Elisabeth Robertson

This post got me kicked out of a Facebook group 5 years ago. Nowadays, most of these things are widely implemented in the classroom. gianfrancoconti.com/2017/07/…

There are ppl with a limited understanding of instructed second language acquisition in secondary schools and of language processing in general who don't grasp the fact that chunking aloud activities such as 'Sentence Stealer', 'Mind reading', 'Lie detector', 'Find your match' and other EPI classics are not merely 'motivational activities'. They have a clear and manifold pedagogical rationale: (1) research shows that in order to achieve fluency, students must have developed a willingness to participate in oral activities (Castro, 2019). That's exactly what chunking-aloud games purport to promote; (2) it also shows phonological short-term memory capacity is an important predictor of vocabulary acquisition patterns in children and adolescents (e.g., Gathercole & Adams, 1993, 1994; Gathercole, Service, Hitch, Adams, & Martin, 1999), and word learning in children and adults (e.g., Gathercole, Hitch, Service, & Martin, 1997). Hence, chunking aloud activities can only be beneficial; (3) moreover, pronunciation practice can help develop listening comprehension along with word segmenta- tion skills (Darcy, 2018); (4) phonological encoding and articulation are essential speaking micro-skill (see picture below). Hence, fluency in the execution of the above is key to overal oral fluency; (5) chunking aloud of highly patterned output, involves repeating specific syntactic structures many times over. These means that word-order mistakes are often prevented when one moves to chunking aloud to oral communicative tasks (e.g. information-gap activities); (6) based on point (4) above, staging chunking aloud activities before speaking activities obviously decreases the cognitive load; (7) chunking aloud games are fun, inclusive and totally learner-centred. Inclusiveness is particularly important in mixed-ability settings, where many students feel they are unable to speak and refrain from joining in speaking activities; (8) last but not least, the new GCSE examination includes a reading-aloud component.