Take a look at these three bars of chocolate. Which one looks easier to eat?

You probably replied, “the one on the right.” After all, it’s easier to eat a bar of chocolate when it's divided into regular, bite-size chunks.

The same goes for language. Have you ever had a student who talked without any pauses? Or a student who paused at strange places? You probably had to ask them to repeat a few times before you could understand what they were saying.

(If nothing comes to mind, check out this video example.)

Improper Chunking Leads to Misunderstandings

Besides being difficult to listen to, improper chunking can also cause misunderstandings. For example, a student once told me that she had “three hour long exams.” I said, “Wow! Are these final exams? Why are they so long?” Eventually, I realized she meant that she had “three hour-long exams” (three exams lasting one hour each).

The problem was that she pronounced “three-hour-long exams” as one chunk instead of pausing between “three” and “hour-long exams.” As you can see, when we make mistakes like these, we can actually cause misunderstandings.

Here’s another example: “Let’s eat Grandma.” There are two ways to say this (“/” = pause):

Let’s eat / Grandma. (pause)
Let’s eat Grandma. (no pause)

As you can see, the meaning changes drastically!

Teach Chunking During Reading Exercises

It's easiest to work on chunking during reading exercises. When you read sentences aloud for your student to repeat, you can exaggerate the pauses. For example, you can read the sentence, “Eggs are a good source of protein,” as follows:

eggs / are a good source of protein
eggs / are a good source / of protein

However, a Japanese or Korean student will most likely read the sentence like this:

eggs are / a good source of / protein

This happens because Japanese and Korean students are used to ending chunks with little words, since that is what they do in their native languages. This may not sound like a serious mistake, but when combined with other pronunciation mistakes, it leads to sentences that sound like this:

Egg zarr a good sore soff protein

To help students avoid these mistakes, you can explain how these mispronunciations might sound to listeners.

👋 That’s it for now!

Mastery of chunking is key to being understood in English, so make sure to point out mistakes in these areas before moving on to other aspects of pronunciation!

And be sure to check out Part I in this series, which covers consonant and vowel mistakes that we should correct.