A large share of fluent language is prefabricated: chunks, collocations, sentence frames. The disagreement is about what follows for teaching: notice chunks as they emerge (Thornbury), pre-select and flood them (Conti), or treat them as the whole syllabus (Lewis).
Where the sources disagree
- Selection: Lewis gives no syllabus. Conti selects by communicative function → pattern. Thornbury combines a frequent-formulae core with emergent items.
- Fluency mechanism: chunk storage (Pawley & Syder, Thornbury) vs process automatisation (Goodey’s comment, DeKeyser via Conti). These are complementary. Chunks are what gets automatised. (Claude)
- Risk: “all chunks, no pineapple”: retrievable formulae without generative grammar.
- Bottom-up grammar: Dellar and Selivan say most “grammar” errors are colligation/priming gaps; Thornbury (Error) and Pienemann via Conti say many are developmental. Both can be true: word-pattern errors (I am agree) look lexical, question-order errors look developmental. (Claude)
- Chunks → rules: Selivan (citing N. Ellis 1996) says chunks bootstrap grammar; Walter (2012) says chunk teaching avoids grammar. Conti sequences both (chunks first, rules in Expansion).
Theory
- The Lexical Approach - grammaticalised lexis, read critically
- Fluency rests on memorised word-groups
- Grammar emerges from usage (emergentism)
Procedures
- Sentence builders and patterns-first lexicogrammar
- MARS-EARS - the EPI instructional sequence
- How many new words per lesson - working memory limits
Research
More notes (by source)
Adaptive Learning in ELT (Philip Kerr)
- Vocabulary apps - reward design outruns learning design
An ELT Notebook (Sue Swift) - DELTA Module 2 example - multiword verbs background essay
Blog de Cristina (Cristina Cabal) - Personality adjectives - false friends, word cloud, bingo, tendency language
Clare’s ELT Compendium (Clare Maas) - Teach the signals lecturers use to flag importance
Collins ELT - CEFR vocabulary labels - prioritise, don’t restrict
- Teach dictionary skills to young learners through games
Demand High ELT - Prepare a bank of challenge prompts
EFL Magazine - Keyword method - sound-alike plus image for word retention
ELT Planning (Pete) - Boers’ six evidence-backed practices for vocabulary and grammar
- Pre-teach academic vocabulary with a subject-EAL cycle
- Twelve conversation strategies worth teaching
ELT Rants, Reviews and Reflections (Mike Griffin) - Check vocabulary intuitions with corpus tools
Gianfranco Conti (The Language Gym) - The full EPI cycle - sentence builders are only step one
Hugh Dellar - Ambient language - exploit coursebook exercises beyond the targets
- Grammar should be taught through lexis, not PPP rules
- Most errors are priming gaps, not grammar gaps
- Nothing is as practical as a good theory
- Round-ups, gapped boardwork and reformulation
IH World (IH Teach English) - Activity repertoire - texts, mingles and dice
Jane-Maria Harding da Rosa (TEYL) - Songs carry chunks and phonology
Leo Selivan (Leoxicon) - Chunks are generative templates for grammar
- Colligation and bottom-up grammar
- Teach lexically - collocations as minimum units of meaning
- Ten paper activities for recycling vocabulary sets
- The lexical syllabus began with Willis and COBUILD
- Translation done well - four L1 activities
Scott Thornbury (An A-Z of ELT) - Creative automatization - five criteria for fluency activities
- Grammar McNuggets - discrete items vs corpus reality
Side Notes on ELT (Lina Gordyshevskaya) - Affective reading - add personal and emotional engagement to a text
Steve Smith (Language Teacher Toolkit) - Learners decode far less than teachers think (fuzzy lexical representations)
- Nation’s Four Strands - balance input, output, language focus and fluency
- Nation’s eight principles of learning as a task checklist
That ELT Blog (Sanchia) - Song listening beyond gap-fill - upgrade, transcribe, correct
The TEFL Zone (Rachel Tsateri) - Anchor a lesson on one new word - Algorithmocracy
- Headlines - a low-prep news lesson built from students’ own texts
Key terms (DELTA M1)
formulaic sequence · collocation · colligation · lexical chunk · lexical priming (Hoey) · grammaticalised lexis · lexical syllabus (Willis) · nativelike selection (Pawley & Syder) · premature lexicalisation · lexical coverage · involvement load (Laufer & Hulstijn)
Already in my vault
Open questions
- How many chunks does an FCE candidate actually need, and which? (Check the English Vocabulary Profile.)
- Can sentence builders work for IELTS Writing Task 2 without producing template-speak?