"Chunk"??

[Matt1978]

Hello Teachers,

While we are studying the language teaching, there is a paragraph as following:

Whole language
The teacher used the chunks instead of individual word and grammatical parts to teach the language to help students apply sentence patterns in their language usage.

Could you please advise me what "Chunk" means? Thanks for the kind help in advance.

[susiedqq]

See this site for an explanation
What Does a Balanced Literacy Approach Mean? - SEDL Reading Resources

[vil]

I’m not a teacher.

Hi Matt1978,

to chunk (v) = group or chunk together in a certain order or place side by side
synonym to collocate (v) = 1. to place together or in proper order; arrange side by side.
2. to occur in a collocation. Used of words: Rancid often collocates with butter
collocation = an arrangement or juxtaposition of words or other elements, especially those that commonly co-occur, as rancid butter, bosom buddy, or dead serious.

chunking = grouping units of information into larger units or chunks in order to facilitate memorizing them. For example, if there are 15 different telephone numbers to learn, they could be placed together in groups of three giving, in effect, five numbers to learn; the three letters C A T could be grouped into one word, CAT, which also has a meaning attached to it. Chunking has been used to improve learning, memory, and retrieval. It recognizes the fact that the human brain can process only a limited amount of information at any one time.

A man just beginning to learn radio-telegraphic code hears each dot and dash as a separate chunk. Soon he is able to organize this sounds into letters and than he can deal with the letters as chunk. Then the letters organize themselves in words, which are still longer chunks, and he begins to hear whole phrases. Thus, a telegrapher can effectively remember several dozen dits and dashs as a single phrase.

Regards

V.

[Matt1978]

Hello Vil,

Thank you for the detailed explanation to my question. Have a nice weekend!!

[Matt1978]

Hello Vil,

By the way, the example you mentioned makes me recall my service in military years ago. At that time I happened to be a telegrapher...and it is exactly as same situation as your illustration...but I only handle the encoding and decoding part, not the telegraphing... ^_^