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I have been watching the debate on the term chunking. Although I love the input from Australia, I would like to point out that chunking is a jargon term.
In my teaching background, I have seen chunking referred to several ways: memory, information acquisition, teaching styles and testing strategies. All of these have one idea in common: link information together in a logical format to reduce the amount of relative links the brain must take to reach the information.
Short term memory can hold 7 (approx) items. These items can be anything (dog, cat, blue, apple, e=mc2) but they are one concept (usually expressed in a word since we "think" in words). Chunking is the task of taking items/concepts and linking them in a way that they become related and reduced.
For example: You want to remember a shopping list. Your grocery list includes: lettuce, ground hamburger, mustard, bread, tomatoes, mayo, ice cream, soda pop, chocolate syrup, carrots. Now the same list using the principle of chunking:
salad - Your brain thinks, "Ok, what is in a salad?" You remember: lettuce, tomatoes, mayo, carrots
hamburgers - What is a hamburger? ground meat, tomatoes, lettuce, mustard, bread
sundaes - What is in a sundae? ice cream, chocolate syrup
This is a simplified example, and you might prefer mayo on your hamburger or carmel on your ice cream, but the idea is the same.
