The first language of most learners of English does not have the <th> sounds – voiced or unvoiced. So this is one of the very first things I work on with students, especially if they have been learning English for a long time and are still pronouncing <th> as /d/ or /t/ or /f/ or /s/.
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Another thing I like to teach my students in the early stages of a course is the importance of chunks. In the process, I capitalize on the fact that many chunks also function in grammar patterns.

At the end of the new edition of Discovering English with VersaText, published yesterday, there is a list of 22 takeaways. These are the points that I hope I have instilled in the readers. They embrace teaching, learning, creativity, metalinguistics, metacognition (all things meta TBH), guided discovery, text, grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, depth, respect and colour.

Here they are.

1. Text is the starting point.
2. The multiple affordances of texts and tasks.
3. The Six Pillars of Vocabulary – the properties of words.
4. All properties of words beget language learning tasks.
5. The task activates learning.
6. Relationships between words carry meaning.
7. Relationships between words and grammar carry meaning.
8. Disabuse students of the idea that vocabulary is random.
9. Reveal the visible patterns in language – patterns of normal usage.
10. Respect students' intelligence.
11. Students benefit from guided discovery.
12. Flatter students' intelligence by introducing terminology and its etymology.
13. Tell students the truth or lead them to discover it.
14. Train students in the art and science of observation and pattern hunting.
15. Take students on the journey from analysis to synthesis.
16. Prepare students to become lifelong learners.
17. Let them bask in the wonder of meaning creation.
18. Demystify English at all levels of the Hierarchy of Language.
19. Accept that students have to do the learning and teachers have to lead them to finding their own optimal paths.
20. Equip students with the information and skills they need to make guided discovery work for them.
21. Don't accept students' narrow view of language as a foundation for their wish list when asked what they would like to do or like to learn.
22. Never stop asking students, HDYK.

Originally, a Kindle only, it is now also a print book with white space for readers' answers, notes, comments. The new edition reflects all the updates we have made to the free, online software, and AI appears at pertinent moments.
The Kindle and book are available from Amazon.

​Should you be interested in all things VersaText, or even some of them, feel free to join the Facebook group too.

Language learners benefit greatly from example sentences, since it is an opportunity to learn language from language, my big thing. For this reason, I devoted a considerable amount of my teaching, training and writing to helping students gain the maximum benefit from illustrative sentences.

In the early 2000s, I attended my first Teaching and Language Corpora conference in Bertinoro, a beautiful hilltop town near Bologna, and presented my incipient formula for computationally selecting the most useful sentences from corpora to present to students. I programmed a tool that allocated the frequency of every word in a sentence and average it. Sentence length was also a criterion.

As mentioned in previous posts, the great English lexiocagrapher, Patrick Hanks was my colleague at this time and I asked him what criteria his kind used when selecting sentences to include in their dictionaries. He said there was no list.

I worked on this further and came up with a list of ten criteria that I discussed with Patrick and he added one more. I gave this list to Pavel Rychlý, who was developing Sketch Engine and his team used these criteria as a basis for their GDEX algorithm, i.e. good example sentences. It is now a standard part of SkELL and Sketch Engine. My criteria are listed on this 2006 webpage.

So, it’s a good thing that corpora can select illustrative sentences, but can students? And should they? In short, yes and yes. But then what? How does a learner know what they can learn from an illustrative sentence apart from it being a targeted piece of input which they might soak in, as they do from any input they are exposed to. The answer lies in knowing the properties of the target word that are necessary to shift it from active to passive use.

I am a strong advocate of the Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner’s Dictionary because it even presents its definitions in full sentences. Full sentence definitions are goldmines. From the sentence defintion, you can easily extract concept checking questions (CCQs). For example,

Collins: A wildcard is a symbol such as * or ? which is used in some computing commands or searches in order to represent any character or range of characters.

• What is a wildcard? A symbol
• What are some examples of wildcard? * or ?
• Where is it used? In computing commands
• What is its function? to represent any character …

Collins: An aphorism is a short witty sentence which expresses a general truth or comment.

• What is an aphorism? a short witty sentence.
• What does it do? it expresses a general truth or comment.

These sentences typically start with a hypernym, here symbol, which immediately limits what it is and is not. Their definitions progress with the target word’s features, functions, etc. Each of these is encapsulated in a phrase or clause in the sentence definition. They are the properties of the word. The Collins then provides example sentences in which the abstract properties are made concrete. If students know what they can learn from full sentence definitions, they can see how the meanings of words manifest in authentic sentences.

I’m writing a student workbook at the moment which will probably be called Discovering Phrasal Verbs, in which students are repeatedly tasked with finding example sentences in corpora. The book explains the importance of the semantics of the phrasal verb particles (prepositions and adverbs) and the importance of the subjects and objects of the verbs. These properties are the most important contributors to the meanings of the otherwise opaque, or at best translucent, phrasal verbs.

When you search corpora for a phrasal verb, the sheer volume of data can be overwhelming. Fortunately, SkELL uses GDEX, so the 40 sentences it presents are manageable. The other tool I recommend is CorpusMate because it is very fast, it enables searches with wildcards, and the cotext is colour-coded using the same colours for parts of speech as VersaText. The wildcard searches are necessary when the phrasal verb is separable, e.g. tear .* away, keep .* .* away.
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AI is another source of illustrative sentences. In ChatGPT's own words, "The sentences generated by AI are original constructs, created using the language patterns learned during training." They are by definition inauthentic sentences, which means they were not motivated by any communicative impetus, hence they lack real-world contexts. These sentences often resemble those made up by textbook authors and test creators. It is reasonable to ask if the trade-off between authentic and inauthentic example sentences in terms of learnability is worth it. Do students really benefit more from authentic than inauthentic sentences?
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Like all good questions in ELT, the answer starts with, it depends. My it depends revolves around what the students are tasked with. If the textbook provides made-up example sentences without any task other than perhaps read, read aloud, translate or memorise some sentences, the students will function at the bottom of Bloom's Taxonomy. Garbage in, garbage out.

​But if the tasks involve higher order thinking skills in which the students skim and scan multiple examples of authentic language in search of specific properties to which they have been alerted, they develop a better understanding of the properties of the target word, and ultimately a more sophisticated understanding of language per se emerges. Like all good citizen-scientists, students engaged in “extreme noticing” need systems to record their findings that will in turn deepen their conceptual grasp of the target language and prepare them to use it confidently.

It is well-known that guided discovery is not for everyone. I was a school music teacher in my 20s and one would occasionally hear, Never try to teach a pig to sing: it wastes your time and annoys the pig. This is yet another aphorism attributed to Mark Twain, but who knows?
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Guided discovery demands a strong rationale, clear instructions, the right tools and an understanding that the students are going to benefit from the multiple affordances of the tasks. It is important that students are made aware of the multiplicity of these learning experiences in the process of acquiring words and their properties. No reflection, no connection.

​Max’s podcasts are mostly targeted at B1 level, and since his work is partly motivated by Krashen’s comprehensible input hypothesis, I listen for gist. My Russian is well below B1 but I comprehend a lot, and could probably retell the thrust of his monologues in English. This is thanks to my study of Russian, its closeness to Czech and its vocabulary having many English and international words, including those that have Greek and Latin origins. I should mention that there are many false friends between Russian and Czech, my favourite being užasný (amazing, awesome) vs. ужасный (terrible).

Each of Max’s podcasts revolve around a single topic, so there is always the general context to help with the gist, but since he only speaks Russian in the podcasts, you have to infer the topic as well. There is no time during the podcast to analyse his use of words so that you might be able to use them in the cotexts that he employs. It is challenging to observe collocation, colligation and chunks on a single listening, and it is not why we listen.
 
So, while the gym has a leg abduction machine, I would say that our brains have a language abduction machine. Abductive reasoning is a form of logical inference that seeks the simplest and most likely conclusion from a set of observations. We do a lot of abducting when our comprehensible input is only just comprehensible.
 

Our word knowledge typically emerges over time in both first and second language acquisition contexts. In FLA our word knowledge mainly accrues through multiple exposure, although we do use dictionaries, chat to friends about new and surprising uses of words. We even read and watch videos about language. In SLA, our word knowledge mainly accrues through structured study, which is both motivated and reinforced by exposure as we read, write, speak and listen.
 
The emergent stages of vocabulary competence can be described thus:

​I am devoting some pages to flashcards, the use of AI, and this continuum in the book I am writing at the moment. It might have the bumptious title, How to Learn Vocabulary Properly. We’ll see! 

​Hoey in fact studied foreign languages so that he could experience the processes of language learning and the practical applications of linguistic and pedagogical theory. When he was observing language in context, that is by reading and listening, he would notice certain collocations but he needed proof of their typicality before he could consider them worth learning. Just because someone has combined a pair of words does not mean that this combination is a typical formulation in the language. The lexicographer, Patrick Hanks (1940–2024) felt the same: Authenticity alone is not enough. Evidence of conventionality is also needed (2013:5).

Some years before these two Englishman made these pronouncements, Aristotle (384–322 BC) observed that one swallow does not a summer make. Other languages have their own version of this proverb, sometimes using quite different metaphors, but all making the same point.

​In order to ascertain that an observed collocation is natural, typical, characteristic or conventional, it is necessary to hunt it down, and there is no better hunting ground for linguistic features than databases containing large samples of the language, a.k.a corpora. In the second paragraph, Hoey experienced the processes … Is experience a process a typical collocation? This is the data that CorpusMate yields:

In the same paragraph, we have the following collocation candidates:

• study language
• foreign language
• apply theory
• observe language
• notice collocation
• combine words
• typical formulation

Here is some more data from CorpusMate.

In the following example, we have a wildcard which allows for one element to appear between the two words of the collocation. Even in these first 12 of the 59 results, other patterns are evident.

The process of validating your findings through multiple sources or methods is known as triangulation, and it is an essential stage in most research. When we train students to triangulate their linguistic observations, it is quite likely that they are familiar with this process from their other school subjects.

This is not just a quantitative observation, i.e. this collocation occurs X times in the corpus. It is qualitative as well: the students observe other elements of the cotext, such as the use of other words and grammar structures that the collocation occurs in. They might also observe contextual features that relate to the genres and registers in which the target structure occurs.

They are being trained in task-based linguistics as citizen scientists, engaging their higher order thinking skills as pattern hunters. This metacognitive training is a skill for life that will extend far beyond the life of any language course they are undertaking.

Triangulation does not apply only to collocation. Any aspect of language can be explored in this way. You may have noticed the word order in the idiom: does not a summer make. Many people have run with this curious word order and exploited it creatively. It is thus a snowclone. Here are some examples from SkELL.

Respect our students' intelligence and ​equip them to learn language from language.

Croswaithe, P. & Baisa, V. (2024) A user-friendly corpus tool for disciplinary data-driven learning: Introducing CorpusMate International Journal of Corpus Linguistics.
    
Hanks, P. (2013) Lexical Analysis: Norms and Exploitations. MIT.
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Hoey, M. (2000) A world beyond collocation: new perspectives on vocabulary teaching. Teaching Collocation. Further Developments in the Lexical Approach. LTP (ed. Lewis, M.)

• warm and fuzzy
• furry and fuzzy
• cuddly and fuzzy
• cute and fuzzy.

None of these eight combinations occur frequently enough in SkELL's billion word corpus to be anointed chunks. English can certainly boast many very high frequency “and” chunks, such as:

• first and foremost
• tried and tested
• doom and gloom
• chalk and talk
• part and parcel
• pen and paper
• trials and tribulations.

With their poetic alliteration and their internal rhyming scheme, these are chunks with their own semantic and pragmatic functions in the language.

Our fuzzy examples, however, are properties of the word. Make a word sketch for pretty much any noun, verb, adjective, or adverb in the English language and you will find words that and links it with. The more arcane the word, the more arcane the partners. See arcane, for example.

Search for words that are in a text you are studying or on a word list you are working with. Explore the "and" relationship by clicking on a word to see it in sentence examples. For example, in the "and" relationship of class, we see among others:

• gender
• category
• method.

Clicking on gender shows 40 example sentences that include class and gender. This must be more than a lexical relationship – it is cultural and political.

Clicking on category shows 40 sentences related to categorisation. Once again, this represents the way this topic is written and spoken about.

Remember that we do not need to read and grasp the sentence examples that corpus searches yield. A concordance page is not a text – it is a source of language data that we skim and scan to identify patterns of normal usage from which we learn how the language works so that our use of the foreign language approximates that of the many native speakers whose output has turned up in the corpus.

The "and" pattern, connecting two words of the same part of speech and with similar semantics, often offers lexical support. Rather than expressing something new, this quasi repetition reinforces the meaning or general impression being communicated. This is particularly noticeable with subjective and emotive words. Look at the "and" relationships of:

• angry
• funny
• modest

There is also the matter of word order. Words in these and relationships are usually said in a set order.

• Coffee and tea is much less frequent than tea and coffee.
• Compare and contrast vs. contrast and compare.
• When and where vs. where and when.
• Reading and writing  vs. writing and reading.

As language teachers and speakers of foreign languages, we are always interested in the properties of words. Knowing a word’s patterns of normal usage is key to using words as native speakers do. And the confidence that emerges from this knowledge impacts on fluency.

How often have you seen claims like these?

• Speak like a native in no time!
• Effortless fluency guaranteed!
• Learn a language in your spare time with no effort!
• Language fluency made simple and quick!
• Master any language with this one simple trick!
• Learning a new language is a breeze!
• Fluency in just 10 days!
• Master a language while you sleep!

Who would make such claims? Certainly not someone who has achieved a high level of competence in a foreign language. As an eternal language student, and a language teacher and a teacher of teachers, I am pretty certain that you and I have worked hard to get to where we are in our foreign languages. It was not effortless, it wasn’t a breeze and no progress was made while we were asleep. I was so desperate to improve my vocabulary, that I used to sleep with my dictionary under my pillow. No I didn’t, but that is the impression you get from some of these slogans.

Learning a language is hard work and there ain’t nothin’ wrong with hard work. Never confuse hard work with hard labour. Hard doesn’t mean boring and monotonous and it doesn’t mean frustrating and unrewarding.

The hard work we do when learning a language involves planning, monitoring and revising. It involves understanding what we are learning, which in turn involves connecting what we already know with what is new to us. Hard work involves practising what we have learnt so that it becomes automatic. Hard work involves using our time efficiently, choosing approaches that work for us. This requires us to assess or critique the approaches to language study that are introduced to us if we are fortunate enough to have various approaches. It is worth reflecting on how many different learning experiences we are having while studying – the learning #affordances of an activity.
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For example, if we are learning a set of English words with their first language equivalents, whether in written lists, on paper or electronic flashcards, in a computer game or being tested by our study buddy, the only connection we make is between the L1 and L2 word. We do not learn how the word is used. This leads us to assume that the L2 word is used in the same way as it used in L1 and this is okay when it works. It is not okay the rest of the time. Psycholinguists refer to this assumption as the semantic equivalence hypothesis (Ijaz 1986, Ringbom 2007).

Another issue with learning L1–L2 pairs is the mental processing of the L2 word: what is your mind doing whilst trying to remember a word? Lower order thinking does not make for a rich learning experience. When we are critiquing our approaches to vocabulary study, we need to consider how many different features of words we are learning at the same time.
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However, when we study the vocabulary of a text in a text, we see how keywords are used differently each time they are used. Yes, their different uses create different messages which means that the author is telling us something new about the keyword each time it is used. These different messages involve different words, which means we can make a diagram of a keyword as it is used in a text. I call these diagrams Word Constellations.

We can identify a key word and highlight all of its occurrences in the text, then highlight the words that are used with it. I prefer to do this with #VersaText because it is easy to see the left and right cotexts of keywords in a concordance. You can do this with at least several key words in the text. ​

In critiquing this approach, we need to consider how much the students learnt during the time spent.

• Did the knowledge gained empower them to use the keyword and its cotextual words better than learning such combinations from flashcards or bilingual lists?
• Did they meet any combinations of words that were new and useful?
• Did they have to check their dictionary for anything?
• Did they notice anything about the distribution of the keyword through the text?
• Did the process heighten their understanding of the text?
• Did drawing the word constellations feel like a strong learning experience?
• Was it an enjoyable process?
• Can they imagine their vocabulary notebooks full of word constellations?
• Are they likely to refer to them again? And again?

If they didn't create a word constellation of a key word in a text, what did they do? How did they spend their time? What learning took place? 

Once we have a keyword in its multiple cotexts, we can use them as the bases of our own sentences. We might like to use them to form questions to discuss with our study buddy or our favourite AI tool. Here are some simple examples of a chat with Perplexity.ai.

Hi. I'm a B1 student of English. Will you be my study buddy today?
Of course! I'd be happy to help you with your English studies.

• Are Czech walking trails a complex system?
• Are they connected together?
• Do they run through the whole country?

Is this time-consuming? Is it a good use of our time? Are we having strong learning experiences? Are connections forming in our minds that have a high chance of becoming permanent?

I used bilingual lists for many years, long after I needed to. I think that if I were to start another foreign language, I would need them as a beginner. But applying what I have actually known for a long time, I would move as quickly as possible to studying words with their natural cotexts.

It may be the case that people who make claims like those at the top of this article do actually teach vocabulary in cotext, but from the courses and resources that I have seen over the years, this does not seem very likely.

If you or your students ever create word constellations, I’d love to see them. And I would love to know what the process led to.

Feel free to join the VersaText Facebook Group where you can share your experiences and learn from others.
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Ijaz, I. H. (1986). Linguistic and cognitive determinants of lexical acquisition in a second language. Language Learning, 36(4): 401-451

Ringbom, H. (2007). Cross-linguistic similarity in foreign language learning (Vol. 21). Multilingual Matters.
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Veselá, Z. (2003) Czech Republic’s unrivalled system of marked walking trails. Radio Prague International, 5.12.2003.

I had an email from a teacher who loves using my VersaText tool with his students. In addition to the very welcome and rarely received praise for VersaText, he was enquiring into the possibility of adding a collocation feature. As you know, VersaText works with single texts, its slogan being, “learning language from language, one text at a time”, collocations are vanishingly rare. In fact, “vanishingly rare” is a strong collocation in English. Check out the examples in #SkELL.

#Collocation is defined variously. First and foremost, collocation consists of two content words of different parts of speech. Compound nouns and adjectives, phrasal and delexical verbs are not collocations. And neither are words that combine with that/ -ing / inf / wh-/prepostions. These are colligations and offer very little choice, if any. You’ve all seen gap fills in coursebooks and exams that test this. Collocation does permit some variation, but within limits of acceptability if you are going to use the patterns of normal usage of the language.

One category of definitions of collocation revolves around statistical frequency. These definitions rely on the number of times words occur in close proximity to each other. The verb collocates of trouble, for example, occur frequently within four words before and/or after the noun in SkELL's huge sample of English.

Other definitions of collocation are phraseological: cause trouble is the core of a clause, which is the essential structure that creates Messages, which in turn constitutes text. Up the Hierarchy of Language we go! 

Most key words in most texts collocate with different items because the author is telling us something new about the word. And this is why a collocation tool in VersaText would be by and large redundant.
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One thing we can be sure of in a text is that the author is not going to repeat the same message repeatedly, again and again, over and over, unless they have some rhetorical reason for doing so.  Here is an example. In VersaText’s sample text, Learning Zone (a transcript of a TED Talk), we see that the verb spend is frequently used with time, and with other time words, e.g. minutes, hours, our lives. It occurs 13 times in the text. Time occurs 28 times in the text and is used thus: ​

Go to VersaText, select the Learning Zone text from the list, then click Wordcloud at the top. If you want the lemma of improve, for example, choose the lemma radio button under the word cloud. Click on any word to see its concordance in this text. This motivates many discovery learning tasks for the students.

If you want to learn more about studying and teaching English with VersaText, click the Course button at the top of the VersaText pages.

My phraseological approach to collocations in single texts is the Word Constellation. See my blog post linked below. 

Like all linguistic phenomena, snowclones have been in existence much longer than the term coined to describe them. A term endows a phenomenon not only with a certain gravitas but a recognition that it has a set of features that an entity needs to be worthy of the name. If it has all of the required features it is a prototype (Rosch). ​

Another fine example is the English language: which features of English do spoken Texan, Irish football journalese, and academic written English all possess? This makes for an interesting Venn diagram and it leads to a description of “core” English. A nice activity, by the way! 

​Terms are of much use to language students and misuse impedes their progress. We are all familiar with the misnomers, past tense and past participle. As Michael Lewis convincingly conveyed, the past tense is actually about remoteness – in time, in reality, and in social distance. The past participle is a non-finite form and by definition cannot express time. 

​Compound nouns and phrasal verbs are not collocations, and delexical verb structures are neither collocations nor phrasal verbs. Restaurant, bistro and canteen are co-hyponyms, not synonyms. The use of by in passive structures is not a preposition but a particle. 

When you know the defining features of linguistic phenomena, you can observe them, study them, learn them and use them with confidence. Our English students who also study maths, science, biology, sport, history, geography, literature and the rest, understand very well that their success depends on a profound understanding of the terminology of their field(s). They also know that their professional success demands a professional level of English. Our students deserve as accurate a description of the language as we can provide them.

Until you know that snowclones are an identified and labelled feature of the language, you can’t look them up, talk about them, research them, or tag the next one you hear as one. But now you can. 

Ask not what students can do for you—ask what you can do for your students!
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If you have any other favourite, shareworthy snowclones, please add them in the comments below. It would be great to develop this. ​

I asked ChatGPT for ten passive sentences about the topic of connectionism. As usual, the sentences are bland and inauthentic. But this is one  was also problematic.

• Complex behaviors can emerge from the interaction of interconnected nodes in connectionist networks.

When I pointed out that this sentence has no passive voice, it apologized for the oversight and offered this instead.

• Complex behaviors can be emerged from the interaction of interconnected nodes in connectionist networks.

When I pointed out that emerged doesn't work in the passive in English, it told me that I was correct and offered me this.

• Complex behaviors can be observed to emerge from the interaction of interconnected nodes in connectionist networks.

When I pointed out that the infinitive form after observed doesn't work in English, it told me I was right again, and offered me this:

• Complex behaviors can be observed emerging from the interaction of interconnected nodes in connectionist networks.