Summary Of The Article 'Chunking' By Ben Zimmer

Ben Zimmer’s article entitled “Chunking” from the September 2010 issue of the New York Times, raises the question: should collocation education be used to teach English? The article focuses on the importance of using chunking as a method in teaching and developing others in the English language. Zimmer uses examples of his son to illustrate his point that children unknowingly pick up myriads of chunks throughout the span of their childhood; he explains, “As Blake learned these pleasantries… I wondered how much-or how little-his grasp of basic linguistic etiquette is grounded in the syntactical rules that structure how words are combined in English” (133). Other chunks such as “Won’t you come in?” or “Make yourself at home,” are noted as common

Through the use of personal examples and extensive research, Zimmer demonstrates how vital chunking is to the English language, and also how often we tend to forget its significance in the creation of linguistic fluency. His message has truly stuck with me, as a result of viewing this article, I now analyze each and every one of my sentences, looking for hidden chunks. Zimmer’s article proves that the English language would be unrecognizable without chunks like “make your bed” or “take a risk.” I found his article as an informative piece that effectively argues the importance of understanding chunking in the English language. Teachers with high numbers of non-native speakers would highly benefit from this article, and from implementing its methods into their classrooms. Research has verified that teaching lexical chunking should be highly encouraged because it lends itself to better memorization, it promotes enhanced language fluency, and it stimulates comprehension of the language

Lexical chunking allows a student to recall a chunk rather simply, instead of formulating a word-for-word translation for every single sentence. George A. Miller, professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of the paper “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information,” featured in the scientific journal Psychological Review, points out, “I am simply pointing to the obvious fact that…as these larger chunks emerge the amount of message that the operator can remember is increased” (351). Learning the language in lexical chunks shines through as the more effective method because the human mind is more capable of recalling collocations vs individual word-for-word phrases. Miller explains, “Since the memory span is a fixed number of words, we can increase the number of bits of information that it contains simply by building larger and larger chunks” (350-351). Researchers such as Miller found that lexical chunks promote a superior recollection in word memorization, thus solidifying the method as a superior option to that of a word-for-word translation. Because it promotes memorization and is less taxing on the student, lexical chunking remains an appropriate choice for language