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Does 'chunking' foster chunk-uptake?

par Stengers, Hélène;Boers, Frank ;Housen, Alex;Eyckmans, June
Référence Fostering Language Teaching Efficiency through Cognitive Linguistics, De Gruyter, page (99-117)
Publication Publié, 2010-08

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Résumé :

Several foreign-language teaching methodologists have in recent years made proposals for a lexical-phrase oriented pedagogy. One of these is Michael Lewis' (1993, 1997, 2000) Lexical Approach. The key activity in this approach is called 'chunking', i.e., students are helped to take notice of the lexical phrases (also called chunks) in the texts they get to read in the classroom. It is hoped that, once the students' awareness of the ubiquity of chunks is raised in the classroom, they will start picking up chunks independently from samples of L2 discourse they meet elsewhere too. To gauge the efficiency of pedagogical chunking as a means of helping students expand their chunk-repertoires, we ran two parallel controlled experiments in the course of a school year, one experiment involving two groups of non-native students of English and the other involving two groups of non-native students of Spanish. Per target language, one group repeatedly engaged in in-class chunking activities. Before and after the treatment, the participants' active and receptive chunk knowledge was assessed. The results yielded no evidence of a differential uptake of chunks between the conditions, which suggests that teacher-led noticing activities alone do not suffice to adequately foster chunk acquisition.