Editorial
The article first appeared in a special issue of the ETAI Forum 2013, celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the Lexical Approach.
Lexical Notebooks
Dale Coulter, Germany
Dale Coulter specializes in corporate language training in Berlin, Germany. His areas of interest are The Lexical Approach and TBLT, which he has provided training on and presented on at a number of conferences and workshops.
E-mail: dale.coulter@allonboard.de
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Idioms
Lack of context
They are not always clear
Collocations
Colligation: the grammar within a phrase
So what does this mean?
How do I find this information?
Pre and Post-Modification
How does this help me?
Implications for teaching
I need to admit right at the start of this article that I am no expert in keeping a lexical notebook or linguistics, nor do I consider myself a good language learner. However, I have found that keeping everything in one place, using a few techniques which I hope to demonstrate below, and a bit of revision, I have become a better learner of Italian lately and above all more confident and secure in my learning.
There has been a relative trickle of articles on keeping lexical notebooks compared to the torrent of literature available on teaching lexis. What is more, conceptualizing a lexical notebook is an even more daunting task mostly because, in my experience anyway, there have been very few examples. In attempt to shed some light on this, I will be using my own lexical notebook for learning Italian to give an idea of the sorts of information to include:
The learning of idioms, especially for exams like CAE and CPE, is vital for many of our students. I dedicate pages of my book to lists of idioms which have come up in conversation or which I know there is a corresponding phrase in English I use. What are the problems I have encountered when learning idioms in Italian?
I never remember Italian idioms when I read them listed on a page of a book. To remedy this I type the idiom into Google in various forms (past, future, infinitive) and look at the different contexts in which it appears. I take a few examples and write them in my book. The more information you have about a word, the more likely you are to remember it and reproduce it.
Learners of English have almost wide range of online resources available to them in the form of websites and corpora. In a recent development project a colleague of mine and I developed some materials using examples from The BNC and Google Corpora to encourage students to deduce meaning of idioms from context. There is definitely some promise in this idea, I would like to include this in my learner training this year, including exercises with idioms and teaching students to use these tools available to obtain more information about a phrase/idiomatic expression on their own.
David Warr’s Language Garden blog and seeing a student of mine using these inspired me to start doing the same myself. It is visually stimulating and adds a little variety to my book.
In fact, I found that I kept making mistakes with this word ‘cena’ and realised it was time to put things straight, so I dedicated a page of my notebook to remedying this problem. I am the sort of student that self-monitors a lot, correcting myself and being very aware of the mistakes I make. On the plus side, it gives me lots of material to learn by myself.
Since then I have started using collocation trees more widely. I have tweaked the idea now and use them more according to context, especially with key words like ‘way’, ‘issue’ and ‘matter’. With a class of Business English learners we made collocation trees on the topic of negotiating and then later with product development.
One of the most challenging obstacles to overcome in Italian is when to use their subjunctive tense. Having not had much success with the pedagogical grammar rules recited to me in Italian class a few years ago, I thought a new solution was needed. I came across something called colligation, which I understand to be the grammar patterns that are contained within the DNA make up of a chunk. E.g. ‘have an affair’ appears in the BNC in almost all cases in the continuous tense (past or present). It seems worth making a record of these syntactical secrets when teaching and learning to help students to unlock words in the forms in which they are found.
In this case I have opted for a longer distance colligation, based on general usage of the subordinate clause with a verb. I have heard the term ‘based on usage norm’ and this is what I have used.
I keep a record of what type of verb follows certain expressions (indicative or subjunctive) and base my usage upon that.
It means I have a store of chunks I know are followed by a subjunctive, reducing the cognitive load while I speak and cutting out the need to learn too many confusing grammar rules.
I can keep a record of style-sensitive changes in the use of these two moods in Italian. That way I do not end up sounding like an academic in a chat with some friends when I am out and about. In English this could take the form of the stylistic differences between ‘will’ and ‘present continuous. For example, lists of “I’ll + be + place + time” as in “I’ll be home at five” or “present continuous + temporal adverb” as in “I’m flying to Moscow on Friday”.
Mostly on Google, looking at the context in which the phrase is used: facebook or social networking sites = more spoken, newspapers etc = more formal, interviews with political figure = more formal. I admit it is not fail safe, but for learning independently it helps.
Add an adjective before a noun and you pre-modify. A noun which has a pre-modifier can then be extended with a post-modifier. Students studying English who need to use more complex sentences could really benefit from this knowledge. OK, that is enough demonstration of pre/post-modification.
I keep a record in my book of the lexical and grammatical patterns of Italian syntax. Italian seems to me to be a heavily post-modified language so I focus my efforts on noticing the types of structures that occur after the nouns. As I have no Italian teacher, I try and paraphrase the example to help me understand it more and ask friends to help me.
- I am better able to deconstruct complex Italian sentences.
- I can contain more information in a spoken sentence.
Words attached to a context are of course a great benefit to a learner of another language. For this reason I make sure I keep pages of vocabulary I have found or heard concerning topics I usually talk about – the context.
- I encourage students to find as much information about an idiom as possible, as it makes it more like to be produced. Training learners to find examples and decide which idioms are useful for them i.e. are they likely to use them? One does not buy films or books that are of no interest, so why idioms?
- I teach ways of keeping vocabulary organised in a notebook, giving learners a push away from long list of decontextualized words and towards fewer words and kept in the company of their lexical friends.
- Show students the importance of knowing the grammar contained within the phrases we use, where to find it and how it can help them learn fewer grammar rules and use grammar better and more naturally.
- I teach and encourage students to improve their use of phrase structures, like formulaic expressions but formulaic structures.
- I want to encourage students to ask more questions about the the grammar they find in use, noticing common structures and recording them in a sort of basic form to be called upon and used when needed.
- I give homework that involves mining articles which interest students for lexis/collocations/phrases that interest them, hoping that this might become a habit.
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