1.how to teach collocations to beginners

9/5/2014 How to teach collocations to beginners? | Denilso de LimaDenilso de Lima

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How to teach collocations to beginners?

2011-08-15 By Denilso de Lima Posted in Articles

I am pretty much sure that youve already heard and read

a lot about collocations . You may have read that

collocations are words that go together. You may also have

found lots of examples in lots of websites and books.

Youve even been convinced that teaching collocations is

strictly necessary to develop learners fluency in the

English language. So far, so good, right!? However, the big

question is: how to teach collocations? In this and further

posts, Ill be sharing some ideas to help you with that.

One of the first things you have to do before starting

teaching collocations is to raise students awareness of

collocations . If they do not get the picture, you will have

problems. So, the first challenging and key task is this: help learners understand what

collocations are and why they are so important. Show them that sometimes its better to learn

words together rather than isolated.

After accomplishing such a task, you and your learners will be ready to make the most of the

words found in coursebooks and even other words that may come up in class. Keep in mind that

you do not have to cover all the words from a single lesson. The best thing to do is to pick three to

four key words from the lesson (a unit in the book) and give five to seven words that go with them.

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Lets say youre teaching beginners. Todays lesson is related to weather. So,

you can pick the words weather, hot, and cold to teach words that

collocate with them. The Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students

of English might come in handy here. I recommend you get these

collocations ready before the class.

In the classroom, at the right time and in the most natural way possible, you

write one of the key words on the board and show students some of the

words that go with it. Imagine you have the chance to show collocates with

weather, for example. Then, you can write the following diagram on the

board:

Its also a good idea to give examples with some of these combinations. That is, dont give learners

the list of words only, give them examples to make the combinations meaningful.

What a beautiful weather !

What a lovely weather !

What an awful weather !

I checked the weather this morning.

Anyone checked the weather?

Im sure youll enjoy the beautiful weather in Bora Bora.

Make sure the examples are possible things to be said by a native speaker of the language. Do not

make up probable examples. In order to find good examples, you can look up for sentences in a

corpus, dicitionary, internet, etc. Always keep this in mind: the more examples you give, the

better.

Keep also in mind that learners sometimes may have problems understanding some

combinations. In case that really happens, you can ask them to translate the collocations theyre

having problem with into their own language (L1). You, the teacher, can also give them the right

equivalences in their own language. Allowing students to use their own language to deal with

some possible problems in the classroom is not a terrible thing; actually, it might be more than

necessary and much welcome sometimes.

As homework, ask learners to pick three to five word combinations and write example sentences

with them. This will help them to revisit the collocations you taught in class. Tell students to

create their own system to for reviewing the collocations. In class, ask learners to say the

sentences they wrote. They should trying saying the sentence out loud and without reading them

from the paper. This makes things much more fun and activate their brain for long term



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Comments (2)Sort by: D ate Rating Last Activity

142 weeks ago

It's really a great way to teach them some collocations :D

Thank you Denilso :D

142 weeks ago

Dear Denilso, Im so thankful cose youre sharing so reach knowledge, with me and others.Imsure were enjoying a lot your subjects. Theyre great....and Im using these on my Blog, theyre so useful for me and my Students. sincerely, Arlene

Share this:

memorization.

This is a simple way to develop students collocational competence and, as a consequence,

their fluency in the target language. Pointing out its importance to students and giving them

ideas about how to store collocations is a thing to be done in the earlier stages of their English

language learning. The earlier they get the idea, the better chance theyll have to soon develop

their skills in English.

References:

Lima, D. (2007). Por que assim e no assado? O guia definitivo de collocations em ingls. Rio de

Janeiro: Elsevier/Campus.

Lewis, M. (Ed.) (2000). Teaching Collocations: further developments in the Lexical Approach.

Hove: LTP.

Lewis, M. (1997). Implementing the Lexical Approach: putting theory into practice. Hove: LTP.

Oxford University Press (2009). Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English [2 ed].

Oxford: OUP

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Denilso de Lima

In short, I'm an ELT

Professional in Brazil. I carry

out researches on lexical

teaching, lexical acquisition,

formulaic language, corpus

linguistics, and that sort of

thing. I give lectures and

workshops about all that and I

love it!

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