Did you hear the one about two sunbathing elephants?Hearing that question, most native speakers of English will automatically know what kind of answer to expect. That's because, when used together, the words 'Did you hear the one about...?' are one of the most common ways of beginning a joke in English. Seriously.
sunbathing elephants won't teach you a lot of bad jokes but it will help you practise some of the lexical chunks we use when speaking and writing in English.
A lexical chunk is a pair or group of words that commonly go together. This includes fixed expressions such as 'Did you hear the one about...?',
collocations like 'native speaker', 'common ways' or 'tell a joke',
noun phrases like 'two sunbathing elephants',
prepositional phrases (
in English),
verb phrases (
help you practise some of the lexical chunks,
know what kind of answer to expect,
teach you a lot of bad jokes),
idioms,
phrasal verbs or
adjective phrases such as 'the famous writer Virginia Woolf'.
As the famous writer Virginia Woolf once said, "It's a very obvious but always mysterious fact that a word is part of other words...words belong to each other."
Lexical chunks are everywhere in English and, even if you don't realise it, you know thousands and thousands of them already. Read the short texts, do the exercises which follow and you might even learn a few more!
By the way, did you want to hear the rest of that joke? The two elephants went on holiday and sat down on the beach. It was a very hot day and they fancied having a swim in the sea. Unfortunately they couldn't: they only had one pair of trunks!
Most jokes have a
punchline, even ones that aren't very funny. Have a punch line, incidentally, is another example of a lexical chunk (a verb-noun collocation). Look at the rest of the joke and try to find three more lexical chunks. Then go to the
Forum and let me know what you've found.
Thanks | for taking part. | Good luck! 
