time we want to say something we retrieve from memory (often fully
grammaticalised) prefabricated sequences of words. These can range from short
fixed phrases (e.g. in brief, all in all) to collocations (e.g. book
a ticket, vastly different) to long lexico-grammatical chunks (e.g. I
haven't see you for ages, How can I help you?)

Dechert (as cited in Schmidt 1992) refers to these
formulaic sequences as "islands of reliablility" using which the
speaker can save processing effort and concentrate on what they want to
say without losing the turn in conversation. In the last 20-30 years their role
has been recognized in the Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research as being central to fluent and appropriate language
production.

Photo by @InglesInteract via eltpics on Flickr

Leonardo Gomes, who goes on Twitter by the nick
@leoxical – a play on words similar to the name of this blog, recently started
a discussion on Facebook about the role of chunks in the language classroom and
referred to chunk learning as "the highway to fluency". You can see the discussion here (Facebook login required, sorry!).



Whereas there seemed to be an agreement on
the crucial role chunks play in promoting fluency, the sticking point of the
debate was whether chunks can aid acquisition of knowledge of grammar. There
have been suggestions in the SLA literature that chunks first learned as unanalyzed wholes are
eventually analysed and generalised into rules, thus providing a roundabout way into mastery of grammar.

For example, a beginner learner of English may
learn "Let's go!" holistically, i.e. understanding its meaning
and use without necessarily understanding the role of let's in the imperative
form or even the meaning of the verb let for that matter. After
subsequent encounters with other imperative sentences with let's, e.g. let's
do it, let's get some pizza etc they can abstract the rule for the
imperative form. Then, later, they may understand that let's is a
contracted form of let us. Similarly, I don't know can be taught as
a chunk without delving into the role of do+not in the formation of the
present simple negative. In brief, internalisation of chunks precedes analysis.

This is what has been convincingly and
abundantly shown to be the case in L1 acquisition. Evidence that the same is
true in L2 learning is less plentiful but nevertheless convincing. Some studies
– most of them focusing on early childhood learners – have shown that new
language is often learned as unanalysed chunks and broken down for analysis
later on. For example, Myles, Mitchell & Hooper
(1998) tracked spoken output of English learners of French over a period of two
years and concluded that learners relied heavily on memorised chunks (for
example "Comment t’appelles-tu?" – What's your name? or literally What
are you called?) in early production but gradually broke them down into
constituent parts. Moreover, they used parts of the chunks – often inappropriately
in the early stages (e.g. "Comment t’appelles-tu, le garcon?" –*What are you
called, the boy? instead of what is he called?) – to construct novel utterances.

Perera's (2001) findings also support the view that chunk learning can aid
grammar acquisition. She studied four Japanese learners of English who created new
phrases by using memorised chunks as templates rather than combining individual
words.

Turning to my personal experience, a student of mine once learned the Past Perfect as a chunk
"…better than I'd expected" before starting to slot in other
verbs: "better than I'd hoped for", "better than I'd imagined". Or a group of students who
first learned the expression Mind you as part of a longer chunk
"Mind you, it is convenient" and later went on to unpack Mind you and
start using it in other situations, e.g. "Mind you, it's cheap"

Do you have examples from your classroom where learners memorised a
chunk and later used it to generate new sentences? Were they adult or young learners?
Do you do anything to encourage this habit?

References

Myles, F, Mitchell, R &
Hooper, J. (1999). Interrogative chunks in French L2: A basis for creative
construction? Studies in Second Language Acquisition 21, 49–80

Perera, N.S. (2001). The role of prefabricated language in young children’s
second language acquisition. Bilingual Research Journal 25(3), 327–356

Schmidt, R. (1992).
Psychological mechanisms underlying language fluency. Studies in Second
Language Acquisition, 14, 357-385

Thornbury, S. (2005).
Appropriation and autonomy. English Teaching Professional, 40, 11-14