Seth Lindstromberg

• (Co)Leader of EFL Teacher Training Courses at Hilderstone College, Broadstairs, Kent, England

This book chapter reviews reports in the literature of second language (L2) acquisition that word learnability is appreciably influenced by "word class" (= "part of speech"). For example, on the basis of empirical results it has been suggested that the simple fact of being a noun makes a word easier to understand and more durably memorable than the...

A classical prospective power analysis estimates the chance of obtaining a statistically significant result. However, it does so with no regard to the reliability of the result. “Design analysis” is a complementary component of study planning which addresses that limitation. Monte Carlo simulations and innovative freeware were used to provide illus...

There has been considerable discussion about the degree to which English phrasal verbs (PVs) tend to be semantically “compositional” or “non-idiomatic” versus “non-compositional” or “idiomatic”. Much of this discussion relates to evidence that many learners of English as an additional language (L2) find PVs particularly difficult to acquire. This a...

It is important to be able to identify research results likely to have been arrived at by means of “ p -hacking,” a common term for research and reporting practices (such as the selective reporting of results) that are biased toward finding p < α. This paper discusses and demonstrates “ p -curving,” a means of checking a set of primary studies with...

Sample distributions provide clues about normality, which is a validity condition of t-and F-tests. Minor deviations from normality can have serious consequences for these tests whenever an additional validity condition (e.g., equal variances, equal sample sizes) does not hold. Additionally, a single outlier may badly distort the results of these t...

Although retrieval of lexical forms is a prerequisite for language production, research of L2 vocabulary learning has focused much more on meanings and form-meaning mappings than on development of detailed, accessible mental representations of forms. This is particularly true with respect to multi-word items (MWIs). We report an experimental study...

When testing a difference between two samples of data such as test scores, experimental researchers of second language acquisition (SLA) have relied on t-tests and ranked-based tests such as the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney (WMT) test. Proper use of these tests depends on the tenability of assumptions about how the data are distributed. For a t-test there...

English spatial prepositions fulfill crucial communicative functions in respect of space, time, and a wide range of other concepts such as recipient (Toss it to me), target (He threw it at me), and intention (You did that to hurt). However, there is no consensus about whether prepositions tend to be represented in mind as monosemic or polysemic, wh...

Two dimensions of emotional meaning appreciably influence how well a lexeme is processed and remembered: valence (how pleasing) and arousal (how exciting). Although subjective Likert-style ratings of such dimensions have a long history of fruitful use in experimental psychology―including psycholinguistics and bilingualism research―they have seldom...

This chapter begins by characterizing intentional, or deliberate, L2 vocabulary learning mainly in relation to incidental learning, a key difference between these two conditions of learning being that intentional learning involves greater focus on the written and spoken forms of vocabulary items that are encountered. Next to be considered are two t...

In incidental learning, vocabulary items with high or relatively high objective frequency in input are comparatively likely to be acquired. However, many single words and most multiword expressions (MWEs) occur infrequently in authentic input. It has therefore been argued that learners of school age or older can benefit from episodes of instructed...

Written in 1999, the article gives examples of how badly prepositions were taught in otherwise pretty good EFL coursebooks of the time. So far as I know, little has changed in this regard. The article may or may not have been peer reviewed. It was based on a presentation at the then recent Dublin conference of MATSDA Materials Development Associati...

Previous studies found that English figurative idioms alliterate at above chance levels. To permit estimation of amounts of surplus alliteration Gries (2011) calculated baseline levels using an analytic method. This article reports a follow-on investigation covering types of multiword unit (MWU) and types of interword, intraMWU phonological similar...

Previous studies found that English figurative idioms alliterate at above chance levels. To permit estimation of amounts of surplus alliteration Gries (2011) calculated baseline levels using an analytic method. This article reports a follow-on investigation covering types of multiword unit (MWU) and types of interword, intraMWU phonological similar...

Recent surveys of published reports of quasi-experimental studies of second language acquisition (SLA) indicate that low statistical power is pervasive owing in large part to small average sample sizes. The surveys do not indicate a marked trend toward samples that are larger. After illustrating the problem of low power in SLA research, we review a...

Corpus analyses of learners’ dictionaries of English idioms have revealed that 11% to 35% of English figurative idioms show either alliteration (miss the mark) or assonance (get this show on the road), depending on the type considered. Because English multiword combinations, particularly idiomatic expressions, present a huge challenge even to advan...

Corpus analyses of learners’ dictionaries of English idioms have revealed that 11% to 35% of English figurative idioms show either alliteration (miss the mark) or assonance (get this show on the road), depending on the type considered. Because multiword combinations, particularly idiomatic expressions, present a huge challenge even for advanced lea...

This article reviews all (quasi)experimental studies appearing in the first 19 volumes (1997–2015) of Language Teaching Research (LTR). Specifically, it provides an overview of how statistical analyses were conducted in these studies and of how the analyses were reported. The overall conclusion is that there has been a tight adherence to traditiona...

This article supplements a review covering all (quasi)experimental studies of second language (L2) learning that appeared in Language Teaching Research (LTR) during the 19-year period 1997–2015. The dual focus of that review is practices in inferential statistics and the reporting of results. The present article sets out guidelines and recommendati...

Lexical phrases (e.g., collocations and idioms) have in recent years attracted a fair amount of interest in the fields of SLA and language pedagogy. However, there is still a shortage of empirical studies of instructional methods and techniques. The present study focuses on the deliberate memorization of L2 phrases and tests the effectiveness of tw...

It is widely accepted that ambitious learners of a L2, including learners of EAP, need productive knowledge of many conventionalized phrases, or formulaic sequences (FSs). Although it is difficult for the post-childhood learner to acquire these FSs without aid, the range of relevant pedagogical techniques known to be effective and efficient is unim...

English phraseology abounds with alliterative multiword units (e.g., slippery slope), which suggests that alliterative word strings have a comparative advantage to become stock phrases. One plausible explanation for this advantage is that alliterative word strings are relatively memorable, all else being equal, although there is little directly per...

High proficiency in L2 partly depends on acquiring many formulaic sequences (FSs), yet post-childhood learners find this difficult. Ways of accelerating the acquisition of FSs would be welcome. Small-scale studies have indicated that assonance (e.g., strong bond ) makes studied FSs especially retrievable if, during exposure, assonance is made the o...

Previous research has furnished evidence that alliterative expressions (e.g. a slippery slope) are comparatively memorable for second language learners, at least when these expressions are attended to as decontextualized items (Lindstromberg and Boers, 2008a; Boers et al., 2012). The present study investigates whether alliteration renders lexical p...

Collocations have attracted a fair amount of attention from SLA researchers in recent years. Even though many collocations are made up of words that must be familiar to intermediate learners (e.g., make a mistake), there is a growing body of evidence that even advanced learners often fail to combine words the way native speakers do (e.g., *do a mis...

Among the challenges that second language learners face is that of acquiring a large num-ber of lexical phrases such as collocations and idiomatic expressions (e.g. Pawley & Syder, 1983; Willis, 1990; Nattinger & DeCarrico, 1992; Lewis, 1993). There is evidence that post-childhood learners master this dimension of L2 vocabulary very slowly (e.g. Li...

This paper reports an experiment in which 24 two-word phrases (collocations and compounds) were dictated to 38 adult EFL students who were then asked to discriminate between ones which manifest consonant repetition across the two words (e.g. private property; important point,) and ones which do not (e.g. private collection; important thing). The st...

Lindstromberg and Boers (2008a, 2008b) have reported experiments with adult learners of English which revealed a comparative mnemonic advantage afforded by word combinations that display sound patterns such as alliteration (green grass) and assonance (home phone). These findings are relevant for TESOL, given the fact that English phraseology abound...

In this article we review experimental and intervention studies published since 2004 on formulaic sequences in a second language (L2). There is plenty of evidence that learners have a lot to gain from building a sizable repertoire of L2 formulaic sequences language, but formulaicity is an area where learners are known to be slow to close the gap on...

This completely revised and expanded edition of English Prepositions Explained (EPE), originally published in 1998, covers approximately 100 simple, compound, and phrasal English prepositions of space and time - with the focus being on short prepositions such as at, by, in, and on. Its target readership includes teachers of ESOL, pre-service transl...

The recommendations for optimizing the LA that we have made in this book so far can be summarized as follows: (1) teach chunks instead of relying on learner-autonomous, incidental chunk-uptake owing to awareness-raising alone; (2) select chunks for targeting not just on the basis of frequency but also on the basis of evidence of collocational stren...

In this section we will consider a number of possibilities for broadening the scope of the pedagogical approach to chunks we have outlined in the book thus far. We will briefly explore the following avenues: (1) applying the elaboration techniques to single words in addition to multiword lexis, (2) expanding the armoury of chunk-teaching techniques...

As learners engage in elaboration of any meaningful element, they invest cognitive effort. Originally referred to (metaphorically) as deep processing, elaboration results in better retention than processing which is superficial, or ‘shallow’ (Cermak and Craik, 1979; for a classic work on memory, see Baddeley, 1997 [1990]). Although nowadays the adj...

Native speakers build up an impressive repertoire of thousands of lexical phrases, but in doing so they can rely on floods of authentic input and innumerable opportunities both to use and play with their mother tongue. Time is hardly an issue: uptake of chunks begins in early childhood and seems to carry on more or less until life’s end. It is clea...

As we demonstrated in Chapter 1, natural discourse abounds with chunks. Given the time-constraints of classroom-based language learning, teachers face the difficulty of deciding which chunks merit attention at the expense of many others. The LA in its present form offers little help in this regard, apart from emphasizing that it is ‘useful’ languag...

Young children are exposed to streams of speech in which they try to discern recurring bits and determine their meaning. These bits are not necessarily words, since the young child does not yet discern word boundaries (Peters, 1983). Rather, the bits that young children discern are of various lengths and often consist of several words. For example,...

In Chapter 5, we described and assessed various routes of elaboration, taking as a starting point the semantic motivation of certain groups of chunks. Some of those routes were shown to lead learners towards a deeper appreciation of the meaning of figurative idioms in particular and were proposed as aids to learning, mostly for receptive purposes....

Empirically validated techniques to accelerate learners’ uptake of ‘chunks’ demonstrate that pathways for insightful chunk-learning become available if one is willing to question the assumption that lexis is arbitrary. Care is taken to ensure that the pedagogical proposals are in accordance with insights from vocabulary research generally. © Frank...

Knowledge of lexical chunks correlates positively with L2 proficiency. However, high estimates of the number of chunks in natural language have led to scepticism about the feasibility of large-scale chunk-learning on non-intensive, classroom-based courses. Furthermore, few proposals for chunk-teaching have looked beyond the noticing stage. One exce...

TEACHING CHUNKS OF LANGUAGE is a resource book for teachers of ESL/EFL at intermediate/advanced level. The activities, or task task types, that it describes approach the goal of facilitating students' acquisition of multiword items of English vocabulary (MWIs) from several angles. For example, some show how teachers can enhance their students' acqu...

If good proficiency in L2 entails the acquisition not only of many single words but of many lexical chunks as well, it must then be asked how all this additional lexis is to be committed to long-term memory in the limited time available on non-intensive classroom-based language courses. If it is the case that a significant fraction of conventionali...

The Lexical Approach (LA) is founded on the belief that, in order to achieve a high level of accuracy with fluency, learners of a foreign language need to commit to memory vast numbers of multi-word expressions. However, since it is far from clear that the methodology currently associated with the LA holds out well-founded hope that phrase learning...

This paper concerns three two-stage experiments the aim of which was to find out whether enactment- and mime-based (E&M) instruction - a key element both of the method known as Total Physical Response and of some less codified instruction at primary level - can be employed in order to help learners: (1) better acquire English manner-of-movement ver...

Here are 99 enjoyable activities, for 11-16 year olds, to coax, cajole and tempt them into learning English. The authors, drawing on their own vast experience, share ideas on maintaining discipline, using ice-breakers, warmers, fillers, developing vocabulary and using literature.

This paper presents a selective examination of the entries on the preposition on in five advanced learners' dictionaries published in the UK. The principal concern is the preposition on as a signifier of contact with a surface - especially an upper surface. The expressions Located Object (LO) and Landmark are glossed in accordance with their use in...

This article outlines a new approach to teaching prepositions and directional adverbs based on work by Brugman (1981) and Lakoff (1987). The approach runs counter to the theories of word meaning which underlie virtually every aspect of the treatment of prepositions in ELT generally. In particular, it is almost diametrically opposed to that describe...

The basis for this discussion of conventional metaphor in ESP contexts is the theory of “conventional metaphor” (e.g., Lakoff, 1987; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Lakoff & Turner, 1989). This basis is elaborated by an examination of the relative scopes of the terms metaphor and idiom and a review of the “lexical bar” theory (Corson, 1985). Chief among th...

This short article defines, teacher echoing, a specific common and stereotypical behavior of foreign and second language teachers. The article points out a small number of reasons to engage in this behavior and a much larger number of reasons not to engage in it.

Recent revived interest in vocabulary teaching has included discussion of meaning-feature grids. But other, more pictorial types of scheme are more useful. Several of these and their uses and advantages are discussed in this article. The conclusions are (1) that ‘many-word’ schemata are useful in planning, in diagnosing learners' problems, refining...