Using vocabulary in chunks

OK. Hello, everyone, my name is Kasia Wozniak and I'm delighted to welcome you to our Facebook live session on using vocabulary in chunks. It may sound quite mysterious but I have two fantastic colleagues to explain all that to us today.

I have Nisreen, hello. Hi. And I have Mark, hello.

Hi. Aa always would like to hear from the audience so let us know where you're joining us from and in the meantime, Nisreen and Mark can you tell us a few words about yourself? Yeah, so I suppose I have a slightly strange background my teaching background is actually is in first language speakers of English.

So, I taught English in schools in the UK and in London, specifically, and actually for a while I taught students in what's called a referral unit. So, those are for very naughty students who were kicked out of mainstream school and after while I decided I wanted to switch to a research focus and working second language so for last ten years or so I've been looking at language development both here and for universities. OK, great.

It sounds like a great career. Yes, yeah, it's very interesting. Very interesting, yeah.

I'm Nisreen Ash. I was raised in Damascus in Syria. And I didn't speak English at home.

We spoke Arabic actually, so I learned my English at school and then I ended up teaching English and then helping teachers to teach English and so my career developed from teaching to working with teachers, and I'm delighted to be here and share my experience as an English language learner. Great, fantastic. I think we have a similar career pathway.

Yes, OK, and just to say we have people joining us from Indonesia Spain, Greece, Brazil Vietnam, Russia, all over the world. Morocco, Siberia. There you go, Barcelona.

Greece, France, so the whole world is with us. Yes. OK, Nisreen and Mark, using vocabulary in chunks.

Can you just reveal the secret to us? Chunks? When I was learning English, I wondered what 'chunks' means.

So, Mark, what are chunks? Yes, so I suppose there was a kind of an old traditional view of language which said, basically, what you have are individual words something like a dictionary and then a set of fairly abstract rules for putting those words together. Grammar.

Then, idea was that you built your sentences one word at a time using those kind of abstract grammar rules. So, you know an adjective can go with a noun so you find your adjective and you put it with a noun and so on. What modern linguistics has actually found is it's a bit more nuanced than that.

So, when you actually look at the way people use language what you find is that lots of words can often get used together. So, if you take two words like 'good' and 'morning' obviously, they're used in lots of contexts so you can have a good day, you can have good food you can have a fun morning, a happy morning but there's a very specific context in which you find those two words together so whenever I come into the office the first thing people say to each other is. .

. 'Good morning. ' Exactly, right.

So there are these two words they go together much more commonly and frequently and they come almost as a chunk, basically. And when you start looking you kind of see them everywhere. Also, when we say 'happy birthday', we wouldn't say 'merry birthday' or 'may you be healthy every year on this day' we would just say 'happy birthday' but obviously other languages have different ways of putting it together.

I mean that it's a very specific way so a different language has very specific ways of saying things. There would be nothing wrong with saying 'joyous birthday' and a natural English speaker would understand what you meant but it's just not the way natural speakers use English. You would just say 'happy birthday' to wish someone a happy birthday.

When we were preparing for this live session for today we looked at a number of examples and one of the examples that we looked across a number of languages is 'strong tea'. I love tea and when I was learning English I found that sometimes I may use the wrong word because in Arabic I would say something slightly different. So, I'd like to show you an example of a different way of expressing 'strong tea' in a number of languages.

It's the one before, yes. This one, yes. No, you were actually right, but anyway.

When we say 'strong tea' in English, we don't say powerful tea and one of the things that I had also discussed with my students in the past is whether we say 'powerful tea', 'heavy tea'. . .

'Powerful tea', I remember one student asking me about it and we just felt that OK, let's look at how often this was used and contrast it with strong tea we found people had rarely used 'powerful tea' in England since the 1800s. For a long time. I think if we go back we've got.

. . a graph that kind of illustrates this.

This is a nice, clear way of just showing what these chunks look like and how frequent they are. So, what you've got in front of you is just a graph I pulled off from Google Ngrams, you don't need to worry about what that is but you see you've got two different word combinations so one is 'strong tea', which is the natural English chunk for talking about really strongly flavoured tea and an alternative way of potentially saying it, which is 'powerful tea'. Again, if someone said 'powerful tea', you'd sort of know what they meant but if you look at the frequencies you can see it's clearly different.

'Strong tea' is much more frequent. It's the combination. It's the chunk that natural English speakers tend to use.

I might think if someone says to me 'powerful tea' now like it has a specific medicinal quality. Yes, that's right. Yeah, so it might distort the meaning a little bit but when we researched 'strong tea' in different languages and that is the next slide We found that it's expressed slightly differently in different languages so in Portuguese, for example it is said in a way that indicates intensity or even strong tea.

But in Mongolian and they say something that means thick tea So, if they're translating from Mongolian, they will be saying thick tea. Maybe if you translate 'strong tea' to Mongolian, literally it wouldn't make sense. And the same thing with Turkish, they would say 'dark tea' and in Arabic, 'heavy tea'.

So if it's a different concept and a different way of constructing words together but in English, if you want to sound more natural then you would say 'strong tea'. What would you say, Kasia, in Polish? Because that's your mother tongue.

Yes, so we also say 'strong tea', <i>mocna herbata</i>. Yes, so it's similar. Easy for Polish speakers.

Easy to learn. What would you say in your language? So, please try to share with us how you would say 'strong tea' in your mother tongue and also the literal translation of it.

So, we will see how different it would sound or what the concept would be in your language. We also researched another example and this one to do with rain because you know how much it rains in the UK. I think we're quite typical.

We took it from tea to rain. Tea and rain, yes. And with heavy rain that was also interesting.

In Portuguese, the Portuguese wording for it, or chunk, is 'a lot of rain'. But, when in Mongolia, 'rain with lots of water'. Interesting.

In Turkish, it's 'heavy rain' so that's an easy one for Turkish speakers. in Arabic, it's 'profuse rain' or even 'rains' in the plural. What would you say in Polish?

I'm thinking we say. . .

<i>silny</i>, so I think it would be like 'strong rain' rather than heavy, yeah. Yeah, strong rain. Yeah.

'Strong' in Arabic is interesting it just indicates more like strength in terms of power. So, if you say strong rain, it's a bit like the rain doesn't have strength so, yeah, languages are fascinating. Different ways of expressing things, but in English it's 'heavy rain'.

We have some replies. So, in Greek, apparently, we say dark or black tea. And that's good.

And then I think. . .

There are so many comments. It's like Turkish. Yeah, and here, I think this is Russian.

So, they say 'solid' or 'study', very rough translation. OK. OK.

What's interesting is that they're all picking up on the same kind of meaning so it's that same core but just each language has a very specific way of expressing it. That's part of what it means to know the language, to know those chunks to speak English naturally is to say 'strong tea' rather than 'powerful tea' even though that core meaning is sort of the same and you see that overlap across the examples we've got here. Yeah.

I think there was a nice example here from Mexico but the comments come so quickly that I tend to lose them but it was about that tea is 'loaded'. Oh, yeah, <i>té cargado</i>. That literally means 'loaded tea'.

That's a nice one. I'll have to remember that one. Yeah!

So, yeah, language is fascinating. What would you say for 'heavy rain'? That would be another thing to share as well and would be interesting to see if there's some interesting way of looking at the rain and the heaviness of the rain.

Yes, OK, we have an example from Russia. More like 'strong rain' in Russian. Yeah, good.

But you know, sometimes as an ex-learner actually an always English language learner I sometimes wondered, are all chunks the same? And I'd like to ask you, Mark, because you're the researcher here and you spent years looking into chunks, so what do you think? So, the simple answer is no, not all chunks are the same the longer answer will take a long lecture and we don't want to give you that here.

So, basically, there are lots of different kinds of chunks and probably a nice way to think about them is that they come in lots of different flavours, right? So, one flavour is how many words they have. So, the examples we've already seen have two words so 'good morning', 'happy birthday' but in fact chunks can have a number of words so you can have one with five words, which is 'the love of my life' which is how I describe my wife.

Whether I'm in a good or bad mood. But you can actually have whole sentences so lots of languages will have proverbs ways of condensing a lot of wisdom into a single sentence. There's an English one, 'the early bird catches the worm' which basically means the person who gets up first and goes ahead and does something, will win, will succeed.

Another way of looking at them is whether it's easy to guess the meaning. So some of them, it's fairly clear. if you know the meaning of individual words you can work out what it means.

So, in English we tend to talk about fast cars rather than quick cars. So if you heard the phrase 'fast cars', you'd know what it meant if you know what 'fast' and what 'cars' mean. Some of them are a little harder to work out so if, as we hope, you pass your Cambridge exams 'with flying colours' that might sound a bit strange, but with that basically means is you did really well.

You got the best mark you could possibly get. There's no way that someone who didn't grow up speaking English would be able to work it out if he knew what the word 'flying' meant if he knew what the word 'colours' meant when you put them together, it sounds very strange. What do you mean?

Flying colours? What does that mean? I was once told, "Oh, Nisreen, everybody thinks you're the bee's knees" and I thought that sounds really positive but I didn't know quite what the bees and the knees meant together.

So I just thought, well, you know that's pretty. . .

interesting, so I went home and I googled it and I found out that it means I'm a really good person. Oh, OK. And I really liked it.

Yeah. But what really sometimes struck me is how people would use them and when would I use that kind of expression? Because the first time it was used I just didn't know how to replicate it again so it can be a bit challenging, as we understand using not the easiest chunks in your language.

Yeah, I mean and they're used different things, right? So, some are just chunks for things and so if I refer to your sunny smile that's picking out a thing in the world, your smile but other chunks they help to link it to a sentence together so a couple you've probably heard of, you say 'as well as' or 'as soon as' those are particular chunks that help you link two things together and it assures that the sentence hangs together as a complete sentence. And then, lastly, one that's a bit trickier to get your head around it's just whether you can use them by themselves, right?

So, some are more or less complete phrases so, again, the two we used earlier. If you walk into the office and say, "good morning" people wouldn't expect you to say anything more but there are some chunks that basically need something else to finish them. And so, again, the examples of chunks that link something like 'as well as' if I said, "there are chunks for things as well as.

. . " A natural English speaker would say, "well, OK, as well as what?

" So, there are chunks that require you to fill them out and have something at the end. This is why they can be quite useful they're a short-term way of bridging of things and allow you to think of what you want to say while you're building a sentence. Functional chunks, I like to call them, but that's not scientific.

That's just Nisreen's way of referring chunks. Well, it's really, in some sense, however you want to refer to them in fact, if you look really closely at the literature which I'd suggest everyone does you'll find linguistics don't always speak about them in common ways so if that's the way that helps you think about it, that's perfect. Yeah, yeah.

We've had various presentations and live sessions on chunks. So, previously, on Facebook we've discussed the reasons why people use language chunks and, obviously, there are various reasons and one of the reasons is to be able to feel like you're part of the group. So, it's group membership and that could be becoming part of the English language speaking group in, say, England, for example.

Or it could be a subgroup within that bigger group and a good example of that is football, the subgroup and I give it to you, Marcus. You're a football fan. I am a football fan, though.

. . You can probably explain that better than me.

Though if you asked my dad what team I support I think he would disagree. I wouldn't ask that, but OK. Football is a really nice example.

We have lots of colourful chunks, really striking chunks that if you don't follow the football, they just sound a bit weird, right? So if you heard commentators saying "they need to hold on until the final whistle" you could probably work out what it is but really you need to know that to finish a football game the referee needs to blow a whistle and say this is the end of the game. So, again, if you don't follow football, if you're not part of it It just sounds a bit strange, it's not obvious what it means.

Then, I think the others we're talking about are just easy to remember? Some you just genuinely come across and think that's a striking one. So, I think we talked about a couple of examples earlier.

Sunny smile? Sunny smile, that's a nice one. Yeah.

'Bee's knees'. Bee's knees. Then there's something like 'as good as gold', right?

It's really clear what it means but it's just a nice way of summing something up so you hear it and it just works, so you're happy to use it again. Yeah, yeah. Another bit more boring one is actually people just like to repeat things.

It's one of those things about the way human beings are once you said something a certain way, it's just easier to say it again. So, when you're part of a language community you just tend to repeat things over and over again so phrases come to be used in certain way words come to be combined and become a chunk. The last one, probably the one that's most relevant most interesting is it's really useful for fluency, right?

So, if you know the right chunks then you don't have to construct a sentence word by word. It makes it much easier to speak and understand English because you're not spending much energy thinking how do I build this sentence? You almost know what that sentence is going to look like.

Actually, interestingly, the person you're speaking to if they are a natural English speaker, they will know as well so they're working with you because they'll be thinking I'm ready for you to say these certain words so it makes it much easier for me to understand what you're saying. Right. Can I ask a question?

What about 'ray of sunshine'? Is that also a chunk? Yes, yeah, that's a great one.

It's obviously quite poetic, but it's actually a cliché in some sense so quite a worn-out phrase, but it's something we use all the time. My wife and I, we have a four-year-old who is, most of the time our ray of sunshine. Not always.

Apple of your eyes? Yes, the apple of our eyes. Yes.

Most of the time, he's a ray of sunshine. And a football fan? Not yet.

We'll see. There's a bit of a debate, because I'm a Tottenham Hotspur fan if that means anything to people, and my dad is a West Ham fan. We tend to disagree a lot.

[inaudible] No, it's an argument. . .

[inaudible] . . .

as to where he'll go for his first football game. I suspect Dad will win because he has more time. Well back again to learning English why should we care about learning these chunks?

Because you're trying to cope with so many things when you're learning English, tenses, grammar writing, reading all these skills, all the exams you have to do and, on top of that, you've got these chunks to pick up so why should we care, Mark? So, there are a number of reasons. One is something called the Common European Framework of Reference that may mean something to some of you, not to others but if you're ever wondering why our qualification exams start with a letter and a number, so B1, B2, B2 first first B1 proficiency, Sorry B1 first.

So B1 preliminary, B2 first. Yeah, B2 first. The reason for those letters and those numbers is the Common European Framework of Reference.

That is basically an international document produced by the parts of Europe and it describes language learners can do at each skill level, right? So you start off with A1, as you get better, you move up through the levels so you get from A1 to A2, B1 to B2, and C1 final C2 when you're more or less speaking as if you were a natural speaker of English and what we tend to find is if you actually look at what's in the Common European framework of Reference we find references to chunks. So, at B2 it says that B2 learners can produce, and this is a technical term the appropriate collocations of many words.

And 'collocations' is just a very specific word for kind of chunk, right? So, we've already seen these things like good morning, happy birthday these are some examples of a chunk or collocation and obviously because we cue our exams to the Common Framework of Reference, they're part of our exams. So, our reading questions specifically test your knowledge of things like chunks, things like phrasal verbs, idioms, phrases and also for writing the things we look for are a greater range vocabulary so the high-level speakers will draw on a greater range of words and actually part of that greater range of words is a greater range of chunks.

There has been a question from Natalia. She asks, "can we use chunks in writing? " And I think you've just answered that.

Yes, you can use them in all kinds of language. It's one of those weird things that until people started looking at it and really after the 1960s and just had large database of language people weren't really that cued into it but when you look at how language is actually used you just basically count things, you see them everywhere. And actually different kinds of language will have very specific chunks so that kind of chunks would use in spoken English something like 'good morning' is not the kind of chunk that you would use in an academic essay.

For an academic essay, a more common chunk will be something like 'it is important to', 'people have suggested that', or even 'on the one hand' 'on the other hand, something like, 'next section'. So all kinds of languages have chunks and actually the more specific the genre, the more specific the language the more specific the chunks will be. Yeah, you can't use 'been there, done that' in academic papers.

You could do, but you might be marked down for sure. Or 'the bee's knees'. Partly, this is why chunks can be very difficult for second language learners because you need exposure to those very specific kinds of language and that's actually quite hard for you to have access to.

It also depends why you're learning English and whether you want it for communication you want it for formal, informal purposes and so you focus on which type of chunks that would serve the purpose that you're looking for. Yeah, absolutely. Great.

Yeah, I mean so just other reasons really natural English speakers use them, right, so. . .

If you use them, you will sound more like a natural English speaker and critically, it's both easier for you to understand them because they use it and actually studies have shown that they've given passages to students and students will know the individual words but as they're not familiar with chunks they can find it hard to understand the other passage and vice versa. Natural English speakers will find it easier to understand what you're saying because, again, it's just part of the way we say things. So, if you said something like 'joyous morning' when you walked into the office we'd all know what the second language speaker meant, we'd be fine with it but it's just not the way that a natural English speaker would say it.

And of course, finally, you know they will also help your own fluency, right? So if you're familiar with these chunks you will not have to spend time building each sentence word by word. You can draw on these things in the same way that a natural speaker does to make your job easier.

I once tested translating back a chunk to Arabic with my mother so she offered me a piece of cake said, "would you like this cake? " We're conversing in Arabic and I said. .

. And in English if someone is offering me a piece of cake or something to eat I would say, "no. I'm fine.

" It's fine to say that, no, I'm fine. " That's also a chunk, and so I took that to Arabic and then my mum said, "would you like a piece of cake? " And I said "no, I'm fine", and she said "I didn't ask how you are.

" I was like that was a good effect, you know. So, she's a native speaker of Arabic another language, and that didn't make sense to her. So, think about them in sense when you think about your mother tongue what would it sound like if someone is learning Portuguese, Arabic or whatever language you speak and how natural it would sound in your language?

I think it's one of the striking things that once you start being aware of them I mean, when I started studying language it was not something I was aware of but once you start thinking about chunks, you actually start noticing them so when you're speaking in your own language you'll be able to predict what you're going to say next or, in fact, what another speaker is going to say to you next and that's nice to do as an experiment. If you are just listening to someone speak in your own language see if you can predict the kind of words they'll use based on what they've already said. You'll find you can do that quite well because chunks are there in your language as well.

So if I need more help as a learner, to learn more and pick up more chunks so that I would improve my language and I would reach a higher level of fluency, where can I find out more? So I think we came up with a number of suggestions. So, the first one we're going to suggest is something called English Vocabulary Profile.

It's something we at Cambridge Assessment have done with our colleagues at Cambridge University Press. That's a very nice resource. It's a website which basically lists a load of words that are characteristic of each Common European Framework Level and so there will be chunks for A1 learners, chunks for A2 learners and you'll find you can search for things like phrases for idioms phrasal verbs, and they help you identify, specifically, the kind of chunks you should be using, basically, where you are and also where you might want to go.

So, if you are working around B2 level you will able to identify chunks relevant to B2, but also maybe to C1 if you want to start pushing yourself a little bit more. That's nice as a sort of reference work, like a dictionary but if you want some practical exercises there are two very nice series of books by our colleagues at the Press. So, one is called<i> English Collocations in Use</i> as a series there's one for intermediate which is for B1/B2 and for advanced C1/C2.

This has a range of really nice exercises for just identifying all the different kinds of chunks there are for things for collocations and once you look at it you'll see how frequent they are and it will be surprising how much of English is drawing on these passages, these chunks. Then, another one we've got is <i>English Idioms in Use</i>. Idioms are just another kind of chunk and the reason we've chosen collocations and idioms they're the ones specifically talked about in the Common European Framework Reference.

When it talks about B2 language and C2 language is talking about collocations and idioms, so it is a really nice text to use. And then finally, we also have some YouTube videos. So, we've got three small YouTube videos that a colleague of ours Tom Booth, has done and they're just nice for giving you lots of concrete examples and just getting more familiar with the idea of what chunks are and, potentially, how you could use them in speech particularly.

Yeah, brilliant, thank you very much. That was very useful. One that I think I use very often is 'welcome along to'.

So "welcome along to our presentation", "welcome along to our programme" "welcome along to. . .

" whatever else and I think that it's also a chunk. It can be a very individual thing as well. Different people rely on it to certain extents and it can vary depending on the situation.

So, a while back, many years back I did podcast for a magazine in in this country, and I thought I was talking very smoothly and when I listened after, I realised I said the phrase 'kind of' more or less every sentence, and that's because, at that point I was really, really nervous and I couldn't stop saying it. There are really individual ways of doing things too. Yeah, great.

I have a few comments and questions they're kind of like comments/questions. Someone who said. .

. "The more you read, the higher number of chunks you learn in context. " So, that is probably just advice, so it's reading also what you can learn, the chunks not only from listening or watching native speakers.

Yes, so part of the key thing is really just quantity. It's getting lots of exposure to different kinds of language because it's one of the difficult things about chunks is that in a sense, chunks are everywhere but specific chunks aren't always used that frequently so the more you read, the more exposure to the language the better chance you have of seeing them and picking up on them but, particularly, if you want to pick up on chunks that are used in writing then you really need to expose yourself to different kinds of writing. And the key is also different kinds of writing so stories will have different kinds of chunks to things like academic writing and interestingly the emphasis will vary so you'll probably find more chunks in academic writing because it's a much more standard way of writing, much less individual.

Whereas in fiction, the kind of thing we want is we don't want lots of clichés. We want the best writers using the language at the top range so they're less relevant things like novels for example. Roseanna is saying for example, she heard 'I went vegan' instead of 'I got vegan.

' I think you say like I went or became vegan? Yeah. Interestingly that's an example a chunk where actually one bit of it you can change, right?

So, there is a phrase 'I've gone', meaning I've become something. So I've gone vegan. You could say I've gone vegetarian.

You could say, actually, I've gone carnivorous because I've decided to eat nothing but meat. So some chunks actually have a bit of flexibility built into them. And so that's a nice one because actually also that's a nice modern one so it's not just these things that have been there since the beginning of time that's another chunk, 'the dawn of time', that's another chunk.

You get new ones developing because language changes. people need to do new things with them, so we develop new chunks to make it easier to do those things. Absolutely.

It's also good to ask if you're not sure about something especially in a conversation so I learned this morning a new chunk, actually. Here's a confession. Can you share that with us?

Well, it's 'kick the bucket', I learned it from you, Mark. I was like, well, does that mean you got angry? Because I would kick the bucket if I'm a bit angry and it turned out that wasn't the meaning, actually.

Is there anyone online who knows the meaning of kicking the bucket? Am I saying it right? You are saying it right.

It's a weird one for me because when I did English at university and I studied it formally I seemed to use slightly differently to most English speakers but in English it has a very specific meaning and it's not at all what you'd think. OK. So we will leave that with you guys in the meantime, there is one more question and Gladys is asking "any ideas to teach C1 collocations?

My students have a very hard time learning them. Yeah, and it is worth saying that it takes a while to learn chunks and particularly high-level chunks because often you're drawing on very specific kinds of language where it's hard to get lots of exposure to it so I would say the key thing is to target particular kinds of language so particular academic essays. I would look at the books we've mentioned.

So Collocations in Use for the advanced one and Idioms in Use for the advanced one. They will identify specific kinds of collocations. There are techniques that seem to be quite useful so if you're aware of the characteristic chunks of the language you're showing them, you can underline them.

You can get them to start picking it out things that they think are chunks and get them to talk about them. And, actually, these things can have quite a weird effect so there have been studies where they've tried to teach specific chunks and what they found is learners didn't necessarily pick up those chunks but actually they were much more aware of chunks they already knew and were able to draw on them much more productively. And also, at C1, you're learning starts to plateau a little bit so you don't really notice the things that you're learning because you've already established communication you're picking up things quicker than you think and you're using them so you don't feel the change that you had when you were still learning basic things in A1/A2 levels so don't be intimidated by that.

You are still picking up things, but you probably don't realise that you're picking them up whilst you're learning and being exposed to different sources. And it is worth saying that they are not everything. The idea is not to literally stuff your writing or speaking with every chunk you can think of.

It's about building a familiarity, building your awareness and over time they will come into the language you use. And building your style, as well. Every person has their own style.

It is true. I mean, I find that in my essays I had one particular word So it's not just chunks, you have words that you tend to like the word 'thus, I always use that. I do, I used to.

I feel like I. . .

I overuse 'thus'. Yeah, and part of it is also about picking up on things you might be overusing so one thing we find that the second languages learners do is they tend to overuse very common chunks so chunks they picked up and they might use them a lot more frequently than a first language speaker of English would do. So, it's also about being aware of your own language you use.

It's easy with writing, because obviously can go back over it and just get a sense of, am I actually repeating things a bit too much because there is a tricky balance to get between using the right amount. Although, the right amount covers a lot of ground, right? So you don't need to be that specific, but just get a sense of other chunks perhaps I'm using too much.

That are also called "chunks". A good example. Exactly.

So, we've got some responses to your question or our questions and so it looks like it means to die? Yes. Very pleasant.

I mean, it's a nice illustration of just how weird chunks can be. Yeah, yeah. Because you wouldn't think the phrase 'kick the bucket'.

. . It's one of the things I decided I would never actually look at why it means what it does, because it's nice to have a bit of mystery.

It's used in informal speech, if you're afraid someone's kicked the bucket and you use it for someone you didn't know if someone kicked the bucket, it means they died. It's not rude to say, is it? No, you would use it in an informal context, not about you know.

. . Unlikely about someone you were very close to you but somebody you saw on the news or somebody who died perhaps a long time ago.

You will find natural English speakers using it but it sounds very odd. But it's less frequent than other ones. Yeah.

There's a question from Sally. She's asking if it's the same phrase as 'pushing up the daisies'? Yes, pushing up Daisies is another is another way of saying that yeah it's actually TV program, I think.

That was played on that as a title but yeah 'pushing up daisies' also means someone has died and they are buried underground, basically. The departed. Fantastic.

Do you remember when we were talking about passing an exam with flying colours? There was a comment I noted here from Leo. He said that sometimes I make the mistake of translating it literally in Spanish to tell my students taking the ESPA test and I realised it makes no sense in Spanish.

So, yeah, that's interesting. As you said you have to be quite careful when you when you translate that. I mean, all second language learners do it My father-in-law is Russian and in Russian you say you don't give a lecture you read a lecture and he still uses the phrase in English.

He says, "did you read a lecture last week? " And I kept saying. .

. It took me a while to remember that's the Russian version of saying it did I give a lecture last week, which was fun. Yeah.

OK. And one more question: What is the difference between chunks and idioms? So, we're using chunks as a formal way of covering all kinds of groups of words that go together a lot.

Linguists have lots of different terms for lots of different kinds of chunks. What makes idioms special is they're the ones that are quite hard to work out what they mean when you put the two words together. There's a really specific way of doing it and a really nuanced way of doing it so an idiomatic way of saying to die is 'kick the bucket' 'pushing up the daisies', so that's what idioms tend to refer to they tend to be quite colourful.

they tend to not be very literal, right? So if you're saying someone is as good as gold they're not really as good as gold. How can gold be good, it doesn't quite make sense.

It's just a little kind of tick, a little specific way the English have of. . .

A bit poetic? Yeah, I think so too. Yeah.

OK, I think that will be it from us this afternoon and thank you everyone for participating and if we haven't gotten back to you yet, we'll definitely do it in writing. So we will answer your questions and make sure you go to our Facebook page and give it a like and then you will get reminders about our Facebook live sessions. So do follow up and to both Mark and Nisreen, thank you very much.

It was a pleasure. Thank you and thanks for watching us today. Yeah, we really enjoyed it.