Does anybody use the "chunking technique"?

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Does anybody use the "chunking technique"?

Postby NoManches » Sun Jun 19, 2016 3:23 pm

This question relates to my desire to express myself like a native, especially for topics that I find very interesting (my hobbies). If I can explain myself without confusion when it comes to politics I will be happy, but when it comes to my hobbies I want to express myself in a very effective manner.

I am extremely happy because I found a magazine this morning in Spanish that I absolutely love. It isn't too challenging (like a novel) but at the same time contains a TON of vocabulary that I need to know for one of my many hobbies. I plan on spending as much time as I can reading old editions of this magazine which are all online. It is a great feeling when you find something in your L2 that you are genuinely interested in and can read for fun, not because you "have to".

As I am reading, I am coming across many ideas that I would love to express in my L2 in a natural way. I can already express these ideas, but I'm sure the way I explain them doesn't very "native".

The idea of chunking occurred to me, where I take a paragraph or a few sentences I really like or would find myself using, and memorize them so that I can recite them whenever I need to. I figure that doing this enough, maybe 25 paragraphs or so, might help me "rewire my brain" so that I start expressing things related to my hobby in a very natural, native sounding manner.


My other option, is to simply read as many of these magazines as possible and hope that a massive amount of input will be enough to get me to express these ideas in the right manner. Of course I plan on reading them all anyway, so that makes me wonder if chunking is worth it?
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Re: Does anybody use the "chunking technique"?

Postby reineke » Sun Jun 19, 2016 4:23 pm

NoManches wrote:This question relates to my desire to express myself like a native, especially for topics that I find very interesting (my hobbies). If I can explain myself without confusion when it comes to politics I will be happy, but when it comes to my hobbies I want to express myself in a very effective manner.

I am extremely happy because I found a magazine this morning in Spanish that I absolutely love. It isn't too challenging (like a novel) but at the same time contains a TON of vocabulary that I need to know for one of my many hobbies. I plan on spending as much time as I can reading old editions of this magazine which are all online. It is a great feeling when you find something in your L2 that you are genuinely interested in and can read for fun, not because you "have to".

As I am reading, I am coming across many ideas that I would love to express in my L2 in a natural way. I can already express these ideas, but I'm sure the way I explain them doesn't very "native".

The idea of chunking occurred to me, where I take a paragraph or a few sentences I really like or would find myself using, and memorize them so that I can recite them whenever I need to. I figure that doing this enough, maybe 25 paragraphs or so, might help me "rewire my brain" so that I start expressing things related to my hobby in a very natural, native sounding manner.

My other option, is to simply read as many of these magazines as possible and hope that a massive amount of input will be enough to get me to express these ideas in the right manner. Of course I plan on reading them all anyway, so that makes me wonder if chunking is worth it?


"Chunking refers to an approach for making more efficient use of short-term memory by grouping information. Chunking breaks up long strings of information into units or chunks. The resulting chunks are easier to commit to memory than a longer uninterrupted string of information."

"Chunk and chunking were introduced as cognitive terms by psychologist George A. Miller in his paper "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information" (1956)."

"Uses of Prefabricated Chunks
- "It seems that in the initial stages of first language acquisition and natural second language acquisition we acquire unanalysed chunks, but that these gradually get broken down into smaller components . . ..

"The prefabricated chunks are utilised in fluent output, which, as many researchers from different traditions have noted, largely depends on automatic processing of stored units. According to Erman and Warren's (2000) count, about half of running text is covered by such recurrent units."
(J. M. Sinclair and A. Mauranen, Linear Unit Grammar: Integrating Speech and Writing. John Benjamins, 2006)."

- "If I find an especially felicitous way of expressing an idea, I may store up that turn of phrase so that the next time I need it it will come forth as a prefabricated chunk, even though to my hearer it may not be distinguishable from newly generated speech."

"Criticism of the Lexical-Chunk Approach
"Michael Swan, a British writer on language pedagogy, has emerged as a prominent critic of the lexical-chunk approach. Though he acknowledges, as he told me in an e-mail, that 'high-priority chunks need to be taught,' he worries that 'the "new toy" effect can mean that formulaic expressions get more attention than they deserve, and other aspects of language--ordinary vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation and skills--get sidelined.'

"Swan also finds it unrealistic to expect that teaching chunks will produce nativelike proficiency in language learners. 'Native English speakers have tens or hundreds of thousands--estimates vary--of these formulae at their command,' he says. 'A student could learn 10 a day for years and still not approach native-speaker competence.'"
(Ben Zimmer, "On Language: Chunking." The New York Times Magazine, Sep. 19, 2010)".

http://grammar.about.com/od/c/g/chunkterm.htm

"Chunking theories of language acquisition constitute a group of theories related to statistical learning theories, in that they assume the input from the environment plays an essential role; however, they postulate different learning mechanisms. The central idea of these theories is that language development occurs through the incremental acquisition of meaningful chunks of elementary constituents, which can be words, phonemes, or syllables. Recently, this approach has been highly successful in simulating several phenomena in the acquisition of syntactic categories and the acquisition of phonological knowledge. The approach has several features that make it unique: the models are implemented as computer programs, which enables clear-cut and quantitative predictions to be made; they learn from naturalistic input, made of actual child-directed utterances; they produce actual utterances, which can be compared with children's utterances;
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have developed a computer model analyzing early toddler conversations to predict the structure of later conversations. They showed that toddlers develop their own individual rules for speaking with slots, into which they could put certain kinds of words. A significant outcome of the research was that rules inferred from toddler speech were better predictors of subsequent speech than traditional grammars."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisition#Chunking

As you can see, chunking can be applied to natural language acquisition.

Cainntear might have some good ideas for you regarding chunking as a learning/teaching technique but what you're describing sounds more like a build-it-yourself phrasebook. As I understand it, in some Asian countries students memorize lots of sentences. The audio-lingual method might involve memorization of entire dialogues.
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Re: Does anybody use the "chunking technique"?

Postby Iversen » Mon Jun 20, 2016 5:02 am

Chunking is definitely a good idea, but not if it is seen as a recommendation of learning thousand of long sentences by heart. Anthony Lauder has published several videos on Youtube (as FluentCzech) where he recommends learning socalled connectors by heart, which are those very common phrases that serve to glue a conversation together. You can't expect to become a fluent speaker without knowing them.

Shekhtman has recommended building 'language islands' within certain topics, where you learn how to speak fairly fluently. In practice that amounts to learning at least some phrases about that topic by heart. It is not all there is to language learning, but it is an important element - and quite practical as a survival and selfconfidence boosting technique.

I would personally add one thing more, namely that you never should learn an expression by heart without also asking yourself what it really means. Otherwise you will essentially be learning extremely long and meaningless words by heart, and you will never learn to think along the same lines as the native speakers do. Actually mr. Lauder also mentions that aspect in one of his videos.

Besides I can't see the purpose of learning 'free' sentences by heart, i.e. sentences composed by someone for some specific purpose, but not repeated ever again in the same form. The formulaic phrases you need to learn are those that pop up again and again in the utterances of native speakers. Of course you may find it amusing to learn poems and famous quotes by heart so that you have something to splash around in your brain when you haven't got better things to do, or you may take a special delight in memorizing famous monologues, like the notorious "to be or not to be" speech by Hamlet - but that's more like a hobby than actual language learning.
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Re: Does anybody use the "chunking technique"?

Postby smallwhite » Mon Jun 20, 2016 7:54 am

NoManches wrote:The idea of chunking occurred to me, where I take a paragraph or a few sentences I really like or would find myself using, and memorize them so that I can recite them whenever I need to.


I don't think what you want to do is called "chunking". On this forum at least, we use "chunks" to refer to phrases: longer than a word and shorter than a sentence, eg. "as far as I know". But what you are considering memorising is several sentences or even a whole paragraph. That's not what we mean by "chunks", as far as I know.
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Re: Does anybody use the "chunking technique"?

Postby Cainntear » Mon Jun 20, 2016 9:13 am

Iversen's said most of it, really.
Iversen wrote:I would personally add one thing more, namely that you never should learn an expression by heart without also asking yourself what it really means. Otherwise you will essentially be learning extremely long and meaningless words by heart, and you will never learn to think along the same lines as the native speakers do.

This is a really important point. Just because when you read it there's all these spaces, it doesn't mean your brain's going to recognise it as multiple words. If you aren't capable of producing different sentences out of the same elements, your brain is unlikely to learn anything general -- it'll just be one unit, a really long word.

However, if you know both what it means and how to construct it, then you can start "rewiring", because then you've got two paths of recall that are mutually reinforcing.

I would also encourage you to actively look for variations, and try to use the language in slightly different ways. Try never to use it in quite the same manner twice. One thing I found quite helpful is holidays -- at any conversation groups, you can start talking about your holiday plans two or three weeks in advance, and you can repeat that if you have different conversation partners week after week. You tend to get similar questions, so you can prepare a bit in advance, and each time try to expand on it. When you come back, they'll ask pretty much the same thing, but in the past tense, and again, you can sometimes sustain this for two or three weeks. But the key is to reuse but alter and adapt as you go

Anthony Lauder has published several videos on Youtube (as FluentCzech) where he recommends learning socalled connectors by heart, which are those very common phrases that serve to glue a conversation together. You can't expect to become a fluent speaker without knowing them.

I think the most safest term to us for these is "conversational connectors"(this seems to be quite common in teaching books at the moment) because "connectors" has so many different meanings in language.

The danger with conversational connectors is missing the subtleties of meaning, in particular the _attitude they express regarding the other party.

It's a while since I watch Anthony's videos, but I recall one of Moses's videos that rankled quite badly, and I think Anthony had something similar.

Moses recommended pading out sentences with things like "to tell you the truth" and "as far as I'm concerned" as though they had no meaning whatsoever. But to me "to tell you the truth" indicates either that the listener isn't going to be happy about it, or that the speaker is making an implied admission of some kind. "As far as I'm concerned is something of a conversation stopper, a "mic drop" if you will: you're expressing that somebody (not necessarily a party to the conversation) is wrong, and you're not going to be convinced otherwise.

In the end, the advice was more likely to kill conversations that aid them "Where should we go tonight?" " As far as I'm concerned, we should go bowling." (Unintended subtext: I don't give two hoots what you want to do -- I want to go bowling and I'm not going to discuss it any further.)
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Re: Does anybody use the "chunking technique"?

Postby Ani » Tue Jun 21, 2016 4:48 pm

I think what you want to do is actually go after phrases and try to understand how and where they are used. For example if your hobby was gardening, pay attention to the different uses of verbs -- planting takes an object (either in the sentence or understood) where as working in the garden is more general. You might gather flowers but never vegetables, etc. There will be some fields specific phrases like "leaf drop" that you would only use in that context.

Seems like you have great material for slow, intensive study.
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Re: Does anybody use the "chunking technique"?

Postby gatto di ghiaccio » Tue Jun 21, 2016 5:13 pm

I totally understand wanting to talk about your hobbies in a fluent manner. One of my hobbies is ice skating and something I have done a little and plan to do more of is watching videos on youtube. These can be either "how to" videos or tv commentary on a skater's performance or interviews. There are a lot of terms and phrases we use in English in the skating community and I wouldn't know how to begin saying those things in another language (point your toes, bend your ankles, etc). So, perhaps as a complement to the reading material you found, you could find any kind of video about your hobbies to help you further cement these types of terms. I think hearing and reading them repeatedly will help you remember when to use those terms when talking about your hobbies.
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Re: Does anybody use the "chunking technique"?

Postby Olekander » Tue Jun 21, 2016 5:16 pm

Chunking should occur naturally to a clued up learner when they are listening to a contemporary audio tape or interacting with native speakers. For me it has proven unconsciously to be by far the best technique for learning a foreign language. I only realised what I was doing/ what I had done, many years after I actually learnt the languages. For this to work effectively however, you need to repeat the phrases in active conversation, and with yourself. You'll often find yourself able to access these chunks when the right opportunity and catalyst presents itself, and hard to actively recall them without a stimulus.

I don't advocate sitting down and learning a bunch of colloquialisms or chunks on their own. They are all massively situational.

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Re: Does anybody use the "chunking technique"?

Postby NIKOLIĆ » Tue Jun 21, 2016 5:53 pm

My notion of "chunking" is a bit different from yours. I often write phrases and "chunks" in an Excel file, but only after I've heard them spoken. I then proceed to review them sporadically. These chunks often contain a grammar structure or a specific use of a "grammar" word I want to work on. It seems to be working so far.


Here are some of those chunks I've compiled for Romanian.

m-am gândit la... - mislio sam na...
de fiecare dată când... - svaki put kad...
n-are nicio legatura cu... - nema nikakve veze sa (has nothing to do with)
Era să ... - stare + per
Mi se pare că ... - Čini mi se da ...
tocmai de aceea - upravo zbog toga
Ești atât de prost încât nu meriți o explicație. - Toliko si glup da ni ne zaslužuješ objašnjenje
a pune o vorbă bună - to put in a good word
din sânul + noun(gen) - iz unutrašnjosti
în rolul principal - u glavnoj ulozi
Nu tocmai! - Ne bas! Not really!
a da o mână de ajutor - give a helping hand
la sfântul așteaptă - nikad
cumpăra pe datorie - kupovati na crtu
ditamai (particularly large example of [sth]) ditamai (urmat de subst.)
pe parcurs - usput?
mă bucur tare mult - mnogo mi je drago
vin peste 5 minute - dolazim za 5 minuta
a se necăji - nu te necăji! - nervirati se - ne nerviraj se!
mai întâi ... și apoi ... - Prvo ... pa posle ...
în cel mult 2 ore (mă-ntorc) - at most, tops; (I'll be back) in 2 hours tops
m-am pus în pat - legao sam u krevet
m-a dat peste cap - blew me away???
Vorbeam de unul singur. - I was talking to myself.
E tot un drac! - Isti kurac!
De abia aștept … - Jedva cekam …
m-a lăsat fără grai - It left me speechless
Frec menta. - I'm not doing anything.
De preferat... - Preferably...
mi-am însemnat/notat - zapisao sam
la timp, din timp - na vreme
din intenţie - namerno
Halal să-ți fie! - Alal ti vera!
ca să fiu sincer = sincer să fiu - da budem iskren
tuturor celor care - svima onima, za sve one koji
ieșit din comun - neobicno, cudno
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Re: Does anybody use the "chunking technique"?

Postby Iversen » Sat Jun 25, 2016 1:27 pm

Anthony Lauder and Moses actually are as unlike each others as can be. Where "Moses recommended padding out sentences with things like "to tell you the truth" and "as far as I'm concerned" as though they had no meaning whatsoever", Lauder demands that you find out what each expression actually means in the language in which it is formulated, just as I do. I don't remember whether he actually uses the term "conversational connectors", but I agree with Cainntear that it is better than just "connector". Lauder's examples definitely are of the kind that can be used during conversations.

NIKOLIĆ's collection illustrates another point, namely how to find out which idiomatic expression or 'chunk' to use in a given situation. Until you have become so well acquainted with a given expression that it pops up by itself you will probably find yourself asking yourself how something in your own language should be translated. You will find a few short expressions scattered around in any good dictionary, but making a collection yourself serve to pinpoint the ones you want to learn NOW - and then you can just hope that those you didn't know you might need are among those mentioned in your dictionary.
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