Reference card · English conversation
Glossary
The words I use when I explain why a lesson works. Terms are used consistently across every lesson in this workspace.
How speech is built
- Chunk (also: formulaic sequence, lexical chunk)
- A group of words stored and retrieved as a single unit — That's a good question, to be honest, as far as I know. You do not build it from grammar; you recall it whole, like one long word.
- Why it matters: retrieving one chunk costs roughly what retrieving one word costs. This is the central mechanism of everything we do here.
- Nativelike fluency
- The ability to produce a whole clause in one planning operation, so no pause appears in the middle of it. Pawley & Syder called this a puzzle: speakers are far more fluent than their grammar knowledge alone can explain. The answer is that they are recalling, not constructing.
- Collocation
- Which words habitually go together. Make a decision, not do a decision. Both are grammatical; only one is English. Check collocations on SkELL.
- Register
- How formal or informal a phrase is, and therefore where it is safe. You know is fine with friends and wrong in a client call. Every phrase I give you is marked for register.
How the drills work
- Fluency vs accuracy
- Fluency is speed and smoothness. Accuracy is correctness. They are trained separately, and training one interrupts the other. During a fluency drill I will not correct your grammar — that is deliberate, not politeness.
- Fluency development
- Practice using only language you already know, where the only goal is getting faster. No new words. One of Paul Nation's four strands of a balanced course.
- 4·3·2
- Nation's drill: give the same talk three times, in four then three then two minutes. Speed rises across the repetitions — and so, measurably, do grammatical accuracy and complexity.
- Retrieval practice
- Producing something from memory rather than re-reading it. Feels harder than reviewing, and builds far more durable memory. This is why my drills make you type or say the phrase before showing it.
- Storage strength vs fluency strength
- Fluency strength is being able to get at something right now. Storage strength is still having it in three months. Rereading a lesson inflates the first and gives you a false sense of mastery; only effortful recall, spread over time, builds the second.
- Spacing
- Returning to material after a gap, when it has partly faded. The forgetting is what makes the practice work — so a drill repeated tomorrow beats the same drill repeated twice today.
- Desirable difficulty
- Difficulty deliberately added to practice because it improves long-term retention. When a drill feels uncomfortable but not impossible, it is working.
Speaking strategies
- Hesitation device / filler
- A sound or phrase that occupies time while you plan — uh, well, I mean, how can I put this. Research treats these as a communication strategy, not an error: they let a speaker plan while keeping control of the turn.
- Circumlocution
- Describing a thing whose name you cannot recall, instead of stopping. It's like a small bag you keep money in → wallet. The single most valuable repair skill in conversation.
- Holding the floor
- Keeping your turn to speak. Silence hands it away; a filled pause keeps it.
- Zone of proximal development
- The band just past what you can already do, where a task is hard but reachable with support. Every lesson is aimed there — if a lesson feels trivial or impossible, tell me and I will re-aim.