Lexical Approach - Chunking

KA1 – Erasmus+

Creative Methodologies – Language

Development

ADC College London

August 17th – 28° 2015

Serafina Patrizia Scerra

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ChunkingSerial and Free Recall

In psichology, Chunking is defined as a phenomenon dealing with individuals’ responses when performing a memory task. Tests where individuals can give a "chunking“ response can be made up of serial and free recall tasks.

• Serial recall is the ability to store items or events in memory in the order in which they occurred. The sequence is to be repeated over time until it is stored in memory as a whole, rather than as a series of items. This ability is very important to the use of language.

• Free recall is a basic paradigm in which participants study a list of items on each trial, and then are prompted to recall them in any order. Both tasks require the individual to reproduce items including words, syllables, numbers, or lists of letters that are often meaningful to him or her.The size of the chunks generally range from two to six items, depending on language and culture.

Dictagloss

Dictagloss is a useful technique to encourage students to work together to extract meaning from complex text. It requires the students to focus on their knowledge of the content and the relationship between ideas and words. Dictagloss is a very useful activity that helps students to use language in order to learn.

A Dictagloss is an alternative way of getting students to learn note-taking skills, as they need to listen to a text being read and reconstruct it. It is both a listening and a writing task and reinforces ideas such as key words, topic sentences and report writing.

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Premise

"Language is grammaticalised lexis, not lexicalised grammar" 

Lexical chunks are vital for fluent production, as fluency does not depend so much on having a set of generative grammar rules and a separate stock of words, as on having rapid access to a stock of chunks.

Two activities will be developed to help students notice the lexical chunks in written and spoken texts.

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ActivityActivity

Destinataries

•B2 level students of Secondary 2/ High school

Overall Aims

•Develop language proficiency

•Acquire strategies to notice and process new language

•Train for autonomous learning

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Specific Aims

•Make the acquisition of the bulk of the lexicon more effective

•Focus on clusters or chunks of words, to show students how words can change meaning, depending on the other words they are chunked together with.

•Get students recognize structures which can be varied and applied in different situations to achieve a communicative end.

•Implement students’ stock of lexical chunks.

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Activity 1

Skills: Reading = Speaking = Writing

Provide activities that allow students to personalise texts encouraging meaningful and authentic initial reactions to them,

Divide the class into two teams, as a relay race, and provide them with a text.

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The title of the text is: Cricket makes Olympics

The International Cricket Council has already approached the International Olympic Committee at the ECB's behest.

London is one of five cities still in the running to host the 2012 Games and if successful, the ECB would like cricket to be part of the event.

Cricket was last part of the Games in Paris in 1900 when Great Britain beat France to take the gold medal. The Twenty20 Cup was a huge success in its inaugural season in English cricket last summer, attracting 250,000 spectators to games. Designed to attract a new younger audience into the game, it has since spread to South Africa and the USA will soon have its own version called Pro Cricket.

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The England women's team will play New Zealand in the first international Twenty20 fixture in August, with the men due

to take on Australia next summer as a curtain-raiser to the Ashes series.

Inclusion in the Olympics could follow in the longer term if the IOC

is receptive to the idea. We are exploring the possibility of making Twenty20 an Olympic Sport," said ECB chief executive Tim Lamb."We have had preliminary discussions with the ICC about the possibility of them

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"The ICC have expressed initial interest and a willingness to explore the issue further if there is a clear desire to do so within the international cricket community."

This season's Twenty20 Cup will have a new innovation with umpires wearing microphones so they can explain their decisions to TV viewers.

"Our aim this year has been to increase attendance over last year, and we are certainly on track to achieve this," said ECB marketing manager Tom Harrison.

This year's Finals' Day will take place at Edgbaston on 7 August. making a case for Twenty20 to be incorporated at the 2012 Olympics, particularly if London is successful in its bid. "If that's too soon, perhaps further down the line. Twenty20 in 2020, who knows?

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Some of the chunks are the following ones:1.still in the running 2.take on (smb) 3.to be receptive to the idea4.explore the issue further5.making a case 6.further down the line 7.on track to 8.will take place at 

  

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• The two teams are required to pick out a number of chunks from the test.

• The students elicit the chunks and check with their partners within a set time of 2 minutes.

• When the teacher gives the signal to begin, the first member of the team takes the marker, goes up to the board, writes a chunk, hands the marker to the next student and goes to the back of the line. The next student does the same.

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• When time is up, the teacher stops the students Then the other team takes its turn. Students continue having team alternate turns until each has written all elicited chunks.

• The teacher invites peer = correction to eliminate incorrect or repeated chunks and make any spelling or grammar corrections, Each team is awarded a point for each correct chunk.

• The total of the scores determines the winner.

• The teacher asks the two teams to analyse the lexical chunks, what they mean and how they are and might be used.

• For each chunk, students are asked to find out and write an equivalent in their language and to tell their partner about the lexical chunks in it.

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Activity 2

•Skills: Listening = Speaking = Writing

•Provide students with opportunities to discover chunks for themselves,

•Get a whole lot of good lexical phrases by using videos of daytime soap operas

•Pull out short segments and focus on various phrases of interest.

•Ask students to locate the lexical chunks.

•Analyse the lexical chunks, what they mean and how they are and might be used.

•Create worksheets, mini = plays to experience lexical chunks in authentic texts encouraging students to analyse, generalise, research and experiment with lexical chunks,

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Metalingual activities

• What does to know a word mean? Think for the word “shop”, for example

• Why is chunking important?• What are the advantages/disadvantages of dictagloss when teaching

lexis/chunks?• Michael Lewis (1997) suggests the following taxonomy of lexical items:1. Words2. Polywords3. Collocations, or word partnerships4. Institutionalised utterances5. Sentence frames

Think of an exampe for each of these.

Dictagloss activity

This activity should be used to consolidate and not to introduce new knowledge:

1. The students listen to the reading of a short text at normal pace, for meaning.2. The text is read again and the students should jot down key words and phrases.3. Working in small groups the students assemble their words and phrases and try

to reconstruct the text from the resources they share. Their version should contain the main ideas of the text.

4. Each group of students produces their own reconstructed version, aiming at grammatical accuracy and textual cohesion but not at replicating the original text.

5. Each group reads their finished version to the class analysing and comparing each text.

6. Each text is then refined in the light of the scrutiny and discussion the students have shared.

7. The teacher writes any new or challenging language on the board for scaffolding purposes.

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After the activities think about these questions:

•Which goals do I , as a teacher, think the activities achieved?

•Which goals do I think the activities fail to achieve?

• Did I notice students doing anything differently during the activities?

• Did my students have a positive, negative or indifferent response to the activities?

• Did I have a positive, negative or indifferent reaction to these activities?

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Lexical approach

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