Like most people, I didn’t take much convincing that students need to learn chunks of language such as idioms and verb + noun collocations, and have tried various ways of bringing them into the classroom over the years. However, I still doubt that my students are any more likely to learn longer stretches of language like these from the kinds of boring exercises like word maps and gapfills that the textbooks give us than they were to be able to produce perfect grammar through those methods. On top of that, you have the problem that a text with two or three grammar points worth picking up on probably has thirty or so unconnected chunks of useful language. I therefore approach every book on collocations with a fair amount of scepticism. Imagine my surprise and delight, then, when I read the introduction to Teaching Chunks of Language and found that it mainly consisted of a great summary of most of my doubts.

The criticisms of older ways of teaching and practising chunks that the book lists and then tries to find solutions for include:

 The techniques used don’t sufficiently aid memorization

 Textbooks don’t pick up on enough of the useful language that is in their reading and listening texts

 Supplementary books on idioms etc are even more limited in the types of exercise they have

 All those things lead to slow and inefficient learning.

The authors also point out that reading alone is unlikely to lead to our students learning most chunks well enough to produce them, as the majority are not high frequency, students need to meet them “multiple times within a relatively short time span” (page 10), and anyway students are only likely to give attention to them if at least one, and preferably all, of the words are unknown. They also critique the idea of teaching only very high frequency collocations, as they are likely to be picked up anyway and are only a small percentage of all the chunks they will need to reach a good level. They also dismiss mnemonics as a solution for most chunks, as it is difficult or impossible to think of one that covers every word of an idiom etc.

The ideas in this book for how to get round those weaknesses of previously available materials are divided into three chapters on initial steps towards memorization (Chapter 2- Basic Chunks Teaching Activities); selecting particular chunks to learn and applying memorization techniques to them (Chapter 3- Teaching Sets of Chunks); and reviewing to make sure those things stick (Chapter 4- Reviewing and quizzing). Chapter 1 is an introduction (How to Use this Book), and the book ends with 60 pages of photocopiable materials, keys, a glossary (of technical terms like “word string” and “entrenchment”), bibliography, and a Teacher’s Quick-Reference Guide to help choose activities by level and time available. There are also additional worksheets at www.helblinglanguages.com/teachingchunks

This 174 page book of practical suggestions and photocopiable materials offers far more teaching ideas for chunks than I’d ever seen in one place before, but the ultimate test for this book is obviously whether it manages to follow up its criticisms with real solutions. The main solutions suggested by the authors in the introduction are all connected to choosing chunks that are “linguistically motivated” and using that in teaching them. By “linguistic motivation” they mean that “their wording is partly explainable in terms of identifiable influences” (page 12). They then go on to give the three “particularly important” examples of being “explainable in terms of their original literal meaning and usage” (e.g. the sailing roots of “show someone the ropes”), words of a similar register going together (e.g. the Latinate words remain and custody in “remain in custody”), and repetition of sounds (such as rhyming and alliteration in “safe and sound”).

To put it in much more common language, their idea seems to be to put much more emphasis on teachability than in other books I have seen on collocations, at least partly making that more of a priority than frequency or putting the language into thematic sets such as body idioms (something they follow recent fashion in stating that is potentially as confusing as it is helpful).

Chapter 2 kicks off the practical teaching suggestions with 14 activities on “Basic Chunk Teaching Activities- Initial Steps Towards Memorisation”, almost all of which have accompanying photocopiable materials at the back of the book that range from just two lines for 2.2 (Priming with Chinese Whispers- using chunks from a song that students are going to hear) to three and half pages for 2.11 (Teach your Phrase- students telling stories containing the target chunks in groups). The introduction emphasises that noticing is the most important first step, and also mentions “what memory researchers call ‘rehearsal’” (page 19) , which is holding chunks in your short term memory while you prepare to use them. This is most obviously used in 2.4 (What are those initials for?) and 2.5 (Remember my change). In the former, students listen out for something with the initials they have been given but can only write it down at the end of the song or story. In the latter, they write down any changes between a written and spoken text, but again only once they have finished listening. The other activities include some variations on some long-neglected favourites (2.1- Reading out loud with pauses, 2.3- Memorising short dialogues, 2.6- a kind of one-man running dictation, 2.8- a variation on dictogloss, and 2.9- putting target chunks into questions that they ask each other).

Chapter 3 has more emphasis on communication than Chapter 2, but is also aimed at making students “engage in the kinds of rich mental processing that are especially likely to result in the formation of robust memories”. For this chapter, there are 36 pages of photocopiable materials for the 17 ideas. As with the other chapters, I don’t think I would use many of the actual materials again (and certainly only with the higher classes from the range they suggest), but they do illustrate the activities very well and so are well worth the space given to them. The first few ideas and worksheets get students thinking about their bodies and what they can do, with language for smelling (3.1), sounds (3.2) and movement (3.3). The third one then moves onto figurative expressions including movements (“my head is spinning” etc), and the next few do the same with weather (“a frosty reception” etc), devices (“memory like a sieve”), cards (“cabinet reshuffle”), seafaring, horse riding, body idioms, and boxing.

The last two ideas were perhaps the most interesting and unfamiliar to me, being based on teaching chunks that have their particular form because of their sound (“colour coordinated” rather than “colour matched”, etc), although I really can’t imagine using those worksheets with lower than post-Upper Intermediate students (rather than Pre-Intermediate+ as suggested by the book), and don’t even think that I would dedicate a substantial chunk of one lesson to this topic with anything under Intermediate. A couple of issues that I would need more information on before changing my mind of this seemingly fundamental point would be how much importance we should give to chunks at lower levels when most of our students can progress without them, how much our reliance on this method should change depending on how much our students read and listen to English outside class, and how much of that text is by native speakers and so likely to include these kinds of chunks.

Chapter 4 has 12 ideas on “reviewing and quizzing” which try to repeat and extend the memorization techniques in other parts of the book, but also aim to promote “effortful recall” (page 83), use of guesswork, and a range of skills. Five of the ideas have a page or two of accompanying worksheets. The ideas include fairly obvious but perhaps underutilized ideas like testing each other in groups (4.1- Memory slips with hints, and 4.5- What comes next?), brainstorming onto sheets of paper that are passed around the room and added to (4.3.- Circulating review sheets), and storytelling (4.4- Using chunks in mini-stories). Review Posters (4.6.) is a variation on a fairly well-known vocabulary learning technique that I needed reminding to use again. There is also an activity where students guess from context if a phrase is being used with its literal or figurative meaning, one that I thought I was the first to use when I tried it with business idioms about 6 months ago! Playing the well-known guessing game 20 Questions with chunks of language (4.7- Guess my chunk) is a bit more fun than the other ideas, but I’m not really convinced that talking about how many words and if it has alliteration will actually help recall in later real time communication.

Although I generally agree with the idea of paying more attention to teachability than I’ve encountered in materials for teaching chunks before, the result in this book does seem to be to introduce idioms that I wouldn’t expect even Advanced students to be able to produce. There is also no distinction made between chunks which students need for production and those that they might only need to understand, perhaps because that will vary over the different levels the ideas here are meant to be suitable for.

My main objection to the teaching ideas in the book was that few of them were actually fun, as being able to add some excitement to the class seems like a very important part of teachability to me (if one that is given too much importance in some classrooms). Having said that, motivated students, especially those with an unquestioning acceptance of the native speaker model, were happy to do most of the activities I tried- even if they were even happier when I did manage to introduce a game element. Judging the book by its own standards, it certainly does make the language more memorable by helping you choose language that will stick and showing you real techniques on how to help recall, although I still have doubts on how much of that language we might want or need students to be able to remember in that way. It was certainly a stimulating book that has made me rethink my teaching, even parts that are not connected to chunks of language. I also expect it to be a book that I think of, and maybe pick up, again and again for years to come.

An edited version of this review was first published in Modern English Teacher magazine. Online version published with the permission of the publishers and author.