Lexical Bundles

Lexical bundles are sequences of words that co-occur very frequently: Would you mind…, I think that…, etc. Teaching commonly recurring lexical bundles to students is good practice, even if you tell them a thousand times that in English the phrase “go shopping” is used as opposed to “go to the shopping,” and they still continue to write the later on their papers. At least you tried.

Traditionally, an analysis of English would focus on the zillions of one-word items making up the language, such as is listed in a dictionary. However, thanks to computer assisted corpus linguistic studies, we now know that language is also made up of ‘chunks’ of words, or phrases, and not just a series of single-word items. Thus the dividing line that had traditionally been drawn between vocabulary and grammatical rules was an artificial one, and instead we see the two acting together. For example, how does one explain the fact that certain verbs tend to go with that-clauses, such as think, know, believe, etc, and other verbs seem to go with to-clauses, such as want, like, try, etc? The simple answer seems to be that certain words have an affinity to certain grammatical structures. This blows the lid off of the original hard-line thought of Chomskian grammar which was that syntax is strictly rule governed. So if the latter is true, then how can the above example be explained? Well, it appears that syntax is more semantically driven then what linguists first thought.

So to get back to the practical matters of EFL/ESL, we now know that it is probably futile to believe that there is an actual grammatical rule that can explain the placement of every word in every utterance in every situation. So why rack your brain over trying to figure out some abstract rule for which preposition goes with what in whatever situation, blah, blah, blah. It’s collocations, baby. You’re just going to have to start memorizing some lexical chunks. Hey, nobody said language learning was easy.

So feed your students little phrases to use all the time, but don’t overdue it. The mind, and especially a feeble one such as mine, can only take so much information at a time. But, every class-meeting try to write a few phrases in the corner of the board, and even better yet, if possible, develop a list of them that can be left permanently in the classroom as the term goes on. And get out of the habit of just writing single words on the board in isolation. For example, instead of just writing down “go” and “shopping” write down “go shopping” or “have a moustache.” And encourage, or assign, your students that when they make a word list, to also try to include the other words (collocations) that go with it. Also, when writing full sentences or clauses down on the board, get into the practice of underlining and pointing out collocations. Eventually some will sink in, and maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll be priming their brain to listen for these chunks in conversation or wherever they might come across English, and they will finally absorb them into their own inter-language – the ultimate goal.