- had a baby
- tell the difference
- That'd be a first
- run the risk of
- He always puts himself first
- What’s on?
cash flow
drowning in debt
wage freeze
pour your money down the drain
Conceptual Frames
multi-part verbs
aimlessly
continuously, at length
onto paper
from many to one
from one to many
completion
"Fluency is a natural consequence
of a larger and more phrasal
mental lexicon"
Paths to Proficiency
Leo Selivan
Money is Liquid
Defining the advanced level
- command of grammar
- reasonable vocabulary (receptive > productive)
- can communicate in a variery of situations
- Intermediate plateau
give (sb) a hand
have a word with
If I were in your shoes
from all walks of life
keep an eye on
give it a try / have a go
all K1 words
(shoes - K2)
Needs:
formulaic language
Conceptual metaphor
- Wider range of vocabulary
- Extend productive vocabulary use
- Communicate more appropriately
- Learner independence
Discourse markers
"Long time no see"
"See what I mean?"
"My point exactly"
"That'd be a first"
"Sorry to keep you waiting"
- very common in spoken language
- help organise spoken text
- do not fit any traditional category
Metaphors We Live By
"You know"
"I mean"
"well"
"in fact"
O'Keeffe et al (2007)
Health = Up
Sickness = Down
Argument = War
give (sb) a hand
have a word with
if I were in your shoes
from all walks of life
keep an eye on
give it a try / have a go
Difficult language?
50-70% of the proficient
language user production
consists of chunks
Improving
proficiency
all K1 words
(shoes - K2)
Boers & Demecheleer (1998)
The people behind the strike
The reason behind the crisis
The motive behind the crime
The assumption behind the theory
Life = Journey
Time = Money
Anger = Heat
"stored and retrieved whole from memory at the time of use, rather than being subject to generation or analysis by the language grammar"
a lost cause
pick up the tab
I've never heard of her
in its own right
monosyllabic answers
I totally blanked out
to some extent
We enjoyed it immensely
go in for a dip
It got off to a bad start
It's all water under the bridge
Wray (2002: 9)
"the multi-word lexicon is at the heart of advanced level lexical knowledge"
from Lexical Grammar
(CUP, 2018)
shrug your shoulders
honk your horn
fail a test
perform an experiment
reach a compormise
O'Keeffe et al (2007:53)
make a mistake
see a film
Collocational competence
- very common (esp. in spoken language)
- offer flexibility (creative use)
- distinguish advanced from intermediate learners
Hill (1999)
"The ability to deploy a wide range of lexical chunks both accurately and appropriately is probably what most distinguishes advanced learners from intermediate ones."
Collocational errors
Why difficult?
Thornbury (2002:116)
- about 30 essays written by advanced speakers
- judged by native speakers
- considerable difficulty in producing collocations
e.g. pay attention, fail an exam
Medium-strong collocations
- lowest number of mistakes
Medium-weak collocations
- most mistake-prone
Recommendations
e.g. exert control, perform a task
- variety of uses - no logical connection
- structural difference between L1 and L2
- focus on the verb rather than particle
Dagut and Laufer (1985)
Nesselhauf (2005)
- Noticing and recording patterns
- Encourage L1 and L2 chunk-for-chunk comparisons rather than word-for-word translations
- Use of monolingual dictionaries and corpus
around
away
down
in
out
up
Collocation use
Use of MPVs
From the new British Council course CiSELT
- Learner at all levels produce far fewer collocations than NS
- Errors persist even at higher levels
- Errors mainly due to L1 transfer
- Advanced language learners underuse particles
- No similar lexical category in L1
- Aspectual particles may seem redundant
Laufer & Waldman (2011)
Berman & Kupersmitt (2008)