There is now plenty of evidence that the learning of multiword units can occur across the four strands of meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, language-focused learning, and fluency development, although the largely unresearched strand with regard to multiword units is fluency development. There are now many useful well-researched lists of multiword units of various kinds. Multiword units tend to be acquired late and are one of the signs of high proficiency in a language. This chapter looks at various ways of classifying multiword units according to their form, meaning, and storage. It has many practical suggestions for supporting the learning of multiword units. These include learning through input, learning through output, consciousness raising, using flash cards, using mnemonic tricks such as alliteration and considering their origins, looking for patterns, using concordances, and fluency development.

To highlight the significant implications of L2 fluency research for language teaching, this chapter is dedicated to four aspects of L2 teaching practice: L2 policy documents, L2 textbooks, classroom practice and teacher cognition. This chapter aims to provide an analysis of how fluency is represented in each of these four aspects, and in what ways fluency research can help practitioners in these areas with everyday practices. After presenting a background to the role of fluency in L2 pedagogy, examples of L2 policy documents, e.g. the UK curriculum for teaching Modern Foreign Languages will be evaluated. We then provide a summary of research examining fluency in L2 textbooks, and discuss teaching activities that are reported as central to promoting fluency in the L2 classroom. Teacher understanding of fluency and the impact it has on promoting fluency in the language classroom will also be discussed.

Chapter 4 discusses corpus linguistics and how electronic corpora have informed vocabulary studies. The main insights have been in the areas of frequency and phraseology. The chapter includes an extended discussion of formulaic language, which has been shown to be a major component of vocabulary knowledge.

In the introduction I argue that it is difficult to understand how language is acquired, processed or used by examining single words. We immediately run into problems of implausible cognitive processing loads of constructing language word by word and inescapable ambiguity any text must be creating. Thus phraseological approaches to language seem to give more promise. This book focuses on one approach, known as the idiom principle, proposed by John Sinclair. The approach is applied to second language learners of English who are often claimed to be restricted in their ability to operate on the idiom principle. The introduction situates this topic in a broader context of current interests in linguistic and psycholinguistic inquiry and explains how it is related to such concepts as chunking, statistical learning, implicit and explicit processing, ad hoc concepts and L2 or LX user.