"According to Lewis (1997, 2000)
native speakers carry a pool of hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions, of lexical chunks in their heads ready to draw upon in order to produce fluent, accurate and meaningful language...
[Lewis] makes a helpful summary of the findings from first language acquisition research which he thinks are relevant to second language acquisition:
Language is not learnt by learning individual sounds and structures and then combining them, but by an increasing ability to break down wholes into parts.
Grammar is acquired by a process of observation, hypothesis and experiment.
We can use whole phrases without understanding their constituent parts.
Acquisition is accelerated by contact with a sympathetic interlocutor with a higher level of competence in the target language.
Schmitt (2000) makes a significant contribution to a learning theory for the Lexical Approach by adding that 'the mind stores and processes these [lexical] chunks as individual wholes.' The mind is able to store large amounts of information in long-term memory but its short-term capacity is much more limited, when producing language in speech for example, so it is much more efficient for the brain to recall a chunk of language as if it were one piece of information. 'Figment of his imagination' is, therefore, recalled as one piece of information rather than four separate words.
In our view it is not possible, or even desirable, to attempt to 'teach' an unlimited number of lexical chunks. But, it is beneficial for language learners to gain exposure to lexical chunks and to gain experience in analyzing those chunks in order to begin the process of internalisation. We believe, like Lewis, that encouraging learners to notice language, specifically lexical chunks and collocations, is central to any methodology connected to a lexical view of language."
https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/arti ... roach-lookDoes anybody use the chunking technique?
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