Messaging Quotes

“To sum up, I am suggesting that learning should be organised around messages, and not around grammar patterns or vocabulary. In”
― George Woolard, Messaging: Beyond a Lexical Approach

“Grammar should serve the message and not the other way round.”
― George Woolard, Messaging: Beyond a Lexical Approach

“The present simple tense is usually introduced as a way of talking about habits: I get up at six o’clock. I have tea and toast for breakfast. I leave for work at seven o’clock. In a further unit, the present continuous is likely to be introduced as describing an activity going on at the time of speaking: He’s working in the study I’m writing a letter. They’re playing outside. And in a later unit we are likely to return to the present simple tense while introducing adverbs of frequency to describe how often we do something: I always brush my teeth. He never forgets his wife’s birthday. We often go to the cinema. If we take the message as the input to learning, we are not restricted in this way, allowing us for example to talk about our habits using more complex and varied structures at the early stages of learning. The”
― George Woolard, Messaging: Beyond a Lexical Approach

“It strikes me that it would be more efficient, and more effective in learning terms, to shift our focus to the noun, since it is the noun that conveys the core meaning. So, instead of presenting the learner with a list of mixed sentences using make and do, we could provide examples of verbs that collocate with, for example, the noun appointment: You’ll need to make an appointment with the doctor. He failed to keep his appointment with the optician. I had a heavy cold and had to cancel my dental appointment. I’ll rearrange the appointment for Friday. This approach is referred to as a key word approach (Woolard 2005), and it feels intuitively closer to the way we actually store vocabulary: one senses that learners are more likely to retain the lexis when it is presented as above. In”
― George Woolard, Messaging: Beyond a Lexical Approach

“In chunking messages, learning follows what Wray (2008) calls a Needs Only Analysis approach. According to this view, there is no immediate need to break down a multi-word chunk into all its constituent parts, provided we understand what it means as a whole. In”
― George Woolard, Messaging: Beyond a Lexical Approach

“With an ever-expanding body of learning material available from publishers and online, I believe the key to effective second language learning is not to give learners more material, but rather to encourage a richer, more direct interaction with it. I call the approach which has emerged ‘messaging, chunking, and texting’. I”
― George Woolard, Messaging: Beyond a Lexical Approach

“Approaches to teaching and learning are dominated by a ‘slot-and-filler’ model, based on the separation of grammar and vocabulary. ”
― George Woolard, Messaging: Beyond a Lexical Approach

“Current teaching practices tend to begin with syntacticalisation and then move onto lexicalisation. I now believe that this may not be the most efficient approach, as it tends to restrict the amount of language that is presented to the learner, and also tends to involve less memory-based learning than I think is necessary to develop spontaneously produced language.”
― George Woolard, Messaging: Beyond a Lexical Approach