December 2004 Archives

Collocation is getting a lot of positive press at the moment. Most papers on the subject agree that it has been neglected and that it took 'some considerable time before vocabulary managed to establish itself as an area of language study in its own right.' (Paul Meehan - Lonely Word Seeks Like-Minded Partners for Possible Collocation) The Collins Cobuild dictionaries and the research emerging from the project did shed new light on the English language and many methods prior to this had neglected lexis; the Pimsleur Method, recently resurrected all over the Internet, is advertising the benefits of concentrating on grammar words rather than meaning words, a view common in the sixties when the Direct Method and other Behaviourist approaches held sway.

The Pimsleur Method is heavily advertised on the internet at the moment. Many of the sites seem to have exactly the same information about the method and, while it may be an effective way of learning, many of the claims being made are suspect and or plain ridiculous. The history of language learning is littered with miracle ways of learning, none of which has ever amounted to much.