Thornbury’s term (IATEFL 2000) for grammar chopped into bite-sized, globally marketed items. Pedagogic grammar is only loosely tied to real usage, and corpus findings rarely reach coursebooks.
Sources (as given)
Rutherford (1987) “accumulated entities”; Hall’s circuit of culture and du Gay et al. (1997) on the Sony Walkman; Ritzer (1998) McDonaldization; Biber, Conrad & Reppen (1994) Applied Linguistics 15/2.
Implications
- Check syllabus order against frequency and register (corpus evidence would put the present continuous much later than coursebooks do).
- Seed an item, let it sit, return to analyse it (Alex Case’s model): recycling over single “the X lesson”.
- Avoid contrived production (forcing second conditionals into a chat).
- Some nuggets can prime noticing in real input (Schmidt & Frota 1986).
Counterargument
Simon Greenall: publishers follow demand from ministries and teachers; teachers of 50+ students often lack training for holistic approaches. “It’s not the message that’s wrong, it’s the medium.”
Apply in my context (Claude)
Exam syllabuses (KET/PET grammar lists) push McNugget teaching. The compromise: keep the list as a checklist, but meet each item first in texts and tasks, and recycle across units.
Connections
Long’s TBLT as the alternative to coursebook PPP · Check vocabulary intuitions with corpus tools · The lexical syllabus began with Willis and COBUILD