They all have the same thing in common. They are the type of phrases that you don't have to construct. You just say them. These are sometimes called stock phrases or lexical chunks and the reason why they are so popular amongst advanced foreign language learners has to do with the fact that (as I explained in my previous post) they allow us to speak without thinking because, in a certain way, your brain can't tell the difference between a sequence and a long word. If you think about it, it makes sense, doesn't it? After all, how are you is a three-syllable sequence just like Hawaii. Pronouncing the first sentence is every bit as difficult as articulating the place name and those who don't speak English might not see the difference between a phrase and a word. I still remember the time a student asked me what festival I kept going on about in a class. lt took me a while to realize that she had misheard the expression first of all.
Anyway, the great thing about lexical chunks is that they allow a learner to sound natural, but there's an extra advantage: chunks also help you speak faster and, therefore, more efficiently. I know. Saying how are you is far easier than uttering a really long sentence such as I wouldn't go so far as to call them sleazy. Still, the key to saying those two sequences lies in the same skill: your ability to master transitions.
As I was saying
yesterday… I don’t really know how to teach English. I just try and share with
my students whatever I find effective: strategies that once worked for me as well as techniques that appear to work for students now. So, anyway, I have decided to get back to blogging. It is my hope that my posts will be helpful you, advanced students out there.
Today I'd like to type a few words about one of the keys to fluency: chunking.
We are all aware that one basic
learning strategy consists in memorizing collocations, right?It's no secret that certain adverbs tend to go with certain adjectives (deeply religious, abundantly clear, highly skeptical,
etc.) and some verbs favor certain nouns (set the bar, paint a picture, collect taxes, etc.). So... what can you
do with the freedom of the press? Well, you can certainly promote the freedom of the
press or, should you be of the fascistic persuasion, you can suppressit. Linguistically, those two options work equally well. Of course, things don't have to be "either or".When you don’t quite obliterate the freedom of the press but weaken it you may say that you undermine
the freedom of the press. Those are natural combinations. Again... they are called collocations.
If you want to take your game to the next level then you should try and expand a collocation into a chunk, which is just a series of words that work together. "It goes without saying", "believe it or not", "as far as I can tell", for example, are chunks. So, if you take a collocation like "sweep the globe" and tag it onto an idiom such as "a rising wave of" you
get the phrase the rising wave of authoritarianism sweeping the globe.
That is not a conventional turn of phrase. And by that I mean that you can’t find it in a dictionary. However, you can
deliver it as if it were one "expression" and that is one of the secrets to actual fluency. Precisely because you know the whole phrase you can say it as a whole unit, just like you do when you say do you know what I mean? You don't build that sentence, do you? It simply comes out.
By the way, there is another marine-themed
metaphor which you can also use to express the idea of stopping something: to stem the tide of. Think about this sentence: governments should strive to stem the tide of authoritarianism
that seems to be sweeping the globe. There you go. It's longer. It's classy. It works! Then you may want to try using variations on that theme . Instead of sweeping the globe you can say, for instance, taking
the world by storm. Whatever you choose to say, just make sure that the
combination has a history in the language, i. e. it has been agreed upon by
millions of speakers and, therefore, feels natural. Otherwise you may find yourself breaking new lexical
ground, which is always tricky when you’re a students. Let writers and poets engage
in the art of invention.
The excerpt below, taken from a cnn article, contains some of the phrases I’ve mentioned.
So I'm about to wrap the whole thing up. The school year is almost over and I have the distinct feeling that I may not be returning to this blog for a long, long time, which justifies a glance back at what I've done professionally over the past few years. After some seconds of serious consideration, I find myself facing a bewildering realization, namely, that I don't know what the best teaching method is.
Before I elaborate on that, let me drop some truths on you. Teaching is not as straightforward as some of you might think. Expectations are as wildly varied as the so-called "learning styles" (of whose actual existence I'm not quite convinced). I do know, though, that not everyone learns things in the same way and certainly not because of the same reasons. Does that mean that brains are hardwired in radically different ways? I really don't know.
Whatever the truth of the matter may be, I think I needn't explain why I can't teach in, say, eleven different ways. So, what am I to do? The answer is simple: choose. Indeed, I have no alternative but to choose one method and then try and make the best of it. I am aware of the fact that, to some students, my approach to teaching may seem chaotic and confusing. I'm prone to referencing pop culture, recounting personal experiences and resorting to all kinds of obscure vocabulary (e.g. "regolith" and "coulrophobia"). Admittedly, this can all be slightly disconcerting to students expecting a standard type of by-the-book class. Yet, one thing is glaringly obvious to me: life is a miscellaneous affair. And there's precious little scaffolding to it. Just think about it for a second. You watch the news or listen to a podcast and all kinds of terms, accents and topics are thrown at you in no particular order of grammatical complicacy, which is absolutely normal because, well, because... that's life. The funny thing is that it is precisely that kind of confusing experience (which you get, for instance, by spending some time abroad) that makes you learn better. Ask anyone who's lived in an English-speaking country for a long enough period of time.
Say what you will about general systems and specific strategies, it is my firm belief that a truly sophisticated speaker should be ready to face unexpected situations and understand out-of-context texts. Can you get that from adapted books or watered-down versions of a news reel? Maybe not.
At the advanced level, a perfectly organized, step-by-step lesson plan, one with increasing degrees of complexity can be easy on the students, but fails to live up to reality. Something of that sort can certainly be useful in the early stages of the learning process. However, at the advanced level (C1 and C2) it can be more of a hindrance than a benefit. Don't get me wrong. I'm not making a case for aimless instruction and a rejection of textbooks. In fact, I do pay attention to the textbook... but in my own personal way. That said, I'd rather start conversations and refer to apparently unrelated snippets of information than do exercise 8 right after finishing exercise 7. Shockingly enough, my system appears to work. At least, sometimes. Every once in a while I receive an email from a student who tells me how happy they are about the progress they've made. The whole thing is quite miraculous to me, which is the reason why I never take any credit for my students' learning. They do the learning. I just given them some pointers or, as I usually phrase it in the classroom, I show my students the way but they do the walking.
The unvarnished truth, however, is that, after many years teaching English, I still don't know how to do it. I guess I try and turn my classes into a conversation, probably because that's how I learned to speak English: by experiencing stuff. If you're a student of mine you know full well that in my classes, topics, words and references appear to simply "come up" (even if I often bring them up deliberately). You're also aware of the fact that I like to overexplain things, put them in a context, connect seemingly unrelated ideas, go off on a tangent, whip up a conclusion, etc. and I try to do all that within the boundaries of what "looks like" casual banter. After all, if one learns to swim by swimming, it stands to reason that we should learn to speak a language by speaking it. So, even if it doesn't look that way, "there is a method to my madness". That said, if I had to give you all a piece of advice I would simply ask you to practice. Practice as much as you can as often as you can! Copy expressions, imitate accents, borrow turns of phrase, listen hard, read a lot and speak whenever you find an opportunity. Seek exposure to the target language. Remember that attending classes alone doesn't really cut it anymore. Classes are just a part of your "diet", but you should also find your "nutrients" elsewhere.
But I digress.
What I'm trying to say, I suppose, is that I'm never sure if my teaching really helps my students. Quite frankly, I can only hope it does. So, imagine my surprise when I came across the video below and I saw the great Richard Feynman, whom I admire deeply, discussing his experience as a teacher and saying "I really don't know how to do it". Not only did he win the Nobel Prize in Physics (1965), but he also taught at the highest level imaginable. Students were invariably enthralled by his explanations (there is footage of him teaching and lecturing). Yet, he claimed not to know how to do it. Well, that might just be the only thing he and I have in common. I don't know how to teach, either. Anyway, I'm afraid it's time for you to listen to the master himself. My dear students... Mr. Richard Feynman.
Yes. That's what I often hear whenever I discuss the importance of using idioms. "It feels artificial" say some of my students. Well, allow me to paraphrase. What you really want to say is probably something like this: "I feel weird because I've never done it before".
Does that get too close to the bone? Eating with chopsticks, playing a new chord on the guitar, wearing a business suit, saying "my husband"... All those experiences feel "strange" at first, right? Only the first time we do them. But it's not because they are intrinsically odd. Some Asian peoples have been eating food with chopsticks for millennia. English speakers have been using idioms for centuries. Your mother may have been saying "my husband" for some decades now. There's nothing odd about those habits.
So, yes. Speaking natural English may be a little "strange" only when you do it for the first time.
If you don't feel comfortable using idioms maybe you should reevaluate your whole learning process because, the way I see it, the change from intermediate to advanced level can be defined as a transition from "grammatically correct English" into "natural English". And being natural involves some serious use of idiomatic expressions. So stop feeling weird and embrace what's real. The payoff is definitely worth the effort.
Okay. Irrespective of how many times I've addressed this issue over the past few months, I still think that I haven't stressed it enough, but let me repeat it yet again. Breaking down the barrier that separates the intermediate and the advanced levels is no easy task. I get that. It depends on multiple elusive factors that seem to be irrelevant to most learners, but not to a teacher. And, of course, one of those factors is range. Yes... range, also known as, versatility.
Whenever we discuss people, for example, we tend to go down the easy road: "she is laid-back". Okay. "She is...". Nothing wrong with that, except it's far too simple and, let's face, from a grammatical point view, it doesn't really matter if you say "She's tall" or "She's obstreperous". Yes. Tall is A1 material. Obstreperous, though, is more unusual, but at the end of the day the structure is the same, isn't it?
A speaker shows range when they are able to successfully depart from the obvious structure (in this case she is) and use a whole different set of strategies. Consider these options:
An adjective: she's perky
A noun: he's a slacker
An adjective + a noun: she's a glib politician
An idiom: she has a reputation for being a loose cannon
A phrase verb: he creeps me out
A full sentence: he has been a loyal friend through thick and thin
If you use all of those, your description will not be boring or robotic. Remember that students at the intermediate level tend to describe people by rattling off lists of adjectives (She's smart, tall, dark-skinned and French), which is neither realistic nor particularly interesting.
As a sophisticated speaker, you're expected to resort to more varied strategies. So, be ready to ask yourself if you can choose between two similar options as in these cases:
In short, remember that having only one option is never a good sign. You can (and should) do better than that.
There are numberless reasons why a particular sentence might be considered to be indicative of an advanced level of English. Sometimes it's the sheer sophistication of the vocabulary. On other occasions it's the structure that makes the difference. Finally there's the old "web of factors" that somehow paints a picture of complexity which is impossible to achieve with the toolkit you get at the intermediate level. Today I'd like to share two sentences that illustrate some of those factors. The first one is the kind of sentence in which collocations are key:
At the very least the Bohemian Club is an opportunity for the world's movers and shakers to forge connections, build insider ties and spread policy information well away from the eyes and ears of the citizens whose interests they claim to represent.
If you pay close attention to it you will soon realize that the structure is quite simple. It actually mirrors the skeleton of this other less ambitious sentence:
In fact, this group is great for meeting people away from your parents
That's why I believe that the key to the first sentence is not really the structure but those nice collocations, which, of course, follow the time-honored "rule of three": to forge/connections, to build/ties, to spread/information. If you are not impressed just imagine an Indonesian learner of Spanish saying something like this: Por lo menos, aquellas reuniones me permitieron entablar conversaciones, establecer contactos y forjar amistades. Come on, admit it. Wouldn't you be impressed?
The sentence below, though, represents a completely different type of "advanced sentence":
[Boris] Johnson agreed that Northern Ireland would remain subject to EU market rules and to erect a trade border down the Irish Sea to police them, angering pro-British unionists who object to Northern Ireland being treated differently than the rest of the United Kingdom
Yes. There are three interesting collocations (erect-border/ police-rules / anger-unionists), but I would argue that it's the words marked in bold type that really hold the sentence together and allowed the author to expand an otherwise simple sequence. Not the lexical input. So, there you go. You may display your advanced command of the language by resorting to many different strategies. Challenge yourself and don't settle for the B2 approach. That's the only way to break down the glass barrier that prevents you from entering C1 heaven.
Complex relative sentences. I already addressed this topic in a video I posted some months ago. Still, I feel it may be necessary to remind you all of a rather necessary addition to your skill set, which can "raise your game" whenever you need to produce formal, technical or academic texts.
To speakers of Romance languages, English relative sentences pose an irresistible temptation: the sequence "preposition + relative pronoun". A subject such as the person with whom I'm going out is grammatically impeccable, but is often frowned upon in the early stages of language learning. Why? Well, because day-to-day language overwhelmingly favors a different syntax, namely the person I'm going out with. Regardless what old timey grammar books or even native speakers will have you believe, the truth is with whom sounds quite formal.
That said, it is also true that sometimes we don't really have much of a choice. So, the sequence "preposition + relative pronoun" becomes the only realistic option we have. Consider these two sentences:
Past the housing problem hung a gorgeous poster showing a cliff, along whose summit rode a man on a chesnut horse with a rifle slung over his shoulder
At once, too, he would curse heaven for having failed to endow him at birth with literary talent, without which, of course, no one could so much as dream of acquiring a massolit membership card.
I take it you have noticed the unequivocally literary vibe of those two complex sentences. I know. You may relay the same message by dispensing with the relative clause (the part that starts with the text in bold type) and simply starting a new sentence. Is that truly elegant, though? The answer is a resounding no.
So, there you go. After years of trying to master those dangling prepositions you are told that your first impulse (the "Romance language" approach) can actually be correct. Feel free to use sequences like these:
That's a prophecy the meaning of which is forever out of reach
The circumstances under which this phenomenon might occur
Finally, I would like to thank Michael Leigh without whose support we would not have managed to come this far
