Spoken Grammar: part 3

As we have already discussed in the previous articles (part 1 and part 2), Spoken Grammar is essential to express our own thoughts in a shorter and more convenient way and to understand native speakers’ speech. It contains some elements of everyday speech that have not been added to the teaching syllabuses. However, we are sure that these features should be taught in the classroom, where the student’s primary goal is communication. In this article, we are going to take a look at two more features (phrasal chunks and hyperboles) and how to teach them in your classes.

Phrasal Chunks

Phrasal chunks are ready-made word combinations, that help us be more polite, impose some uncertainty and give us more time to think. Some common examples of these phrases are kind of, sort of, you know, I mean, that is, a bit, a bit of, etc.

Teaching activities:

• sorting (put the word phrases into the appropriate column). The columns could be the following: 
• discourse marking (1): you know, I mean, but I mean, if you see what I mean, etc.
• hedging, boosting and vagueness (2): I think, I don’t think, sort of, kind of, all this sort of thing, something like that, that is, etc.
• modifying the amount (3): a bit, a little bit, quite a lot, some, a little, the majority, etc.
• searching for phrasal chunks in the video. First, ask students to watch the video and write out the phrasal chunks they hear. Then let them watch the video with subtitles or read the transcript and check if they have heard all the chunks. Give students the dialogue from the video without chunks and ask students to put them back in the right logical places. Discuss.
• add chunks to the dialogue. Take any dialogue that is in the syllabus and ask students to add phrasal chunks to it, then roleplay the dialogue.

Hyperbole

This is a very common feature that is easily understood by the students. It is used to exaggerate something and to make speech more figurative. Common examples are:

I was so exhausted, I could sleep for the whole week.

I warned you a million times about the exam on Tuesday.

My backpack weighs a hundred kilos.

I’m starving. I can eat 20 burgers!

Moreover, a number of hyperbolizing phrases with the words die and kill exist, e.g. :

• die for something (want to get some simply achievable things, like tea, chocolate, cigarettes, gym training, sleep etc.);
• die to do smth (die to is followed by a verb and means that you are looking forward to doing something);
• kill for smth (you do want to get something that you need to try hard to achieve, e.g. graduation from university, passing the exams, getting a new job, etc.).

To work out the meaning of these phrases, give some examples to students and ask them to guess and explain the difference. Then ask them to make their own examples.

Below you’ll find some activities to practice hyperbolizing some measures, like time, space or number: 

• ask students to generate as many synonyms as possible to some common words and phrases, for example:

important: essential, vital, life-and-death issue;

10 minutes: just a second, a minute, a short time;

many: a lot of, dozens of, hundreds of, millions of.

• give students sample sentences  and ask them to hyperbolize it, for example

It will take 15 minute -> It will take a few seconds.

• ask students to make their own sentences about their typical day and the tasks they need to complete, trying to hyperbolize where possible. They can also make it in pair in the form od a dialogue.