Brazen ______
_____ amok

; )

I haven’t been following these studies that closely in recent times, but they’re having a much bigger effect on our world than I had seen when the psot was written. Imagine Google without the lexical approach to search.
And Google also uses lexis – not grammar, not semantics – in it’s translation tools. It’s all done on the probabilities of collocation. Amazing stuff.

Ken

if anything this indicate that the “recent research” took place before 2009…

Ken I loved the article by the way, thanks

Thanks

I’m generally less concered about literary sensibilities than with learner needs. Orwell’s essay was not written for the ESL learner.

I’m glad that you find creative ways to spend classroom time, which is to say that you are doing your job. Again, however, creativity is one thing, while the issue of what our students need to learn is another. In my experience, most Chinese learners simply want to learn to communicate in English through email and conversation. They also want to sound like something that approximates native speech. All of this requires learning high frequency language and using it where appropriate. If they do not learn to identify these patterns they will indeed produce uniquely creative syntax. You won’t have to teach that.

Ken

‘Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.’

This holds for turgid discourse markers and other unimaginative phrases. Corpora are too formulaic and encourage poor style and lazy thinking. Language is far more flexible than a few thousand standard pairings thrown out of a corpus. I can think of more creative things to do with my classroom time than teaching hackneyed collocations – which learners can acquire passively through general exposure to the language outside of the classroom. The ‘real world’ is the best place to learn vocab, not the classroom. The classroom is really the place to develop and polish what vocab and grammar they already have.

You have to everything in chunks, in other words, with some syntax even if it’s just an article tagged on to a word but teachers and students should lean towards making their own chunks where possible.

I am not an educator, just a weak and slow learner. I spent my first 1.5 years of Chinese language study relying almost exclusively on Chinesepod, so was immersed in the lexical approach. I think it mostly is very good. From my perspective, the weakness with Chinesepod’s specific tack is that doesn’t systematically expand and reinforce the use of lexical chunks across lessons, since each lesson is an independent module, with no expected sequence or explicit layering between them.

The very most common lexical constructs and patterns that occur in the language are adequately reinforced by Chinesepod, since they naturally occur across a broad swath of different lessons. For example, you can’t help but run into “zen3 me2 yang4” (= “what about”) multiple times. But, it is mostly random hit and miss as to whether any but the most common chunks will ever be reinforced enough to develop into a lasting component of the students vocabulary.

For example, I may come across “seriously ill” in an individual lesson, but will I ever see it again? Will I ever come across related chunks like “serious accident” or “serious accusation” in a future module? Who knows. If not, the value of time spent learning this chunk will mostly be lost. It will rapidly disappear from memory.

During the podcast for a dialogue which includes the chunk “seriously ill”, the hosts may talk about related variants, like “serious accident” and “serious accusation”. This is good, but since it isn’t part of the actual lesson dialogue, it is unlikely that I will retain this information. Only material included in the lesson dialogue receives enough of my focus and repetition to have the potential for setting in.

A very good feature that Chinesepod has added sometime in the last year or so is the ability to search for the use of a specific word in other lessons. This is a help. A student might be able to use this to design their own lesson sequence that re-enforces sets of lexical chunks. I hope to eventually return to Chinesepod and try this someday.