TEPhL – Teaching English as a Phraseological Language: Changing learner and teacher perception of ‘words’

Corpus-based research suggests quite strongly that a significant proportion of native-speaker English comes in the form of phraseological units of one sort or another. Phraseology, however, does not yet have the role it deserves within ELT methodology or syllabuses, despite the many professionals who have worked in this direction, from Palmer and Hornby, through to the ‘corpus age’ and the ‘lexical approach’, to the very recent work on pedagogically motivated ‘phrase lists’ (Simpson-Vlach & Ellis, AL 31/4; Martinez & Schmitt, AL 33/4). There are a number of reasons for the slow progress made by phraseology. These include conservatism, and the very heterogenous, disorderly nature of phraseology. Another very simple, though extremely powerful reason is‘the printed word’. We have all seen and read ‘words’ from a very early age, and words are therefore the norm, both in written text and, by extension, in speech, while phraseology is something which needs to be pointed out separately, and sometimes is. This paper focuses on one way in which the user’s perception of text can be altered, so that phraseology can win back some of the ground currently held by words. The method involves presenting text on PowerPoint displays in such a way as to highlight phraseological relationships, using features such asitalics, underlining, square brackets, bold type, spacing, and (notably) colour. The presentation will illustrate how awareness-raising methodology of this sort can be used either as part of a language lesson, or as a main ingredient in a specifically designed module on teachers’ training courses. The role of corpus-based dictionaries in such teaching will also be discussed.