A PREAMBLE: CONSTRUCTION GRAMMAR AND EFFICIENT TEACHING

The theoretical and practical foundations for the approach to L2 teaching and learning discussed below lie in cognitive linguistics and construction grammar. Construction grammar (CG) emerged primarily due to widespread disenchantment with the quality of production in communicative teaching (see, for example, Hinkel, 2006; Widdowson, 2003). CG presents a whole-unit approach, as opposed to incremental units, to all kinds of conventionalized form-meaning pairings, such as phrasal verbs, prepositional phrases, and collocations, which can be taught and learned as prefabricated expressions (e.g., Nattinger & DeCarrico, 1992; Wray, 2002). CG allows language teachers to work with more efficient pathways in practical language teaching (Hinkel, 2009).

To date, a large body of research has established that effective academic L2 usage demands relatively advanced language proficiency. For this reason, applications of CG models to L2 pedagogy do not need to conflict with those that have proven to be fruitful and expedient in any L2 setting. In practically all cases, teachers have the ultimate responsibility for curricular and instructional decisions that have an indelible effect on learning. CG is another tool, highly effective and efficient, that teachers can use to help students get to the desired levels of language proficiency.

CONSTRUCTION GRAMMAR: FOUNDATIONS AND ASSUMPTIONS

• Cognitive linguistics establishes connections between sets of constructions―in the form of lexical strings―and thus enables a greater control of learner grammar in speech and writing. That is, when working with whole constructions, both form and function are essential. For example, in the author of the book states that… vs. this guy in the book is talking about…,both morphosyntactic features and semantic and pragmatic functions contribute to the difference in usage.
• The language system and everyday language usage do not entail assembling structures, based on a myriad of rules, in the process of communication, where opportunities for errors in articles, active/passive forms of adjectives, prepositions, tenses and verb forms, noun and verb confusion, and so on arise immediately. These opportunities can be eliminated by means of the approach adopted in CG.
• Instead of assembling a great number of constructions while producing language, CG relies on “storing” them, as lexical strings with substitutable parts, and deploying them as needed in context. For example:
the author/book/article ~~ states/comments/notes/continues/observes/points out/indicates
• These constructions range from the highly regular and systematic to the almost completely idiomatic. For example, the uses of little/a little, few/a few, or some/several are far more regular than an interest has arisen or many educators/scientists/analysts have recently turned to.
• In CG, there is no clear-cut division between regular and idiomatic expressions. Regular, irregular, and collocational constructions can be taught and learned as whole units, which skips the difficult and error-prone process required for assembling them.
• In writing, constructions can be deployed as genres require. For example, Hey dude vs. Dear Dean Powells can be appropriate and requisite in various genres, but confusing the two may not be the best way to proceed.
• Instruction in CG teaches the forms and associated principles based on which speakers can control contextually appropriate language production. This is something that all novice academic language users―native and nonnative―have to learn.

In L2 teaching, prefabricated chunks can and should be treated as various types of “word strings” that are to be stored and retrieved whole from memory (Wray, 2002). Many adults can recite L1 poems or texts that they learned several decades earlier, and there is little reason to doubt that learners are quite capable of similar feats in their L2 production.

WHAT? MEMORIZE?

According to Ellis (1997, pp. 129-130), collocational chunks can consist of entire memorized sentences or phrases that include from four to ten words, and these allow learners to create new constructions to add to their stock of expressions. In this sense, commonly occurring sentences, clauses, and phrases can be “viewed as big words” and memorized as lexicalized stems. Many of these preconstructed lexical strings are “institutionalized” (Ellis, 1997, pp. 129 – 130) because they are typical of specific discourses and/or genres (Hinkel, 2004, 2009, 2011; Nation, 2001). The number of such memorizable constructions is limited only by one’s available time and diligence.

KEY ADVANTAGES

Because L2 instruction usually takes place under great time constraints, it is important to maximize language gains and make learning as efficient as possible.

• Learning language chunks is likely to be one of the few available expedient routes to relative L2 accuracy and fluency that leads to production and subsequent automatization (Hinkel, 2004). (See the appendix for a sample of sentence and phrase stems.)
• For language learners, a tremendous advantage in CG lies in expedited learning and reduced workload because high-frequency constructions can be learned as whole units, instead of elements that have to be further assembled during language production (Hinkel, 2011).
• Differences and similarities between constructions allow learners to create new construction units in various combinations or to modify those already “stored away.”
• For learners, common or frequently repeated problem areas, such as articles, prepositional phrases, or sentence fragments, can also be easily avoided if these are dealt with as whole constructions, instead of being incrementally assembled.
• In language teaching, an efficient perspective is to look at grammar and vocabulary as a continuum of constructions, from the highly systematic and regular (e.g., third-person singular verbs or subject-verb agreement) to the much more fixed, such as collocations or idioms (e.g., change is in the air or this evidence sheds a great deal of light on current technological advancements).

The CG approach to language teaching can be used with language elements of all shapes and sizes, from tiny bits, such as affixes, to phrases to whole sentences or even sets of sentences, including the perennial areas of difficulty, such as metaphors and idioms.

With the groundwork in prefabs and follow-up practice, producing academic prose becomes relatively effortless. A great deal of research carried out on the effectiveness of learning grammar in contextual lexicalized chunks and sentence stems has shown that these are fundamental to both L1 and L2 learning and use (Ellis, 1997; Nattinger & DeCarrico, 1992). Stock grammatical and lexical chunks can become an efficient means of expanding L2 learners’ language range, particularly when they are also taught how to substitute discrete elements appropriately and in practical ways. For example, the fact that the function of noun clauses is similar to that of simple nouns can be addressed by means of substitutions in patterned expressions common in academic prose:

The experiment/ data/study shows that xxx increases(with yyy) / an increase of xxx/ the growth/rise of xxx.

A FINAL WORD

It is important to note, however, that despite the cognitive, linguistic, and psycholinguistic evidence that memorizing language chunks represents an effective and unrestrictive means of expanding learners’ lexical and grammatical ranges, a cultural and pedagogical bias exists against the idea of extensive memorization (Hinkel, 2002, 2004, 2009; Nation, 2001). Nonetheless, it may be necessary to re-examine this bias, as learning L2 in lexical and grammatical units (chunks), instead of discrete words or word elements, can often “cover in half the time what is . . . expected from a whole year of language learning” (Wilkins, 1972, p. 102), making learning far more efficient and leading to higher levels of accuracy and fluency for the learners.

REFERENCES

Ellis, N. (1997). Vocabulary acquisition: Word structure, collocation, word-class, and meaning. In N. Schmitt & M. McCarthy (Eds.), Vocabulary: Description, acquisition, and pedagogy (pp. 122-139). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Hinkel, E. (2002). Second language writers’ text. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Hinkel, E. (2004). Teaching academic ESL writing: Practical techniques in vocabulary and grammar. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Hinkel, E. (2006). Current perspectives on teaching the four skills. TESOL Quarterly, 40(1), 109-131.

Hinkel, E. (2009). Integrating the four skills: Current and historical perspectives. In R. B. Kaplan (Ed.), Oxford handbook in applied linguistics (2nd ed., pp. 110-126). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Hinkel, E. (2011). What research on second language writing tells us and what it doesn't. In E. Hinkel (Ed.), Handbook of research in second language teaching and learning (Vol. 2, pp. 523-538). New York, NY: Routledge.

Nation, I. S. P. (2001). Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Nattinger, J., & DeCarrico, J. (1992). Lexical phrases and language teaching. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Widdowson, H. (2003). Defining issues in English language teaching. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Wilkins, D. (1972). Linguistics in language teaching. London: Edward Arnold.

Wray, A. (2002). Formulaic language and the lexicon. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Eli Hinkel teaches linguistics and applied linguistics at Seattle University. She has taught ESL and applied linguistics, as well as trained teachers, for more than 30 years. She has published books and numerous articles on learning second culture as well as second language grammar, writing, and pragmatics.