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, 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 suppress it. 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.
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.
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