SPEAKING IN CHUNKS:

AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE USE OF MULTI-WORD PHRASES

IN SPOKEN LANGUAGE

BY ADVANCED LEARNERS OF ENGLISH

Margaret Baigent

ABSTRACT

Advances in computer technology have enabled huge quantities of natural text to be analysed, and this has reinforced the theory that much of our language output is not created from the smallest components but comes in the form of multi-word 'chunks' of language, stored and produced as such.

Little is known, however, about the way in which learners of English acquire or use these chunks. This study was carried out to observe the use of chunks of language by four Italian-speaking advanced learners in typical classroom speaking tasks, and compare this with native speaker performance of the same tasks.

It was discovered that, while the learners had certainly acquired and could use successfully a large number and variety of chunks, their speech was generally made up of proportionally less of these than that of the native speakers. They made errors of a pragmatic nature in the use of chunks, but far more formal errors, and displayed a relative lack of collocational and idiomatic chunks. There was some evidence that the use of chunks of language improves oral fluency. Both native and non-native speakers demonstrated little awareness of chunks.Based on these findings, some suggestions are put forward for teaching applications to improve learners' awareness and use of chunks.CONTENTS

1 INTRODUCTION 12 THE NATURE OF CHUNKS 32.1 TERMINOLOGY AND CLASSIFICATION 5 2.2 USE OF TERMS IN THIS STUDY 73 CURRENT FINDINGS FROM RESEARCH 93.1 CORPUS LINGUISTICS 9 3.2 DISCOURSE ANALYSIS 12 3.3 LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 154 IMPLICATIONS AND APPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING 19 4.1 IMPLICATIONS 19 4.2 DIFFICULTIES 22 4.3 PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS FOR LANGUAGE TEACHING 25 4.3.1 SELECTION 26 4.3.2 APPROACHES 305 RESEARCH 35 5.1 AIMS 35 5.2 PROCEDURE 36 5.2.1 EXPERIMENTAL METHOD 38 5.2.2 SUBJECTS 38 5.2.3 TASKS 39 5.2.4 DATA COLLECTION 40 5.2.5 TRANSCRIPTION 41 5.2.6 ANALYSIS 426 FINDINGS 48 6.1 SIMILARITIES BETWEEN NATIVE AND NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS 48 6.1.1 AWARENESS 48

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6.1.2 RANGE OF CHUNK TYPES 49 6.1.3 TASK-SPECIFIC PATTERNS 49 6.2 DIFFERENCES BETWEEN NATIVE AND NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS 50 6.2.1 NUMBER AND TYPE OF CHUNKS 50 6.2.2 DISCOURSAL USES OF IDIOMATIC CHUNKS 52 6.3 OTHER FINDINGS 53 6.3.1 FLUENCY 53 6.3.2 NON-NATIVE SPEAKER ERRORS 547 EVALUATION 57 7.1 IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING 57 7.2 FURTHER RESEARCH 608 CONCLUSION 62REFERENCES 63APPENDICES 68 APPENDIX 1 68 APPENDIX 2 70 APPENDIX 3 71 APPENDIX 4 82

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1 INTRODUCTION

The last twenty-five years or so have seen an increasing interest in lexical aspects of language. This has occurred alongside, and at least partly as a result of, the general move away from competence views of language (eg Chomskyan Transformational Grammar), which rely on the creative manipulation of abstract syntactic rules by an ideal speaker, towards a performance model, which leads to such fields of study as sociolinguistics and pragmatics. Here the emphasis is on language as social behaviour, and thus the importance of working from authentic instances of language in context, rather than from invented examples, becomes paramount.

Undoubtedly, technology has played its part, too: more sophisticated and more widely-available recording equipment has made the collection of naturally occurring spoken language easier and more practicable; and developments in computer technology have made possible the processing of almost unlimited quantities of authentic text.

The evidence obtained from the analysis of this naturally occurring text has led to new perceptions of the role and behaviour of lexis in areas such as textual cohesion (eg Halliday and Hasan 1976, 1989; Winter 1977), conversational implicature and discourse management (eg Levinson 1983), and functional systemic grammars (eg Halliday 1985).

In addition, and with particular relevance for this dissertation, there has been a widening of the study of lexis beyond the single orthographic word to consider the behaviour of words in more or less fixed combinations. There have been many suggestions for classifying these multi-word units and some of these will be examined in the next section.

Pawley and Syder estimate (1983) that several hundreds of thousands of complex lexical items are known to the 'ordinary, mature English speaker' and that these:

"form the main building blocks of fluent, connected speech" (1983 p 214)

The idea that much native speaker speech is based on 'prefabricated' language, rather than created from scratch, that we store and perhaps even acquire most of our language in this ready-made form, obviously has far-reaching implications, not only for the theoretical analysis of language but also for pedagogic theory. This will be discussed further in Section 4 and has been the motivation for the research described in this dissertation. 355 words

2 THE NATURE OF CHUNKS

John Sinclair, drawing on his decades of investigating vast quantities of naturally occurring language, particularly as part of the University of Birmingham/Collins publishers Cobuild project, puts forward his theory of the 'idiom principle':

"a language user has available to him or her a large number of semi- preconstructed phrases that constitute single choices, even though they might appear to be analysable into segments" (1991 p 110)

He gives the example of of course as a two-word phrase that is selected and operates as a single word, but extends the principle to idioms, proverbs, jargon expressions - "any occasion where one decision leads to more than one word in text" (ibid p 111). He sees this as working alongside an 'open-choice principle' of grammatical creativity in our construction of meaning through language, but believes that "the first mode to be applied is the idiom principle" (ibid p 114). This echoes and reinforces Becker's suggestion (cited in Nattinger 1980) that:

"the process of speaking is Compositional: We start with the information that we wish to express or evoke, and we haul out of our phrasal lexicon some patterns that can provide the major elements of this expression. Then the problem is to stitch these phrases together into something roughly grammatical, to fill in the blanks with the particulars of the case at hand, to modify the phrases if need be, and if all else fails to

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generate phrases from scratch to smooth over the transitions and fill in any remaining conceptual holes." (1975 p 72)

This view of language obviously implies a 'multiple storage' system in the mental lexicon - of individual words and the same words in longer institutionalised 'chunks' - and the redundancy of this has been pointed out by Bolinger (1975) and Peters (1983) amongst others. It is exactly this redundancy, however, that makes for efficient retrieval by the speaker and easy processing by the hearer. This 'economy of effort' is one of the reasons suggested by Sinclair (1991 p 110) for the predominance of the idiom principle; others are the pressures of real-time conversation and the similarity of human experience. Whatever the motivation, there can be no doubt of the role of these preconstructed chunks in facilitating interaction by, for instance, indicating the speaker's attitude (eg clause-initial do you know to signal a surprising fact); directing the discourse (eg by the way to change the topic); or alluding to shared knowledge or experience (eg the use of jargon phrases or idioms). In Yorio's words:

"Conventionalized forms make communication more orderly because they are regulatory in nature. They organize reactions and facilitate choices, thus reducing the complexity of communicative exchanges. They are group identifying. They separate those who belong from those who don't." (1980 p 438)

It is precisely the point of Yorio's paper that learners need to be helped to 'belong' in this way.

This idea of cultural competence has been restated far more recently by Moon (forthcoming) and McCarthy and Carter (1994), who also point out (ibid p 114) "the frequency with which idioms and other types of fixed expressions are alluded to, rather than used in full" in everyday discourse: in confirmation of this, a flick through a recent Sunday supplement yields the following titles using allusions to a proverb, 'fixed phrase' and a restricted collocation respectively: Daughter of invention; A head of his time; Do you remember your school daze? (The Sunday Times 'Books' 4 August 1996).

2.1 Terminology and classification

It will already have become clear that there is an enormous variety in the terminology used to describe and discuss much the same phenomenon: 'preconstructed phrases'; 'conventionalised forms'; 'fixed expressions'; etc, as well as the superficially more familiar 'idiom' and 'collocation'. It is time to inspect some of these terms and uses more closely.

Bolinger (1975) seems to use a wide range of terms - 'memorized chunks', 'stereotypes', 'pre-assembled chunks' and, particularly, 'prefabricated chunks' or 'prefabs' - without giving us precise definitions. He distinguishes between idiom and collocation on grounds of opaqueness, but in general seems to emphasise the similarity of storage and recall rather than difference in type of these 'chunks'.

Sinclair (1991) also makes no practical distinction between different types of multi-word units; for him, statistical co-occurrence is everything, and reflects the speaker's application of the same idiom principle, discussed above.

Nattinger (1980, 1988, 1992), on the other hand, is meticulous in his subdivision of what he calls 'lexical phrases' - "conventionalized form/function composites" (1992 p 1) - but is at pains to point out that he has no interest in idioms and clichés:

"we take no particular position with respect to idioms and clichés, or other conventionalized forms, unless they can be seen as associated with specific functions"

(Nattinger and DeCarrico 1992 p 34)

Lewis's 'institutionalised expressions' (1993) seem to correspond roughly to Nattinger's lexical phrases; he sees them as expressions used to "manage aspects of the interaction; they are pragmatic in character" (1993 p 94). But he is also concerned with 'polywords' - including compounds, phrasal verbs and short phrases - and collocations.

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This rough lexical versus pragmatic division can also be seen in Yorio's (1980) breakdown of 'conventionalised forms' into 'idioms' and 'routine formulas', those tied to a particular communicative situation. He also recognises, but does not concern himself with, other types of conventionalised forms such as collocation, binomials, proverbs and aphorisms.

Cowie, too, opts for a semantic/pragmatic division, with his 'composites' and 'formulae' (1988) and is particularly convincing in his reasons for this. Both these types of fixed and semi-fixed expressions, he says, have stabilised as single units, thereby losing the referential meaning of their constituents, but, while the former acquire a new referential meaning as the sum of their parts (eg a close shave), the latter acquire a meaning connected with their role in discourse (eg good morning). Collocations, at least relatively fixed ones, would appear to be included under 'composites'; in his 1990 paper, which discusses collocations and idioms in learners' dictionaries, Cowie is, in fact, more explicit about this.

This multitude of terms and types of classification reflects the inherent difficulty in drawing clear dividing lines between one type of multi-word unit and another, something which most of the above, as well as others, are quick to point out. There are always differences - semantic, syntactic and pragmatic - within categories and similarities between categories which make any form of classification fuzzy-edged.

Taking Nattinger's own discussion of his lexical phrases as an example, he points out that these may be:canonical or non-canonical (for that matter) (all in all) sentence length or shorter (nice meeting you) (in a nutshell) continuous or discontinuous (as far as I _ ) (not only X but also Y)variable or fixed (see you (soon, later, etc)) (long time no see)

In fact, Nattinger uses these differences to sub-categorise his lexical phrases, but admits that there are often ambiguities and overlaps: "there is no sharp boundary separating these categories" (Nattinger and DeCarrico 1992 p 46).

The same distinctions apply to other types of more purely lexical multi-word units and, in addition, we face the problem of drawing sharp lines between literal and 'open' collocations on the one hand, and 'pure' idioms (ie opaque and unvarying) on the other.

"Collocations of words in familiar literal senses are at one end of a broad spectrum of word combinations in English. At the other are idioms: combinations whose constant re-use in a fixed form has led to a radical change of meaning." (Cowie 1988 p 131)

In fact, as Cowie indicates by his use of the word 'spectrum' - others talk about a continuum or cline - there is no sharp cut-off point: 'fixedness' and 'opaqueness' are often subjective. In addition, the range and limitations of grammatical flexibility often cut across categories.

2.2 Use of terms in this study

In the light of the above, a broad semantic/pragmatic division seems the most helpful for some purposes, not least for teaching. For the purposes of this dissertation, however, I will follow Moon's example (forthcoming) of recognising all multi-word items or 'chunks', as I would prefer to call them, on the basis of: 'institutionalisation (the degree to which an item is considered by a language community as a unit); 'fixedness' (the 'frozenness' of form or regularity of inflection); and 'non-compositionality' (degree of semantic opaqueness, but also of grammatical or pragmatic non-compositionality). Moon points out that these criteria "are not absolutes but variables, and they are present in varying degrees" (ibid) but they are helpful, and allow us, while recognising differences between types, to include fixed collocations, compounds, idioms, discourse-structuring devices, and other types of 'fixed phrases' (such as similes, greetings, 'vague language' expressions (eg Channell 1994), and difficult-to-classify items like of course and in fact) in any analysis. 1430 words

3 CURRENT FINDINGS FROM RESEARCH5

3.1 Corpus Linguistics

It would probably be an exaggeration to say that computer technology has revolutionised the way we see language, but it has certainly given us new ways of looking at language, and has already "revealed quite unsuspected patterns", phenomena which "traditional descriptive frameworks are normally not able to account for" (Sinclair 1991 p xvii), through the possibility it gives us to analyse enormous quantities of naturally occurring text.

It is worth mentioning how recently this has happened; the first major computer corpora were created in the early 1960s (eg the Brown corpus of written American English) and only started to yield significant information over a decade later. In 1961, an early corpus of spoken language was used by Jones and Sinclair in a first, tentative experiment, inspired by Firth's now famous remarks on collocation. Their aims were "to find evidence of lexical rather than grammatical organisation ..... to reveal associations between words which were part of the regularly recurring structure of the language, and to find some indication, however rudimentary, that meaningful "lexical sets" could be produced from significant collocations" (Jones and Sinclair 1974 p 39).

The corpus was small - 135,000 words of spontaneous conversation - and "as this was one of the first examinations of a body of language for collocational information it was important to establish some basic methods and principles." (ibid p 18).

Despite this limited amount of data and the exploratory methods, Jones and Sinclair were able to extract a certain amount of initial evidence for such phenomena as: the clustering of words related to areas of meaning; the delexicalisation of some very frequent and generally applied words, eg put; the role of lexical repetition across speaker boundaries in discourse; and, most relevant for this dissertation, certain patterns of collocation suggesting idiomatic sequences.

Since then there have been increasingly numerous investigations into the collocational behaviour of individual words using computer corpora. Some of the most recent include Kennedy's investigation into the intersection of grammar and the lexicon through the collocational patterns of grammar words (Kennedy 1991); Kjellmer used a corpus of collocations extracted from the Brown Corpus (the Gothenburg Corpus of Collocations) to investigate the prepatterned nature of a prose text (Kjellmer 1991); and Moon (forthcoming) has found considerable evidence of the genre-specific density of particular types of multi-word chunks. The growing awareness of the importance of multi-word items and collocation has also had an impact on areas of computational linguistics such as language acquisition (eg Zernick and Dyer 1987) and computational dictionaries and natural language generation (eg Smadja 1989).

The Brown Corpus model of carefully selected text is giving way to gigantic monitor corpora such as that now used by Sinclair in Birmingham - vast stores of text, added to continually, from which linguists can select material according to their requirements. Sinclair argues (1991) that we need these huge quantities of text in order to collect large numbers of instances and arrive at representative patterns by selecting the most typical of these instances. His recent work, described in Sinclair 1991, focuses on the importance of units smaller than the conventional 'word' (the different meanings and collocational behaviour of different forms of the same lemma); the predominance in natural text of the idiom principle; and the patterns of the language as carried by very common words, both lexical and grammatical. All the evidence, he feels, suggests that the traditional separation of grammar and lexis is misleading and unhelpful:

"in modern lexical research, it is part of the long-term task to specify accurately the established phrases of a language ..... In this work, it is much more fruitful to start by supposing that lexical and syntactic choices correlate, than that they vary independently of each other." (Sinclair 1991 p 104)

Sinclair defines 'phrase' as a co-occurrence of words which creates a new sense. Computers are good at counting, and counting is what allows us to perceive recurring patterns of co-occurrence in text. Through the quantity of large corpora, we arrive at a quality of evidence that is often at odds with our impressions about how language works. Although this can be unsettling as well as exciting, we cannot afford to ignore this evidence of language usage.

3.2 Discourse Analysis

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In this section, I shall use the term Discourse Analysis broadly to refer to any model of investigation and analysis of naturally-produced written or spoken language in context. Thus, while a grammarian's unit of analysis is the - often invented - isolated sentence, Discourse Analysis deals with units that are longer, but also shorter - any bit of language that contributes to a unified stretch of meaningful text.

There has long been recognition of the way that in written texts, certain words and phrases function as formal links indicating a relationship between one section of text and another: on the other hand; for this reason; for instance; for example. There is now an increasing awareness of the role of words and phrases in structuring even seemingly unstructured spoken discourse such as spontaneous conversation. In their collection of 'discourse devices', Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992 pp 64-65) include lexical phrases typically found in written texts: as a result of; in spite of; but many others which seem more typical of everyday conversation: if you see what I mean; as far as I know; and so on.

Other findings and theories from this relatively new approach to language are necessitating a shift in the way we view lexis: no longer from a purely semantic and morphological point of view, but encompassing pragmatic and contextual elements as well. Work by Halliday and Hasan (eg 1976; 1989) has highlighted the role that more purely lexical items play in giving cohesion to a text through, for instance, synonymy (or near synonymy), hyponymy and meronymy (part-whole relationships). Hasan (1989) also points out that these relations are not always absolute but often have validity only within a particular text.

Winter (1977) draws our attention to the way certain lexical items, such as situation; reason; contrast; act as signals to the reader of a text; they have little meaning without reference to the surrounding text and function in a similar way to non-lexical items such as because; on the other hand; on the contrary. However, McCarthy and Carter (1994) point out that the fact that these are lexical items allows the writer/speaker a choice which can reflect an attitudinal or ideological stance - a dilemma as opposed to a crisis, for example - and this can be further reinforced by the addition of modifiers - a slight hitch (1994 pp 105-6). Again, through these perceptions, we see a blurring of the border between grammar and lexis, and again we might be better served to think in terms of chunks of language, this time those chunks, as well as individual words, which have a structuring role in discourse.

Although he was working with invented data and isolated sentences, Searle's insights into indirect speech acts have been incorporated into wider views of language as discourse. His point that indirect speech acts are often conventionalised is relevant for this dissertation. Taking Searle's own examples and terminology, Can you do A? has greater indirect illocutionary-act potential as a request than Are you able to do A? (1975 p 75) because:

"certain forms will tend to become conventionally established as the standard idiomatic forms for indirect speech acts" (ibid p 76)

Knowledge of these conventionally used and accepted forms is of course part of an individual's ability to communicate appropriately in a given speech community, the starting point for those looking at language from an ethnographic point of view.

"Communicative competence includes knowledge of how to engage in everyday conversation as well as other culturally constructed speech events" (Schiffrin 1994 p 8)

ie knowledge of the speech events and acts found in a speech community and the language that 'does' these. Saville-Troike (1982) notes the importance of 'linguistic routines' in this:

"Routines must be learned, as well as analyzed, as single units although they may vary in length from single syllables (Hi) to phrases (How do you do, April Fool, and Have a nice day) to a sequence of sentences (the well-rehearsed pitch of a door-to-door salesman)." (Saville-Troike 1982 p 42)

The idea of knowing how to 'do conversation' is taken up by Conversation Analysts, who see conversation as a "source of much of our sense of social order" (Schiffrin 1994 p 10). In addition, "conversation also exhibits its own kind of order and manifests its own sense of structure"(ibid p 10). Thus, basic CA notions of turn-taking, repair, etc, all involve particular signals. These are certainly not always conventionalised - or indeed even linguistic - but very often, recognisable established formulae are used: you see to mark a

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dispreferred response; by the way to introduce an insertion sequence; what do you mean? to initiate repair (examples taken from Cook 1989 pp 54-55).

Any view of language as discourse involves recognising the inherent tension between the stability and dynamism of language itself. In the fluid, creative construction of discourse, routine formulae, fixed or idiomatic expressions, and discourse markers provide writer and reader, speaker and listener with recognised signals and stabilising points of reference.

3.3 Language Acquisition

A child learns about the world at the same time as s/he acquires the language to define that world.

"In the beginning a child apprehends holistically: the situation is not broken down, and neither is the verbal expression that accompanies it. That is why the first learning stage is holophrastic: word and utterance are one, an undivided word representing a total context. Only later are words differentiated out of this larger whole." (Bolinger 1975/81 p 53)

Peters (1983) identifies this type of multi-word phrase or sentence - eg all gone; fall down - as the 'long units' of language acquisition, and provides evidence that "the child perpetrators of formulas are unable in other utterances to handle the same complexity of grammar, or do not use formulaic words in other utterances" (Locke 1986 p 250, referring to Peters 1983).

This type of unanalysed, situation-specific use is, of course, typical of the language required at an early stage of both first and second, child and adult language acquisition, for social routines and polite formulae eg night night; thank you; how do you do.

Children acquiring a second language in naturalistic situations seem to rely heavily on formulaic expressions (eg Hatch 1972; Hakuta 1974), probably more so than L1 acquirers. Hatch (1972, cited in Krashen and Scarcella 1978) suggests that this is due to the L2 acquirer's greater capacity to remember longer utterances; others (eg Hakuta 1974; Wong-Fillmore 1976) have stressed their urgent need to establish and maintain social relations through language.

There is some evidence that adult learners rely on formulaic speech in the early stages of development in both informal and formal (classroom aided) acquisition (eg Hanania and Gradman 1977; Ellis 1984), again in response to particular communicative goals eg see you; I can't; do you like ... ; I don't know. There seem, however, to have been relatively few studies of this aspect of language acquisition.

The use of 'formulaic speech' then (Ellis 1985) has been noted and observed in both L1 and L2 acquisition. What is not clear is the actual role this plays in the acquisition process.

It has been suggested with reference to both first and second language acquisition (eg Wong-Fillmore 1974; Ellis 1984) that language first acquired as unanalysed chunks is later broken down into its constituent elements, which then become available for use in creative, rule-bound language, ie these chunks are "the raw material for later segmentation and analysis in developing the rules of syntax" (Nattinger and DeCarrico 1992 p 23).

Others disagree. In their 1978 paper, Krashen and Scarcella examined various LA studies and concluded that the evidence supports their view that "the creative construction process is independent of routines and patterns" (p 298). They see these more as temporary short cuts to early production beyond the current level of competence, necessitated by social and communicative pressures.

Hakuta leaves room for different interpretations at the end of his 1974 paper, but ends with an interesting question: "do prefabricated patterns whose internal structure is finally perceived remain as convenient short-cut routes to production, or are they simply discarded, never to be employed again?" (1974 p 296).

Given current theories of the mental storage and retrieval of 'words', the former would seem to be the more accurate answer. This perhaps helps to highlight an important point: in 1985, Ellis noted that "the centrality of grammar in linguistics has been echoed in SLA studies" and that there have been very few studies of

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interlanguage vocabulary (1985 p 288). Those vocabulary acquisition studies which have been done have tended to focus on the memorisation and recall of individual words in a second language and the efficacy of various learning strategies and techniques (eg Cohen and Aphek 1980; Meara 1982; Pickering 1982, all cited in Carter and McCarthy (eds) 1988). The emphasis on morphosyntactic analysis and rule-formation in language acquisition also, of course, obscures or ignores the fact that very many multi-word chunks are not just unanalysed but unanalysable - expressions such as for good; of course; there you are you see, and many thousands more, are truly idiomatic, and any attempt at analysis is unhelpful.

Thus, there seems to be a need for more research specifically into the acquisition in both first and second languages of multi-word items and the role they play in the process of interlanguage development. 2201 words

4 IMPLICATIONS AND APPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING

4.1 Implications

The ever-increasing awareness of the pervasiveness of prefabricated chunks in native-speaker performance must lead us to rethink our approach to teaching English to non-native speakers.

Pawley and Syder (1983) recognise this phenomenon as a key to 'native-like selection' of idiomatic, rather than unidiomatic expressions from the range of grammatically correct forms available. Conversely, of course, this also explains why much NNS production comes across as unidiomatic and 'un-English'. While this is not a new concept in itself, the extent to which native speakers rely on prefabricated language is only recently being appreciated. And now we have realised it, we can no longer afford to relegate 'idiomatic language' to the sidelines of English teaching.

"Traditionally, picturesque idioms have been seen as appropriate for relatively advanced students" (Lewis 1993 p 98)

and again,

"idioms become a 'fun' element of the syllabus, but no one is quite sure what they are for" (McCarthy and Carter 1994 p 109)

We direct our energies into presenting and re-presenting verb phrases, and any lexical items which are not recognisably 'words' - such as you see; of course; by the way - are rarely focused on.

Previous theories of teaching which sought to simplify language for learners by removing the messy, idiomatic or unanalysable bits were perhaps acting in good faith; given what we now know about the extent of these 'inconvenient' bits of language, to persist in such theories and methodologies would be dishonest and patronising to our learners.

The way ahead, however, is far from clear. Kennedy (1991) calls for "text-based, pedagogically-appropriate descriptions of language ... throwing light on what some of the units of learning might be" (p 215).

We do not yet have such descriptions. In the meantime, what is clear is that the traditional strict pedagogic separation of grammar and vocabulary is no longer valid or adequate for teaching purposes, given what we now know about the nature of collocation. Lewis (1993) points out the obsession of traditional vocabulary teaching with nouns:

"Often, vocabulary teaching is almost exclusively directed to naming more and more objects, rather than encouraging the ability to talk about things" (p 102)

Here he is referring to the lack of help we often give learners to explore the collocational possibilities of these nouns.

Neither can we ignore the findings of corpus linguistics as regards the collocational behaviour of so-called 'grammar words' such as prepositions (eg Kennedy 1991) or delexicalised verbs (eg Sinclair 1991). Kennedy writes:

"The extent to which collocations occur ... suggests that it may be possible to teach some of what has normally been considered as grammar in terms of vocabulary." (Kennedy 1991 p 216)

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However we approach the teaching of prefabricated chunks of language, there seems to be a consensus that we not only should but also can incorporate them into our teaching. In his 1983 paper on communicative competence in language learning, Richards makes this explicit:

"The fact that language is conventional has important implications for language teaching. Firstly, it suggests that there is reason to be sceptical of the suggestion that language cannot be taught, but only 'acquired'. Many of the conventionalized aspects of language usage are amenable to teaching." (1983 p 115)

Many others have made suggestions as to how this teaching may be achieved, and some of these will be reviewed in section 4.3. In general, however, Cowie (1992) seems to speak for many when he says:

"It is impossible to perform at a level acceptable to native speakers, in writing or speech, without controlling an appropriate range of multi-word units. Moreover, the demands of creative expression in the foreign language rests, as it does for native speakers and writers, on prior knowledge of a repertoire of such expressions. These are realities which communicative language teaching in particular has to accommodate itself to." (1992 p 10)

4.2 Difficulties

The problems for both learners and teachers are many. Apart from the heavy memory load involved in 'learning' a wide repertoire of prefabricated chunks (eg Bolinger 1976; Lewis 1996), L2 speakers also face a number of other difficulties in using them. In her useful overview of learner errors, Moon (forthcoming) states:

"Errors in the use of multi-word items can be categorised crudely as formal, pragmatic, or stylistic."

She gives examples of some lexical errors (eg come low or high water) and, perhaps more importantly, reminds us that:

"formal errors may arise where syntactic 'rules' for multi-word items are not known or observed, so that items are strangely pluralised, or use (sic) in an untypical tense, aspect, or voice." (ibid)

Pragmatic errors may occur because of an inappropriate awareness of the discourse situation, or through lack of knowledge of a particular evaluative connotation: eg (Moon's example) pearl of wisdom is usually used by native speakers to express sarcasm (also McCarthy and Carter 1994 on the textual and interpersonal functions of idioms).

Finally, non-native speakers may make stylistic errors by using an expression which is particularly marked for some reason - perhaps rare or slang.

Moon (ibid) cites evidence that L2 learners tend to shy away from multi-word items. Perhaps they are aware of some of these difficulties - idiomaticity is after all generally acknowledged to be a universal in natural languages - or perhaps they are discouraged by previous unsuccessful attempts at using carefully learned idioms.

In the face of so many difficulties, it is perhaps not surprising that past and existing teaching materials and methodologies have tended to ignore or avoid multi-word chunks, or label them as 'difficult' areas (eg phrasal verbs) or 'advanced vocabulary' (eg traditional idioms and proverbs). Even recent practitioners consider the wisdom of not attempting to teach multi-word chunks: Kennedy (1991), for example, in his discussion of prepositions and their collocational behaviour, wonders, "perhaps they should not be taught at all, but rather left to be absorbed through language experience" (1991 p 227), and Gairns and Redman (1986) on collocations, suggest not trying to present collocations and other multi-word chunks in any systematic way but rather to deal with them as they arise. (However, in their recent course books (1996) there is an attempt to focus learners' attention on collocations, which suggests that they have revised this view.)

The difficulty of the learning task is highlighted by Alexander's bizarre suggestion (1985) that, rather than trying to help L2 learners to remedy their 'phraseological and pragmatic deficits' in conversation, we should try "to "educate" those who come into contact with foreigners (sic) so that they come to appreciate that such difficulties are part of crosscultural interaction and need to be tolerated"! (1984 p 18)

Moon puts it succinctly when she says:

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"It is a difficult situation: these items are hard, but they need to be acquired at some stage." (forthcoming)

Furthermore, Carter and McCarthy note that:

"The emphasis on problems may in itself be dangerous, since it concedes to idiomaticity and fixed expressions a problematic status, and thus ignores arguments concerning the naturalness and pervasive normality of such 'universal' relations in language." (1994 p 57)

We must not underestimate the difficulty of the task for learners or teachers, but neither should we use this difference as an excuse to feed our learners an inaccurate and over-simplified version of the language or of the learning task they face.

4.3 Practical suggestions for language teaching

Although the existence of prefabricated chunks has been noted and commented on for at least twenty years (eg Bolinger 1975, Becker 1975) and their ubiquity confirmed by studies in the field of discourse analysis (eg McCarthy 1991) and corpus linguistics (eg Sinclair 1991), the results of this knowledge are proving slow to permeate mainstream second or foreign language teaching. Both teachers and learners are reluctant to abandon traditional notions of 'grammar' and 'vocabulary' or their belief in a PPP (Presentation, Practice, Production) methodology, where vocabulary study is ad hoc and subservient to the real business of learning and practising discrete 'grammar' items.

There have, though, been some serious attempts to suggest practical teaching applications in both the selection of language for learning and the approaches which can be adopted. These are discussed in the following two sections.

4.3.1 Selection

In his useful 1980 classification of 'conventionalized language forms', Yorio also issued this word of warning:

"When the choices at our disposal are so numerous and diverse, random or purely subject selection is totally inadequate." (1980 p 439)

His criteria for selection, however, - need, usefulness, productivity, currency and frequency, and ease - seem too general and all-encompassing to be of much practical use, although he rather more helpfully points out the difference between short- and long-term teaching objectives. Short term, there will be a need for items necessary for survival and instant communication; long-term objectives should be to increase learners' awareness of the power of conventionalised language in situational and cultural contexts.

Since then, various suggestions for the selection and ordering of multi-word chunks for teaching/learning purposes have been made.

Kjellmer (1991) suggests that "established sequences of on lexical word and one or more function words ... are a vital part of the lexicon ... and are the ones that every learner of the language will need to learn before tackling the fossilized and semi-fossilized phrases" (p 114). (By fossilized and semi-fossilized phrases Kjellmer intends purely lexical collocations such as stumbling block, and idioms.) While some of Kjellmer's 'established sequences' are indisputably more useful than some of the 'fossilized phrases' - for a change; a number of compared with artesian well; arms akimbo - this seems too sweeping a generalisation. Even amongst Kjellmer's own examples, I would contest the claim that to be appointed by should have priority over such fossilised phrases as classical music or glass of water.

Bahns (1993) suggests that we should reduce the learning load by concentrating only on collocations where there is no direct translation in the learners' L1, given that learners seem to rely on a 'hypothesis of transferability' (Bahns' term). Bahns' study was carried out with German-speaking learners; I am doubtful whether this strategy would prove very useful with my Italian-speaking learners, as even expressions which have some similarity in English and Italian usually show some formal and pragmatic differences, which might tend to be ignored if translational equivalence is taken too literally and 'hypothesis of transferability' encouraged too keenly.

Kennedy (1991) advocates using computer corpora to highlight the relative frequency of collocations of common grammar words (he takes four prepositions as his examples) as one basis for deciding the content of language

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teaching syllabuses. He is though aware of the problems inherent in a corpus-based analysis: it is not always easy to decide whether a particular sequence is in fact lexicalised; many collocations recognised by native speakers as formulaic occur very infrequently in any given corpus; collocations are often discontinuous and therefore not obviously identifiable; formally identical collocations may have more than one function.

Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992) argue strongly for language teaching based on their 'lexical phrases' (see Section 2 of this dissertation). As has been discussed, these lexical phrases are categorised and classified meticulously, but it is not clear on what grounds they are selected in the first place; many of them sound, to my ears at least, rather unconvincing or contrived: in a nutshell; hold your horses; or Nattinger's obviously favoured it's only in X that Y. In addition, the fact that they only include in their lexical phrases expressions that have a particular discourse function seems deliberately and unhelpfully to exclude purely lexical chunks which may be equally common and necessary for communication eg car keys; pouring with rain; weak spot.

Probably the most complete theories as to how to apply our new awareness of lexical chunks to language teaching have come from Sinclair and Renouf (1988), Willis (1990) (and Willis and Willis 1989) and Lewis (1993).

In the context of his lexical approach, which he stresses is not a lexical syllabus (1993 p 109), Lewis proposes the inclusion, for incomplete mastery, of a large number of high-meaning/low frequency words (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) for immediate communicative power. Alongside these, however, should appear their most typical collocations, as well as sentence-length institutionalised utterances and sentence heads, which can serve an instant communicative need but also contribute to subsequent grammatical competence. Emphasis should also be given to delexicalised words and their patterns and, following Lakoff and Johnson (1980), the metaphorical usages that are a part of everyday language. All of these, he says, should be selected on a principle of 'maximal usefulness' to the students in question (ibid p 106-103).

Lewis criticises Willis's lexical syllabus (1990) for giving inadequate attention to multi-word lexical items (ibid p 109). However, although the basis of Willis's syllabus is individual words, these words are seen not in isolation but in their mor common or typical patterns. Developing Sinclair's ideas (Sinclair and Renouf 1988), Willis used the Birmingham COBUILD corpus to find the most frequent words in English but, as he points out:

"the lexical syllabus does not identify simply the commonest words of the language. Inevitably, it focuses on the commonest patterns too." (1990 p vi)

However, he also makes it clear that the corpus evidence is not sufficient:

"We need to look seriously at the language and make principled decisions about what patterns and uses are to be regarded as typical and to be highlighted for the learner" (ibid p 41)

He also, following Sinclair and Renouf (ibid), recognises the need for the inclusion of some lower frequency, high-content words to fill out lexical sets (eg days of the week, colours) or in relation to the classroom learning environment (eg student; group). Generally, however, the claim is that by working from the words commonly used, we also find the most common lexical collocations and structural patterns, and in fact, Willis did put these theories into practice with the 3-level Collins COBUILD English Course (Willis and Willis 1989).

Although Willis and Lewis do not agree in every respect regarding the selection of language for inclusion in a syllabus, I believe Willis and many others would agree with Lewis's belief that:

"increasing competence and communicative power are achieved by extending the students' repertoire of lexical phrases, collocational power, and increasing mastery of the most basic words and structures of the language." (ibid p 48)

4.3.2 Approaches

Although there have been few proposals for wholesale methodologies as regards the teaching of prefabricated chunks (but see Willis and Willis 1989; Nattinger and DeCarrico 1992), possible approaches are emerging.

There have been tentative suggestions for a role for computer corpora in the classroom as well as in syllabus planning and materials writing (eg Willis 1990; Sinclair 1991; Kennedy 1991) to allow learners using a concordancing

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programme to arrive at their own understanding of language patterns and collocations, and build up their own 'learner's corpus' (Willis 1990).

This fits in with a new general approach put forward as an alternative to the traditional Presentation-Practice-Production. Willis (1990) talks about the need for learners to be 'exposed' to particular features of the language, 'for awareness-raising' activities, leading to speculation and analysis. This evolves (in Willis and Willis 1996) into a CR (consciousness raising) approach, with specific emphasis on multi-word chunks of language. Lewis (1993 and 1996) proposes an OHE (Observe-Hypothesise-Experiment) paradigm; he sees this as a cyclical rather than linear process, reflecting the provisional and cyclical nature of learning, and basically a long-term one, which should, however, be reflected in short-term teaching sequences.

This kind of approach is consonant with a holistic view of language and a recognition that mastering a language does not involve " 'assembling' it from its smallest component parts" (Lewis 1993 p 96). Lewis applies this view to teaching thus:

"correctly identified lexical phrases can be presented to L2 learners in identifiable contexts, mastered as learned wholes, and thus become an important resource to mastering the syntax. So the learner breaks down phrases rather than building them up." (ibid p 96)

This seems to be a view shared by Sinclair and Renouf (1988) and Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992) among others.

Slightly paradoxically, in this holistic view, many practitioners see a place for drills and pattern practice. Kennedy (1991) says:

"research on collocations suggests that automaticity or habit-formation from an information-processing or skills perspective still has some explanatory power" (1991 p 216)

This is realised by Nattinger and DeCarrico in their oral drills, which move from simple repetition of fixed routines to gradual substitution and variation, to encourage confidence and fluency and to replicate the "routine to pattern to creative language use" observed in language acquisition (1992 p 116).

Willis seeks to mirror the native speaker's repertoire of prefabricated chunks in his suggestions for 'holophrase drilling'; he is insistent, though, that this should not be seen as central to a methodology. He sees it as a useful confidence builder, which should be done in short sharp bursts after awareness-raising and analysis. In this way, he says, mindless mechanical repetition is avoided and the result is to consolidate a chunk for future retrieval.

This brings us to what seems to me to be a fundamental requirement of any approach, strategy or technique which aims to assist learners in their acquisition of native speaker type chunks, and that is instilling in them an awareness of the existence of these chunks and an ability to recognise them in discourse. This also means very often recognising that a chunk can be analysed no further:

"teachers will need to encourage learners to recognise fixed expressions, idioms and collocations as chunks. They will need to help them in dealing with them as wholes, and not as isolatable building blocks that can be reconstituted" (Alexander 1989 p 22)

Nattinger (1988) maintains that:

"Since a great part of the learner's task is to chunk unfamiliar material in meaningful ways, the teacher who makes this chunking easier increases the number of items the learners retain." (1988 p 65)

It is not an easy task for teachers or learners, as Lewis points out (1993 p 120), especially for those 'brought up' linguistically with notions of 'grammar' and 'vocabulary'.

We all need practice in identifying collocations and underlying patterns in order to maximise learners' benefits from the language to which they are exposed. However, I believe, as Kjellmer does (1991), that:

"students who have acquired 'collocational learning habits' at an early stage can be expected with some confidence to pursue their further studies of lexis in a more fruitful way." (1991 p 125)

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However carefully we select and offer language to learners, though, there can, as Lewis reminds us, be "no expectation that any of the new language will be learned in a particular lesson." (1996 p 15). It is a long and gradual process of empowerment. 3022 words

5 RESEARCH

5.1 Aims

The evidence for extensive native speaker use of prefabricated chunks of language seems to be convincing. There is far less evidence about non-native speaker behaviour in this respect. There seem to have been relatively few comparative studies of NS/NNS performance which might shed more light on the processes and problems of acquiring prefabricated chunks in the L2. Alexander (1985) mentions, among few others, a study by Gotz (1982), which focused on the inappropriate transfer of L1 communication strategies and signals in conversation; the 1987 study by Blum-Kulka and Levenston also investigated L2 speakers lexical-grammatical deficits in particular speech acts and compared these with NS performance.

Generally, however, NNS inadequacy in this area is taken for granted (eg Pawley and Syder 1983; Widdowson 1989; Kjellmer 1991). Amongst practising teachers, too, there is automatic acceptance of the fact that much learner output, while grammatically well-formed, is 'not really English' or 'linguistically ill-formed', to use Widdowson's phrase (1989).

The situation is probably not helped very much by current teaching practice in my institution and, I imagine, in many others employing a generally communicative methodology. I believe that some attention is paid by both teachers and learners to features such as discourse organisation markers, collocation and 'linguistic well-formedness' in written language. In speaking, however, where the emphasis is on effective (or at least adequate) communication in real time, relatively little attention is paid to the overt teaching/learning of idiomatic chunks and, I suspect, relatively little is even usually noticed about how learners actually express their message.

This study then was an attempt to discover more about learners' use or non-use of NS-type chunks of language in carrying out tasks typical of a communicative classroom. I decided to focus on spoken language for the above reason - that it seems to be an area failed by communicative methodologies - and also because, being usually more spontaneous, it is therefore probably more representative of a user's mental storage and retrieval systems. The study was carried out with advanced learners (approaching Cambridge CPE) who could be expected to have a wide range of active vocabulary and considerable fluency of speech, to see to what extent this was reflected in their use of idiomatic chunks.

5.2 Procedure

Two pairs of advanced learners carried out four short oral tasks. These were recorded and the learners were later asked to identify in their transcripts any multi-word utterances which they believed they had produced as a single chunks of language. The results were compared with native speaker performance of the same tasks.

5.2.1 Experimental method

Although I obviously hoped my investigation would prove to have validity to inform future classroom practice, I decided not to collect the data in a classroom situation. This was partly because of the difficulty in obtaining sufficiently clear recordings in these conditions. In addition, since the NS recording would obviously not be classroom data, I decided on an experimental method as providing the best means of data comparison.

5.2.2 Subjects

Two native speakers and four non-native speakers took part in the investigation, in pairs. The native speakers had met a few days before the recording; the non-native speakers met only at that point but knew they would be in the same class for the coming year. These were advanced learners about to begin an eight-month course leading to the UCLES Proficiency examination. They were selected from the seven students at that time enrolled in that class because they had followed a course the previous year and were thus familiar with the learning situation in the institution, the British Council, Bologna.

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The learners were aged between 17 and 34; three were female, one male. Three are in full-time education; the fourth works in a local bookshop/publishing house. They have between four and fourteen years experience of English in a formal learning situation, between one and four of these at the British Council; none has had much exposure to English outside the learning environment. Only one has a strong instrumental motivation for improving her English - she wants to work in the field of literary translation; the others perceive English as a general requirement of late twentieth century life.

While they were principally selected on the basis stated above, these learners are in fact fairly representative of our student population. For the academic year 1995-96, approximately 54% of students enrolled on courses were aged between 14 and 29, 24% between 30 and 39; the female/male balance was 68% to 32%. Figures for the current year 1996-97 are not yet complete, but show no great variation with respect to the above.

5.2.3 Tasks

The tasks were chosen as being representative of those typically used in our teaching institution, with its emphasis on student-student interaction and maximal opportunity for fluent communication with little or no teacher intervention. By using familiar task types, I hoped to reduce any anxiety the subjects might feel in this experimental setting, and any findings would be applicable to this same teaching situation.

Four tasks were selected from the Cobuild 3 course book (Willis and Willis 1989), in three cases with slight alterations to the wording of the instructions. They were thus actual rather than hypothetical classroom tasks, and well within the linguistic abilities of these learners, the course book being aimed at students at an intermediate level.

The first two were of a more purely interactional nature (talking about personal experiences and feelings); the third and fourth were more transactional (problem-solving and trying to reach an agreement). These particular tasks were selected because the transcripts of native speakers doing them revealed a considerable number of chunks, and because the nature of the tasks seemed to some extent to prescribe the language needed for their achievement. The tasks as given to the subjects can be found in Appendix 1.

5.2.4 Data Collection

I recorded each of the pairs of subjects in a continuous session (ie all four tasks together) using a small hand-held tape recorder. In order to allow the subjects to get used to the situation, I suggested they spend a few minutes chatting to get to know each other, with the tape recorder running.

I asked the learners to carry out the tasks together as they would in a classroom situation and explained that I would not participate or intervene in any way. The native speakers likewise were asked to approach the tasks as if they were part of a learning/training session, eg a course or workshop.

I then made complete transcriptions of the recordings and asked all subjects to read through these and mark in their own utterances any phrases of more than one word which they believed they knew and had produced as a single chunk; doubtful instances could be marked with a question mark. To help to make clear the types of phrases I had in mind, I gave the subjects an extract from the Cobuild tapescript of native speakers doing one of the same tasks, with examples of chunks underlined (see Appendix 2). I also asked the two native speakers, who are teaching colleagues of mine, to do the same with all the non-native speakers' transcripts. In this way, I hoped to gain insights into non-native speaker perception as well as use of chunks, and to avoid complete reliance on my own intuition in the analysis of the transcripts.

I was also interested to discover to what extent the use of chunks of language assisted a learner's fluency (eg Pawley and Syder 1983); to help in this, I asked two of my colleagues experienced in teaching/examining for the Proficiency examination, to listen to the recordings of one of the tasks and award the NNS subjects a mark for fluency, according to the criteria and marking scale used for this exam.

5.2.5 Transcription

Because these transcripts were to be used by non-linguists (and indeed non-native speakers) I tried to avoid unfamiliar symbols and over-complex annotation. While aiming for an accurate reproduction of the interaction, including overlaps and interruptions, I did not feel it was necessary to indicate intonation patterns or deviant pronunciation. I

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added some conventional punctuation (full stop, comma, question mark, exclamation mark) in a way conventionalised for the written representation of speech in eg narrative.

However, because of the importance of pauses and hesitations in indicating a speaker's use of ready-made chunks of language (eg Pawley and Syder 1983; Kjellmer 1991) - native speakers often show quite considerable hesitation between chunks, rarely in the middle of them - I was careful to indicate pauses faithfully and represented them in an easily-understood way, using two or more dots (.. for a short pause; ... for a longer one, etc). Although sound-lengthening can also be an indication of hesitation between chunks, I decided for simplicity of presentation not to mark this in the transcripts shown to the subjects, although I did take it into consideration when carrying out my analysis.

5.2.6 Analysis

As I had anticipated, the analysis of the transcriptions was not without some difficulties in the identification and classification of the multi-word chunks of language produced.

(a) Identification of chunks

I found that there was no real alternative to relying on my own intuition in identifying chunks; both the NS and NNS subjects showed varying degrees of perception and there was insufficient consensus for me to rely on others' identification of chunks, except as an occasional useful confirmation in dubious instances.

There were, of course, many of these. The transcriptions yielded very many fully conventionalised or lexicalised chunks (Pawley 1986) (eg I mean; just for fun) and these were usually identified by at least one of the NS subjects as well as myself. But there were a considerable number of instances which were far from clear cut, even when identified by more than one person. The main types of difficulty are outlined below, where all examples are taken from the native speaker transcripts.

1) common, but not fixed collocations, eg tropical storm seems a clear example of a fixed collocation, but what about terrific storm?

A similar difficulty occurs with modified adjectives, eg quite obvious; not so obvious. I found I could not identify clear criteria for including or excluding these, but had to judge each instance on an individual and intuitive basis.

2 very common verbal forms, especially those which appeared to be task- specific, eg I've never been; I'd like to. Interestingly, I had not considered these might be chunks until the subjects themselves identified them as such. Generally, I decided not to include these.

Conversely, I would tend to include tag questions and 'short replies' (eg isn't it; neither am I) despite their structural complexity, because of their frequency in native speaker conversation and their discoursal functions.

3 I am also uncertain whether some discontinuous 'sentence builders' of the type identified by Nattinger and Decarrico (1992) should be regarded as chunks. In Task 4, for example, there were these two examples: whether ........ or whether whether ........ or not but, given the separation of their parts by fairly long sequences and their incorporation into a larger structural frame, I feel they belong rather in a more creative, constructive model of language use.As well as the problem of deciding whether to include some multi-word sequences as chunks, it was also sometimes difficult to decide where a chunk began and ended; there often seemed to be overlaps. For example, in the following utterance: can be awake all night

I identified two chunks - be awake and all night; one of the native speaker informants identified one - awake all night.

Various factors helped in making decisions of these kinds. One as previously mentioned, was the independent support of at least one other respondent. Another was the repetition, in the same task or another, of the same chunk or a variation of it, eg travelling around was used three times by the same speaker in Task 1 and was also identified as a chunk by both the NS subjects. A further useful guide to the reality of a chunk was a lack of an internal pause in its

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production (Pawley 1986) and, for the NNSS, there were several clear instances of literal translation of an Italian expression.

(b) Classification of chunks

Having taken the necessary decisions of the types discussed in the previous section, I then had to find useful ways of classifying the chunks. Since my intention was to compare NS and NNS use of chunks, I decided to work from the NS transcripts and use any identifiable tendencies as a classification framework for the NNS recordings. Fortunately, some clear patterns emerged.

As well as general discourse markers (eg I mean; that's right) there was much task-specific organisational language. Task 3, for example, (which involved guessing the season represented in short poems) produced such chunks as the first (second, etc) one; what about (this one); comes to mind.

In addition, each task produced its own topic-specific chunks, eg from Task 2 (discussing storms): tropical storm; fork lightning; negative feelings.

There seemed to be a further group of recognisable fixed expressions which were not specific to the topic or task but are used more widely, eg just for fun; a stereotype image.

I was surprised at the amount of 'vague language' (Channell 1994) that emerged, eg a lot; kind of; tend to, and felt that this could serve as a useful category in itself because of its ubiquity in the NS performance.I therefore decided on the following categories in my analysis of the NNS transcripts: General discourse markers Task-specific discourse markers Topic-specific chunks Vague language expressions Other chunks (including collocations)

When I came to look at these transcripts, I realised there could be a need for one extra category, for incorrectly used or ill-formed utterances which were however fairly clearly produced as a chunk, and in many cases were identified as such by the subjects themselves, eg *into your bed (for in bed); *in that case (for in that situation); *women before (for ladies first). However, in general I decided to include these ill-formed or ill-used chunks in the category for which they were intended.

To an extent, of course, the allocation of a chunk to one category or another is subjective and there will certainly be instances which might be disputed. The border between general and task-specific discourse organisers seems particularly fuzzy, as does that between topic-specific and more generally used items. Formally identical chunks occasionally appear in different categories, eg that's true to agree with an opinion expressed or to confirm the truth of a statement. Vague language too could perhaps be subsumed by the other categories but, as I have said, I felt it could usefully form a category of its own, not least for eventual pedagogic uses.

In general, however, I was interested in observing tendencies or patterns and although some of the specific examples might be contentious, I believe that certain patterns did emerge from the data. These are discussed in the following section. 2461 words

6 FINDINGS

There were many similarities between the native speakers and non-native speakers' use of chunks of language: the range of types used; task-specific tendencies; individual tendencies and preferences for particular expressions. In addition, both NSS and NNSS showed a lack of awareness of the chunks of which discourse is to a large extent composed.

However, some differences also emerged: the NSS used proportionally more chunks than the NNSS; NS chunks tended to be more topic-specific; the NSS used idiomatic expressions with precise discoursal functions in a way not seen in the NNS output; and NNS errors suggest some interesting shortcomings in the perception and use of chunks.

6.1 Similarities between native and non-native speakers

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6.1.1 Awareness

Both NSS and NNSS showed varying degrees of awareness of their own use of chunks of language and recognition of them in other people's speech. One NS and one NNS showed a reasonable ability to perceive chunks: in one task, for instance, the NS identified 22 and the NNS 44 chunks respectively out of a total of 87 identified by me; in contrast, in three of the NNS transcripts the second native speaker identified no chunks at all, where I had 34, 74 and 71 respectively.

6.1.2 Range of chunk types

All subjects used chunks from the four categories in all tasks. Variations seemed more connected to the amount of talking time for each speaker and to individual preferences than to a clear NS v NNS difference. For example, one NS (NS1) used more than double the number of vague language expressions used by the other NS (NS2), a pattern which was repeated exactly between two NNS subjects (NNS1 and NNS4). (See Table 1)

Table 1 Number of chunks produced by category over all tasks

NS1 NS2 NNS1 NNS2 NNS3 NNS4General discourse markers

18 22 47 29 14 24

Topic-specific discourse markers 28 23 37 19 27 35

Topic-specific chunks 28 14 32 16 9 20

Other chunks 9 10 65 43 17 54Vague language expressions 13 6 13 12 10 6

NB Figures for NNSS include incorrect chunks

6.1.3 Task-specific patterns

As anticipated, the tasks themselves circumscribed the language used to a greater or lesser extent, and all subjects conformed to this expectation. The task-specific chunks produced were both lexical and discourse organising. For instance, Task 1 (talking about travel experiences) produced a large number of time expressions, eg NS at the time; on a separate occasion: NNS two years ago; Christmas time; in summer. Task 3, on the other hand, (speculating about the seasons portrayed in short poems) produced an enormous quantity of task-specific discourse organisers, eg NS and NNS the first one; the last one; because of; what about. (See Table 2, Appendix 3 for a complete list of chunks produced)

6.2 Differences between native and non-native speakers

6.2.1 Number and type of chunks

In most cases, the NNS subjects produced more chunks per task than the NSS (see Table 3). The exception to this is NNS3 who consistently produced a low number of chunks compared with both the other NNSS and the NS subjects. However, this was probably due to her rather fragmented contributions and the whole pattern of her interaction with her partner, the only male subject, which interestingly displayed clearly Tannen's (1990) 'rapport' v 'report' tendencies of women and men respectively: for example, although the female subject initiated a topic change almost as often as the male, it was only twice to offer an extended contribution of her own; the remaining instances were all task organising (eg reading the next question in Task 4) or inviting her partner to contribute (eg and you?). The male speaker, on the other hand, used 16 out of his 23 topic changes to give unsolicited information, often in extended utterances.

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The NNSS then tended to produced a greater number of chunks per task than the NSS. However, they also in every case spent more time on each task than the NSS. Therefore, in order to make a truer comparison, I calculated the average number of chunks per minute of conversation time and found that, with the exception of one NNS subject (NNS4), both the NSS showed a greater density of chunks in their discourse than the NNSS. The actual figures are given in Table 3.

Table 3 Total numbers of chunks produced

NS1 NS2 NNS1 NNS2 NNS3 NNS4TASK 1 11 22 41 46 13 21TASK 2 22 8 24 20 18 19TASK 3 23 27 59 30 22 52TASK 4 30 18 70 30 24 47TOTAL CHUNKS 86 75 194 126 77 139

TOTAL SPEAKING TIME

9' 28" 30' 23" 16' 42"

AVERAGE CHUNKS PER MINUTE

9.08 7.92 6.38 4.14 4.61 8.32

A further point of interest was that the native speakers consistently produced more task- and topic-specific chunks than more general ones, a pattern which was reversed for the NNSS (see Table 1). This could be interpreted as suggesting greater precision of language (which as far as purely lexical items are concerned is true) but probably has more to do with the more business-like, less dispersive way in which they approached the tasks; the NNSS perhaps saw it as a chance to 'practise their English', classroom style, and were more prone to digression.

6.2.2 Discoursal uses of idiomatic chunks

Taking a global view over all the categories of chunks produced, I was struck by the almost total lack of sentence-length chunks in the NNS performance, particularly more idiomatic expressions. Although numerically not very significant, those produced by the NSS do reinforce McCarthy's suggestion (1992; McCarthy and Carter 1993) that native speakers often choose to use an idiomatic rather than unidiomatic expression for precise interpersonal or evaluative reasons. The sentence-length chunks produced by the NSS in these tasks were idiomatic to a greater or lesser degree in their fixedness of syntactic form and degree of semantic opacity (McCarthy 1992) and usually had a precisely definable pragmatic role, often evaluative, in the discourse, eg just for fun; it's a long story.

Referring to Strassler's 1982 research, McCarthy notes that the use of an idiom can indicate self- or other-abasement and loss of face (ibid p 59). In Task 3 and 4, where the subjects were asked to hypothesise and speculate, idiomatic phrases were often used to indicate their feelings of ignorance, eg you got me there; expressing my ignorance; it's a challenge, I suppose. It is interesting to compare the NNS-produced literal equivalents: I don't know/ I can't say; I'm very ignorant; these statements are terrible, where the feeling of humour and solidarity is missing.

An example of an idiomatic chunk used a challenge to a third party's face, is (in discussing a poem alleged to have been written by a five-year-old boy) the ironic: that's pretty good for a five-year-old, compared with a NNS's but five perhaps it's .. too little .. no, five years old it's not very possible.

6.3 Other findings

6.3.1 Fluency

Interestingly, the two teachers asked independently to rate the NNS subjects for fluency were in very close agreement. Using the scale used in the CPE oral examination, where 0 is 'Not capable of connected speech' and 5 is 'Virtually native speaker speed and rhythm in everyday contexts', the marks given were as follows:

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Ist teacher 2nd teacher NNS1 3+ 3 (4) NNS2 3 2 NNS3 3 3- NNS4 4 4 Although the actual marks given differ slightly, if we use the teachers' combined marks to rate the subjects from most to least fluent, we get a ranking of: 1st NNS4 2nd NNS1 3rd NNS3 4th NNS2

which corresponds exactly to their ranking in terms of the density of chunks produced. Unfortunately, in such a small-scale study, this can only be seen as indicative, not conclusive in any way, but does seem to support Pawler and Syder's (1983) suggestion that speaking in chunks leads to greater fluency.

6.3.2 NNS errors

Moon (forthcoming) divides learner errors with multi-word chunks into three categories: formal; pragmatic; and stylistic. These learners generally maintained an informal but fairly neutral style and there were no real instances of chunks which were incorrect for stylistic reasons. There were occasional errors of a pragmatic nature: NNS2's use of I must say sounds inappropriate in her utterance I've visited er .. few countries, I must say; NNS1 uses it tastes good to refer to a national cuisine rather than a specific item of food; NNS4's (you are a) citizen of the world would probably sound sarcastic to non-teacher native-speaker ears (see Section 6.2.2), although it was obviously not intended as such.The great majority of errors, however, were formal, both lexical and syntactic, but overwhelmingly lexical.Examples of syntactic errors were: *every kind of people *fashion world (for the fashion world/the world of fashion) *coming back to home *I like very much (+ complement)Lexical errors included errors of collocation: *the strength of nature *at houseThere were also examples of fixed phrases imperfectly produced: *looking out from your window *in that moment *in this point of viewand other expressions where only the context and some of the constituents gave a clue to the speaker's meaning: *put up your dresses (for put on your clothes) *open day (for broad daylight)There was occasional evidence of variation, possibly reflecting the state of the speaker's interlanguage regarding the chunk in question, eg NNS4's: *lightnings and thunders *thunders and lightnings as well as the correct form; and NNS2's: *get used *got used as well as, in another task, the complete form get used to.The influence of the subjects' L1 was evident in many of the syntactic and lexical errors made: *let's go for exclusion (for by process of elimination); *how to say (for how do you say it/how can I say it); I can't do anything (for I can't help it) are word for word translations of the Italian: andiamo per esclusione; come dire; non posso farci niente.

Generally, however, the number of errors made was very small compared with the number of chunks used successfully (see Table 2, Appendix 3). 1398 words

7 EVALUATION

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This was a very small-scale investigation and one which was set up in a very open-ended way, when I carried out the recordings and analysis I hoped only that some general patterns or tendencies might emerge from the data. Although the findings of such a small study are too limited to be conclusive, I believe that some useful indications may be perceived for possible teaching applications and for further study.

7.1 Implications for teaching

It was interesting to see quite how many chunks of language were correctly produced and used by the NNS subjects, including very many which are unlikely ever to have been 'taught' to them, eg something like that; but anyway; what about. This suggests that these chunks are acquired naturally as part of the general process of language acquisition, but the comparatively lower density of chunks in the learner output and the formal and pragmatic errors produced suggest too that teaching can might help to speed up and refine this process. This teaching should aim to help learners to increase the proportion of chunk-based language in their speech (and therefore improve their fluency), and to improve the accuracy of the chunks available to them would seem to be vital in guiding them towards ever greater communicative competence.

This suggests a place in teaching methodologies for some general approaches and specific activity types. It suggests a place for a certain amount of drilling, as suggested by eg Willis (1990) as an aid to automaticity and fluency. Other practice activities where learners are asked to incorporated particular chunks of language into their discourse would seem equally justified; these could help to identify these chunks as chunks for the learners, and to encourage an appropriate pragmatic and discoursal use of them.

Focusing on the words and expressions which help to construct spoken discourse, in the ways suggested by Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992) for example, also seem likely to prove helpful but, given the way the language used varied so much with the nature of the task, it would seem more useful to take a task-specific approach to this. This could involve the use of task-structuring lexical frameworks (such as those more often used for written tasks) and would fit in well with the current interest in task-based learning.

Nattinger and DeCarrico (ibid) excluded from their 'lexical phrases' purely lexical or idiomatic chunks which had no discoursal role. The learners in this study, though, displayed their most serious shortcomings in just these areas. As discussed in Section 6, the native speakers tended to produce more precise, often topic-specific lexis, including recognisable fixed collocations, eg had a passion for; stereotype image; travelling around. The learners, on the other hand, relied heavily on more general expressions, eg strange sensation; strange feeling; strange situation; strange things, and sometimes showed signs of their own frustration at their inability to find 'the right words', eg NNS2's I don't know the ... to describe another way; I can't explain. And errors such as *at house; *put up your dresses by learners at this level of English seem to indicate a shameful neglect of lexical collocation on the part of communicative teaching. On the basis of the NS performance, organising vocabulary by topic still seems a valid pedagogic approach, but we must move right away, I believe, from the single-noun centred basis of this type of selection, and collocational habits must be encouraged from the first stages of learning.

The actual methodology employed in this study could also be adapted for teaching purposes. This is, of course, hardly surprising as it was based on the approach employed in the Cobuild course books (Willis and Willis 1989), but it is worth noting that any listening text already being used in the class - and, therefore, available and relevant - can be exploited in this way to focus on the chunks of language used and their role in the discourse.

Looking with learners at a transcription of their own output may also provide a means of focusing on the stretches between the chunks, to identify any instances of 'missed opportunities' to use a chunk.

In the broadest terms, it seems that what is needed is greater emphasis on accuracy in speaking, involving where necessary, drilling, reformulation and correction, but accuracy in the use of chunks of language from a lexical and discoursal viewpoint as against the overemphasis on structural accuracy, which still tends to dominate pedagogic practice. This would also help to redress the balance of the 'anything goes' ethos adopted in 'free speaking activities' in many communicative language classrooms, and would guide learners towards greater fluency and truer communicative competence.

Unfortunately, for this to happen on a large scale, we need to see first a change in the mindset of the majority of teachers. As was seen in this study, even a well-qualified and informed teacher working in a

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reputable international organisation showed very little awareness of the chunks of ordinary discourse. Pedagogic news does not travel very fast and old habits will not change overnight, but I believe we are already starting to see materials and teaching practices which see language in a way other than as a mixture of 'grammar' and 'words' in 'sentences', in a way which is starting to recognise the central role of multi-word chunks of language.

7.2 Further research

Some possible directions for further research are suggested by the outcomes of this investigation. It would be interesting to pursue the fluency aspect further, to discover to what extent fluency is connected with the use of chunks of language, or whether other factors - such as personality or pronunciation - are more important. It would also be interesting to carry out a similar study, but compare learners at different levels of proficiency attempting the same tasks, to see if greater proficiency in general meant a greater proportion of chunks, and to see to what extent chunk-density influenced the execution of the tasks. A longitudinal study of one or more learners might shed some light on the interlanguage development of chunks and chunking. Finally, the very topic- and task-specific nature of the chunks produced by the native speakers would suggest that different genres and task types could be usefully subjected to the same type of study.

8 CONCLUSION

This study provided support for the suggestion that NS speech is based to a considerable extent on pre-fabricated chunks of language. It also supported the view that these chunks are often genre- or, in this case, task-specific. The speech of advanced learners seemed to approach that of native speakers in terms of the number and range of chunks used, and there was some support for presuming a link between the use of chunks and fluency of speech. Observation of these learners' shortcomings and errors made it possible to suggest or endorse some appropriate teaching strategies to help increase the number and accuracy (formal and pragmatic) of the chunks available to them for use in real time conversation.

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