PP Presentation adapted from Boers & Lindstomberg "Optimizing a lexical approach to instructed second language acquisition". It covers every chapter of the book.

1. OPTIMIZING A
LEXICAL
APPROACH TO
INSTRUCTED SLA
Adapted from Boers & Lindstromberg (2009)
Mario Nappo - Università degli Studi di Milano

2. Classifying chunksBoers and Lindstromberg (2009): 1-17
The stock of chunks in English is very diverse:
• Strong collocations  commit a crime
• Social-routine formulae  have a nice day!
• Discourse markers  on the other hand
• Compounds  peer pressure
• Idioms  take a back seat
• Proverbs  when the cat’s away the mice will play
• Exlamations  you must be kidding!
This diversity may help explain why a plethora of terms have been used in literature both
for chunks in general (formulae, multiword units, phrasemes) and various sublcasses of
chunks (phrasal verbs, dead metaphors).
Mario Nappo - Università degli Studi di Milano

3. Organizing chunksBoers and Lindstromberg (2009): 1-17
•face-to-face interaction (you know what I mean)
•Help learners to fit in with a group of native speakersFUNCTION
•Fully fixed form: commit suicide
•Restricted substitution: conduct/do/carry out an
experiment
•Open slot frames: the _ er , the sooner the better.
FORMAL FEATURES
•Transparent: make a presentation [compositional]
•Opaque: spill the beans [non-compositional]
TRANSPARENCY
•Very frequently: first and foremost [everyday discourse]
•Extremely rare: it’s raining cats and dogs [archaic]FREQUENCY
Mario Nappo - Università degli Studi di Milano

4. Do L1/L2 learners benefit from chunk knowlege?
Boers and Lindstromberg (2009): 24-34
 Messages couched in a conventional form are more likely to be deemed as appropriate by
the speech community.
 Children tend to learn very early on that ”could I have” is more effective than “I want”.
 Prefabricated chunks facilitate L1 and L2 fluency, both in language production and
comprehension.
 CONCERN: is it a matter of automatized processing or a matter of swift retrieval of a
multi-lexical ensembles from memory whereby strings of individual words become stored as
ensembles? The debate is still open.
 Chunks provide raw material out of which children build up their grammar.
 The grammar emerges from those formulae children encounter and imitate first:
as soon as daddy comes home  as soon as you can
Mario Nappo - Università degli Studi di Milano

5. Evidence that L2 learners benefit from chunk knowledge
Boers and Lindstromberg (2009): 35-38
Two
different
groups of
upper-
intermediat
e students
1.
Pedagogical
chunk
knowledge
2.
Focus on
single
words
Speaking
task
Results:
developing
of students’
fluency
• A group of upper-intermediate students was
given a EFL instruction that included a
large amount of ‘pedagogical chunking’
whereas a same-level parallel group
explored the same course with focus on
single words rather than chunks.
• After several months the students were
asked to perform a speaking task (semi-
structured conversation in English with
their teacher) while assessed by blind
judges who were not aware of the
experimental set-up.
• The students’ fluency was found positively
associated with the number of chunks they
used.
Mario Nappo - Università degli Studi di Milano

6. Incidental uptake of L2 chunks
Boers and Lindstromberg (2009): 39-45
Learning chunks by incidental learning is very hard:
• Many chunks are idiomatic which makes a lexical item hard to learn;
• In writing, chunks are typographically signalled by hypens and commans far less often, thus
they may be relatively difficult to acquire while reading because compared to words (which
can be noticed by counting spaces) they are less marked out;
• In speaking, chunks tend to be spoken relatively quickly hence it’s hard for the learner to
discern them in speech.
The classroom context is not enough compared to input and time available to native
speakers: thus teachers should set asaide time in class not so much for teaching
chunks as for teaching strategies that learners can adopt in order to learn chunks on
their own.
Mario Nappo - Università degli Studi di Milano

7. Incidental uptake of L2 chunks
Boers and Lindstromberg (2009): 45-51
Nevertheless it is undeniable that some incidental uptake does occur
• In the incidental uptake of chunks, the noticing process is
important for learning to occur.
• A recently proposed technique for gauging noticing is the
EYE-TRACKING: learners are asked to silently read
short texts while an eye-tracking instrument records
their eye-movements. If the learners’ eyes backtrack more
often to particular elements in the text, then this signals
the learner’s awareness of the elements in question.
• The chanches of a reader autonomously noticing chunks
are probably greatest when the word string as a whole is
unfamiliar: this may happen in the case of collocations
when both content words are unkown (e.g. wreak havoc)
in which case the learner may indeed contemplate the
two words in combination.
Eye-tracking instrument
Mario Nappo - Università degli Studi di Milano

8. Selecting chunks for the L2 classroom
Boers and Lindstromberg (2009): 55-67
Which chunks are particularly useful to be learnt in a classroom context?
CRITERIA VANTAGE POINTS FOR THE L2 LEARNER
FREQUENCY OF
OCCURRENCE
Chunks, especially idiomatic expressions, are quite numerous in
every kind of text.
FAIRLY FIXED (lexical
substitutability)
Good procedural knowledge of fixed chunks is likely to support
only the fluent production but also to diminish the likelihood of
collocation errors.
FIGURATIVE CHUNKS Selecting idioms with an historical origin: most of them cannot
fully understood unless particular conventional meaning or
pragmatic function is mapped onto the whole assembly of
Mario Nappo - Università degli Studi di Milano

9. Teaching chunks to the L2 classroom
Boers and Lindstromberg (2009): 68-78
• In teaching chunks teachers should raise students’ awareness of their linguistic
motivation: in mainstream linguistics the connection between a linguistic form and its
meaning is considered arbitrary, neverthless there are linguistic elements including some
lexical phrases that even in a L2 classroom can be shown to be motivated.
PROCESSES OF ANALOGY PROCESSES OF ASSOCIATION
ICONICITY: direct translation of the extra-
linguistic phenomena  as cold as ice
METONIMY: e.g. the association of hands with
certain activities that we perform helps motivate
many chunks in which hand or hands are used
metonymically  lend a hand
DOMAINS OF EXPERIENCE: metaphorical
analogies which, over time, give rise to
conventionalized figurative chunks  from
popular ball games such soccer and cricket to
horse racing.
STRONG WORD PARTERSHIP: the existence of
(commit a crime) seems capable of linking
additional parterships with words from the same
lexical field  commit offence, commit adultery,
commit rape.
Mario Nappo - Università degli Studi di Milano

10. Elaborating chunks: SEMANTIC ELABORATION
Boers and Lindstromberg (2009): 79-105
EXPLOITING IMAGERY ORGANAZING LEXIS
DUAL CODING: association of verbal with
verbal stimuli.
The meaning of a word is associated with a
mental image.
• Fairly direct in case of words that denote
something concrete;
• Possible but less straightforward in case of
abstract words: the word jeopardy can be
associated with the concrete noun leopard
virtue of both semantic association
(dangerous animal) and phonological
resemblance.
SOURCE DOMAINS: organizing idioms
to their experiental source domains  card
games, warfare, boxing, etc.
COLLOCATIONAL BOXES: organizing
collocations in tables containing no more than 5
base words to the left and the collocate to the
right.
PERSONALIZED VOCABULARY NOTEBOOK:
The learner can autonomously collect new
language. It can be organized and reviewed in
class.
USE OF IMAGERY: pictorial elucidation
promotes comprehension and retention of
meaning but not form.
LEWIS’ organizing principles: topic, situation,
notion and narration.
Mario Nappo - Università degli Studi di Milano

11. Elaborating chunks: STRUCTURAL ELABORATION
Boers and Lindstromberg (2009): 106-125
PHONOLOGICAL MOTIVATION MEMORABILITY
18% of English idioms allitterate while the 2%
rhyme.
This occurs particularly with:
• BINOMIAL IDIOMS (spick and span): tend
be short; the points of consonant repetition
are often close together
• STANDARDIZED SMILES (drunk as
• Sound pattern has a high mnemonic
• Children take delight in the sound patterning
words whereas adults are less likely to dwell
the phnological properties of lexical phrases.
• Due to cognitive-style differences, some
learners are more liable than others to notice
phonological properties of words and phrases.
English phraseology is poor with respect to its
inflection: if alliteration occurs across a
sequence of short words, the same consonant is
repeated at a close intervals thus is likely to be
extra noticeable
Teachers should draw students’ attention to the
phonological repetition in a given chunk and
highlight that its lexical makeup might not be
completely accidental.
Mario Nappo - Università degli Studi di Milano

12. Bearing in mind: consolidating chunks
Boers and Lindstromberg (2009): 127-145
Michael Lewis, despite his outspoken preference for using class time to teach strategies rather than
individual lexical items, does concede that certain benefits can come from classroom activities.
MATCHING EXERCISES: students are asked to match
verbs in one list with their strong collocate nouns into
another.
• It has to include a sufficient number of familiar or half
familiar items; if it is not so, students will have to
resort to blind guess-work.
• It consolidates the memory of partially acquired chunks
and it introduces novel ones.
Mario Nappo - Università degli Studi di Milano

13. Bearing in mind: consolidating chunks
Boers and Lindstromberg (2009): 127-145
Michael Lewis, despite his outspoken preference for using class time to teach strategies rather than
individual lexical items, does concede that certain benefits can come from classroom activities.
DELETION EXERCISES: students are presented with a
set of words all exept one of which are strong collocates of
a given keyword. The task is to identify “the odd one out”.
Mario Nappo - Università degli Studi di Milano