Why is your lexical lens so important?

I’ve named this short course My Lexical Lens for a very specific reason. Back in Season 2 Episode 2 of Ethos English I talked about the neuroscience researcher Daniel Levitin’s book The Organized Mind. In this book he makes the point that as a species we’ve depended on categories to survive. Our surroundings are so full of information that we are forced to ignore information that we don’t consider important. This is what’s referred to as the attentional filter. Think of it like a camera lens. By focusing on an object in the foreground everything in the background goes blurry.

Daniel Levitin writes the following:

Attention is the most essential mental resource for any organism. It determines which aspects of the environment we deal with, and most of the time, various automatic, subconscious processes make the correct choice about what gets passed through to our conscious awareness. For this to happen, millions of neurons are constantly monitoring the environment to select the most important things for us to focus on. These neurons are collectively the attentional filter. They work largely in the background, outside of our conscious awareness. This is why most of the perceptual detritus [garbage] of our daily lives doesn’t register, or why, when you’ve been driving on the freeway for several hours at a stretch, you don’t remember much of the scenery that has whizzed by. Your attentional system “protects” you from registering it because it isn’t deemed [considered] important. This unconscious filter follows certain principles about what it will let through to your conscious awareness.

At this point you may be asking yourself how this is relevant to language learning. When we’re using language our attentional filter is focused on the message, not how it’s expressed. Thus, unless we consciously train ourselves to pay attention to the patterns of language we will overlook them. This explains why language learners, despite years of practising English in a communicative classroom setting, often fail to see significant improvements in their fluency and accuracy. 

If we want this situation to change so that our learners can become far more effective – and autonomous – learners, we can do a few things. First, we raise awareness that English proficiency depends on knowledge of chunks. Secondly, we explicitly teach the main categories of chunks. Then we consistently ask them to identify and categorise chunks they come across in their reading and listening. Lastly, we encourage our learners to record and review these chunks using apps like Quizlet or Anki.

Let’s get to work on developing your lexical lens!