2017 TESOL-Ukraine National Convention «Pathways to Success for Contemporary English Teachers and Their Learners» (Book of Convention Papers) · Ministry of Science and Education of Ukraine, U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, TESOL-Ukraine · Lviv, April 25–26, 2017 · 2017
Olha Oliinyk explains why collocations deserve dedicated classroom attention. They give students real-world and academic expressions, because language is acquired in chunks rather than in individual words — and they train learners to rely on meaning and context instead of memorising endless word lists with their strict definitions. The difficulty is that there are far more collocations than words: a single word occurs in many different combinations. She illustrates this with a simple case — “a great deal” means “a lot”, “a good deal” is a near equivalent, “a big deal” already shifts the meaning, and “a large deal” is unlikely to occur at all. That is why students, especially at lower levels, so often produce “unnatural” sentences even when they know the words.
She then names three usual sources of error. First, the same collocation may not exist in the same form in the learner’s own language (Turkish students say “to be friend with” instead of “to make friends with”). Second, over-generalising a structure: since “beautiful” collocates freely with “woman”, “child” and “day”, learners go on to say “beautiful man”. Third, translating word-for-word rather than chunk-for-chunk: the French “station de ski” becomes “ski station” instead of “ski resort”. The practical conclusion is that the teacher’s job is not to hand out lists but to design instruction around what learners actually need — so that they build collocational competence: the skill to select, store and retrieve a ready-made chunk of language.
2017 TESOL-Ukraine National Convention «Pathways to Success for Contemporary English Teachers and Their Learners» (Book of Convention Papers) · Ministry of Science and Education of Ukraine, U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, TESOL-Ukraine · Lviv, April 25–26, 2017 · pp. 124–125 · 2017
Collocations are a fantastic way to bring the excitement of vocabulary building into your classroom. They help your students acquire real-world or academic expressions by helping them learn language in chunks, rather than individual words. Collocations also encourage students to focus on meaning and context, rather than memorizing endless lists of words and their strict definitions. Encourage your learners a little differently by helping them see the world not as individual bits, but as groups of information rich in nuance and understanding.
When English teachers are with their students in the classroom, they have extraordinary opportunities to expose learners to useful language, functions, and vocabulary in interesting and exciting contexts. In keeping with their curriculum, teachers need to choose which structural and functional knowledge to work with and which to abandon. When deciding on which collocations to introduce, teachers may be a little overwhelmed with this potentially daunting task.
Let’s look at some specific examples.
Learning collocations might be quite challenging for most learners. Even words such as “big”, “large” and “great” could be tricky. Take, for example, the phrase “a great deal”, which means “a lot”. A near equivalent would be “a good deal”, but if we say “a big deal”, the meaning changes. Moreover, “a large deal” is quite unlikely to occur at all. Consequently, taking into consideration that there are many more collocations than words, as many words occur in several different collocations, it is quite understandable why our students, especially at lower levels, fail to produce “natural” sentences most of the time. Below you will find more reasons why students encounter problems while using collocations:
As teachers, to help our students overcome the above-mentioned problems we need to design instruction to focus on what they need. That is, our instruction should help learners avoid incongruity while assisting their fluency in production. At this point, it would be useful to present the rationale and activities that incorporate teaching collocation into our lessons, all designed to help our students develop collocational competence. (i.e. the skill to select, store and retrieve chunks).
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PhD, holder of the top global certificates CELTA and TESOL, graduate of prestigious US programmes (Universities of Arizona, Oregon, George Mason), a certified trainer of the US Embassy and a speaker at the international TESOL and IATEFL conferences.