ABSTRACT
For the past twenty years or so, much of the English Language Training (ELT) profession has been endeavouring to raise learner's awareness of collocations and formulaic phrases and multiword 'chunks' of language. Once the essentially phraseological nature of English, and the large proportion of formulas and strong collocations used by native English speakers (NES), had been revealed by corpus research, it didn't take long for the ELT profession to stress the importance of raising learner's awareness of prefabricated multi-word chunks. Regarding collocations, Wray suggests that when a NES first comes across the string major catastrophe in contextualized input, it will remain unanalysed by default. On the other hand, English as a native language (ENL) also has a large number of less frequent metaphorical expressions that are less useful to English as lingua franca (ELF) speakers, which might easily be misunderstood, and whose use could be described as unilateral idiomaticity.
