Ben Zimmer’s article entitled “Chunking” from the September 2010 issue of the New York Times, raises the question: should collocation education be used to teach English? The article focuses on the importance of chunking and how useful it is in teaching and developing others in the language of English. Zimmer uses his son as a prime example of how kids of his age unknowingly pick up myriads of chunks, “or idioms,” throughout the span of their childhood; he explains, “As Blake learned these pleasantries… I wondered how much-or how little-his grasp of basic linguistic etiquette is grounded in the syntactical rules that structure how words are combined in English” (133). Besides this example, he cites other phrases such as “Won’t you come in?”
…show more content…
Because of this fact, he states that there has been a surge in educating the youth in applied chunking; this method of teaching is especially prevalent among classrooms with many non-native English speakers. The last half of the article he shifts his focus to recognize those who criticize his claim that lexical-chunking is a valid approach to learning the language. Respectfully, he acknowledges those scholars who disagree with this method of teaching, citing that they believe it is an ineffective method of teaching because the language contains unfathomable amounts of lexical chunks. He concludes the article by predicting that research in collocations and teaching lexical chunking will both begin to grow and flourish in the coming …show more content…
Some argue that learning the language by chunking is ineffective because it’s nearly impossible to learn enough collocations for students to be effective, or even fluent. Writers like Rafael Forteza Fernández, author of the article “Collocations in the Vocabulary of English Teaching as a Foreign Language” from the academic journal Acimed, share this opinion. Fernández maintains, “Claims that collocation learning offers the learner with prefabricated lexical items for specific functions is excessive…No matter how many collocations a non-native speaker learns it’ll never compare to how much knowledge a native speaker has because they are more familiar with how it is used on a daily basis” (4). While he has a valid point when he argues that learning the language through chunking is tedious and requires mastery to achieve fluidity, it should still not be discouraged as a whole. Understanding chunking at some capacity is vital to comprehending and communicating in the language. Boers and Lindstromberg agree, “In short, there can be no dispute over the importance of chunks in language and language learning” (16). Because the language is so “chunky,” new speakers must be trained to identify these collocations in order to have even the slightest chance at comprehending the language, they go on to propose, “Language needs to be taught in chunks not as individual vocabulary items, and it
Because of this fact, he states that there has been a surge in educating the youth in applied chunking; this method of teaching is especially prevalent among classrooms with many non-native English speakers. The last half of the article he shifts his focus to recognize those who criticize his claim that lexical-chunking is a valid approach to learning the language. Respectfully, he acknowledges those scholars who disagree with this method of teaching, citing that they believe it is an ineffective method of teaching because the language contains unfathomable amounts of lexical chunks. He concludes the article by predicting that research in collocations and teaching lexical chunking will both begin to grow and flourish in the coming …show more content…
Some argue that learning the language by chunking is ineffective because it’s nearly impossible to learn enough collocations for students to be effective, or even fluent. Writers like Rafael Forteza Fernández, author of the article “Collocations in the Vocabulary of English Teaching as a Foreign Language” from the academic journal Acimed, share this opinion. Fernández maintains, “Claims that collocation learning offers the learner with prefabricated lexical items for specific functions is excessive…No matter how many collocations a non-native speaker learns it’ll never compare to how much knowledge a native speaker has because they are more familiar with how it is used on a daily basis” (4). While he has a valid point when he argues that learning the language through chunking is tedious and requires mastery to achieve fluidity, it should still not be discouraged as a whole. Understanding chunking at some capacity is vital to comprehending and communicating in the language. Boers and Lindstromberg agree, “In short, there can be no dispute over the importance of chunks in language and language learning” (16). Because the language is so “chunky,” new speakers must be trained to identify these collocations in order to have even the slightest chance at comprehending the language, they go on to propose, “Language needs to be taught in chunks not as individual vocabulary items, and it