Lexical Chunks Offer Insight Into Culture

Hanna Kryszewska

Hanna Kryszewska teacher, teacher trainer, trainer of trainers. Also co-author of resource books and course books. Based in Poland at the University of Gdansk, Poland. Pilgrims trainer. Editor of HLT Magazine.
E-mail: hania.kryszewska@pilgrims.co.uk

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Background
What is GOOGLEFIGHT?
Single words
People
Chunks
Holidays
Literature
Parting word
PS. Key

Early spring I was approached by a Polish teacher trainer organization DOS (www.e-dos.org) to prepare a session on culture. Since language chunks are me passion I decided to do something on culture and chunks. My presentation was almost ready when at IATEFL Harrogate I was introduced to GOOGLEFIGHT by Diana Eastement, OUP. ( Thank you Diana!). I started playing with the new toy and here are the result.

It is an easy tool. You go on the Internet into google type in googlefight. Then you get these two funny characters on the screen, you type any word or language chunk into the respective boxes, then the stickmen have a little fight and finally up comes the result in figures. So you know which chunk is more often used on the Internet. Easy. In class, if you have access to the Internet, or as homework, you can set tasks for students or they can create their own tasks, make predictions and then check them against the data that come up. The best bit is making up the tasks and interpreting the results. You can recycle single words or chunks from lessons or make random choices.

I started with common single words. First the words were basic and chosen at random then there was a pattern. This is what usually happens. When I got to bread and butter, bread won. So I was curious about bread versus oil . Of course, oil won because of crude oil. However, the final battle between butter and olive oil guess who won! Check yourself.

People's names and phrases to describe people are chunks too. Also there is so much culture behind them, metaphor, myth, religion and relationships. Hence this set.

And your verdict is???

Of course, you can work on idioms, irreversible binomials, phrasal verbs and the whole lot. Here is another set . Can you do the task? Check on the Internet. I do not include the figures since they change every day. In fact judging by the figures or comparing them you can tell when the students did their homework.

You don't have to use grids. You can just select various chunks, in this case well known holidays. The students have to rank them. The outcome is interesting and also brings out the fact that the Internet is more western culture orientated than not. Also coming up with the holidays is an exploration in itself.

Needless to say if you teach literature you can choose names of famous authors and titles of their books. I was amazed when Charles Dickens came way above Shakespeare until I realized that I misspelt Shakespeare's name. My partner consoled me and said that I am in good company because there were evidently other people who misspelt his name. Yet another sympathetic person said that after all Shakespeare spelled his own surname in 8 different ways. See how much culture comes up!

Just have fun on googlefight but I have to warn you is addictive. But what a tool!!!
You can check Michael Swan versus Jeremy Harmer, or Mario Rinvolucri versus Hanna Kryszewska, Pilgrims versus any other school of you choice. But please don't blame me if you get hooked. I warned you.

I give up. I know you want to know the answers. Here are the results as of early May.

Single words

People

Chunks

Holidays

Literature

Please check the What's New in Language Teaching course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the British Life, Language and Culture course at Pilgrims website.