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.

Many of my online francophone friends prefer to speak in text chat, rather than in voice. Especially in one-to-one conversations, I see how they actually use language, and discover many practices like the continua gostando / continua a gostar situation Orlando mentions. (It took me two weeks to realize that no one used demeurer to say, “I live in Paris” — it would be more like “I reside.”

So, with the approval of the person I’m talking to, I’ve sometimes turned on a feature that records a text conversation, giving me idiomatic evidence of French being used.

In terms of Chinese this decision is easier because of a lack of any comprehensive, generally accepted corpus that underpins materials creation. Insofar as Chinese is concerned, any movement down this path is positive and much needed.

But, my question is not if a lexically informed approach is needed but rather how to use the “stuff” that we create or we observe in the speech of others. If we order language teaching in a hierarchy moving from basic to advanced, how do we integrate a hierarchical approach with a lexical approach? Should a lesson on the language of cooking precede a lesson on the language of scuba diving and if so why or why not? Should a lesson on the language of cooperation precede a lesson on the language of disagreement? Should a lesson on the lexical uses of “get” precede a lesson on the lexical uses of “make” or “know” or “banish”? This takes on a great deal of importance if we agree that a lot of grammar is only disguised lexis. Indeed, are making decisions like these more an art than a science?

So how do we make these decisions? Should we leave these decisions entirely up to the interests of students? And what happens when we are not teaching self-directed learners that are capable of making smart choices? What if we are teaching a class full of students who need to follow a common thread?

Personally I have a list of rather interesting questions I want answered. Maybe Orlando could chime in. How do we turn lexical phrase reception (passive) into production (active)? Are phrases learned and remembered differently than single words? Do phrases need to be actively produced in context to be stored for future reuse? How many times do they need to be heard or produced before they are remembered?

I’m interested in how you see a network approach as an answer. Of course, given that this is your blog, I should allow for other questions as well, so I am curious about what questions you hope to answer

I agree that lexis is no silver bullet for the teaching of languages. (I think we all aggre that there is no silver bullet.) For me, however, lexis has opened up new possibilities, such as Orlando’s empirical approach to selecting learning content on the basis of what really happens when native speakers of L2 communicate.

Clearly there are patterns in spoken language and ithem is better than a discrete-point, word by word approach to learning the language. Those paterns could be organized on the basis of frequency or relevance to the context of study. Ultimately, though, I’m not sure this stuff can be organized in textbook form. I have no idea how a university professor woudl choose which phrases belong in a course, and which ones do not, or the rationale for how they woudl be presented. The only solution I see is a dynamic syllabus, updated and developed according to the needs of the learners. (Maybe this is why we’ve ended up with 1,000 lessons on CPod!) I’m startign to think that the network approach is the only answer. More on this later.

Ken

In class, do you point this language out to students (so content serves to support your teaching) or do you have them look at the raw data and draw conclusions on their own?

I believe both approaches are currently being used. I am more interested in the instructed approach. But, I recently came across a journal article that recommends the second. You might be interested.

Language Learning and Technology, October 2008; The Pedagogical mediation of a developmental learner corpus for classroom-based language instruction.