Whyandhowtoteachcollocations

Whyandhowtoteachcollocations

• 2.
  Lexical Approach Choosingour words carefully in certain situations is more important than choosing grammatical structures (Harmer 1991). We cannot use structures correctly if we do not have enough vocabulary knowledge. Collocation describes the relationship between words that often appear together. They include structural patterns that resemble traditional grammar and combinations of words that simply go together.
• 3.
  Types of Collocations
• 4.
  Categories for collocations Strong Weak Medium strength A large number of collocations are strong or very strong. For example, we most commonly talk of rancid butter, but that does not mean that other things cannot be rancid. These are words which co-occur with a greater than random frequency. Many things can be long or short, cheap or expensive, good or bad. These are words that go together with a greater frequency than weak collocations. Some examples are: hold a meeting; carry out a study.
• 5.
  Learners’ difficulties withcollocations 1. Learners may have intralingual problems. For example, instead of many thanks, they might incorrectly use several thanks. 2. Learners may make negative transfer from their mother tongue. For example, become lovers instead of fall in love. 3. When students learn words through definitions or in isolation, their chances of using appropriate collocations or remembering the words decrease. 4. When students read texts, they may not recognize collocations as meaningful phrases, which would inhibit their understanding of the text.
• 6.
  Teaching collocations Makestudents aware of collocations. Teaching individual collocations. Storing collocations.
• 7.
  Activities to raisestudents’ awareness of collocations 1. Ask learners to underline chunks they can find in a text. 3. To encourage student autonomy, have students do dictionary work to find certain collocation s. 2. After they have read a text, learners can be given a set of incomplete phrases taken from the text and asked to complete them by scanning the text again. This can be done at any 4. After they have seen certain collocations in a text, learners can be asked to find pairs of collocations arranged randomly. level. 5. Give students phrases in their native language and equivalent phrases in English, and ask students to match the phrases.
• 8.
  Activities to practicecollocations Learners of different levels can be given gapped texts to fill in with the correct collocation. Learners can be given a text or some sentences that include collocational errors and asked to correct them using collocation dictionaries. Intermediate and higher-level students can try to find synonyms which can collocate with certain words. Students from different levels can create gap-fill or matching exercises for each other. A brainstorming activity can be done to let students revise collocations containing a particular word.