Bilkent University School of English Language

TEACHER TRAINING UNIT

Delta Module 2 Course

ASSIGNMENT : LSA 4: LANGUAGE SYSTEMS

ASSIGNMENT TITLE : HELPING INTERMEDIATE STUDENTS IMPROVE THEIR

UNDERSTANDING AND USE OF LEXICAL COLLOCATIONS

PART 1 : BACKGROUND ESSAY

CANDIDATE NAME : Vildan Özkan

CANDIDATE NUMBER :

CENTRE NAME : Bilkent University School of English Language

CENTRE NUMBER : TR 023

DATE : 07.04.2019

WORD COUNT : 2500

Vildan Özkan/Helping Intermediate Students Improve their Understanding and Use of Lexical Collocations
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Section Page No

1. Introduction 1

2
2. Analysis

 Meaning and Use 2-3

 Form
4

 Phonology 4-5

3. Learner Problems 5

 Lack of Recognition and Collocational Competence 5

5-6
 L1 Interference and De lexicalized Verbs

 Arbitrariness of Collocations 6

6
4. Teaching Suggestions

 Activity 1 6-7

7
 Activity 2
8
 Activity 3

8-9
 Activity 4

5. References 10

6. Appendices 11

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Vildan Özkan/Helping Intermediate Students Improve their Understanding and Use of Lexical Collocations
1. INTRODUCTION

According to Nation, knowing a word entails a wide array of components ranging from its meaning

to spelling, pronunciation, etymology, grammar and collocates which are the words that tend to go

together with a specific word to ultimately form collocations (2008:101-102). Collocations are

defined as ‘the way words occur with one another’ (Carter & Mc Carthy, 1988:32) or as ‘certain,

recognizable, recurring, non-idiomatic combinations’ (Benson, Benson & Ilson, 1997). As lexical

approach suggests, language is composed of multi-word chunks and what lies at the core of language

teaching is to raise learners’ awareness of and improve their ability to learn the language through

lexical patterning rather than word by word translation (Lewis, 1993). Ellis (1997) states speaking

natively is speaking idiomatically possessing a full command of frequent collocations (cited in

Williams, 2016). However, my learners are having issues with accurate and appropriate use of

collocations in form, meaning and function; therefore, they need to achieve ‘collocational

competence’ in expressing their complex ideas in a native-like manner (cited in Williams, 2016). To

this end, in this assignment, I will analyze ‘lexical collocations’ for Intermediate learners, focus on

learner problems and suggest some teaching activities.

1. ANALYSIS

a. Meaning and Use

Collocations are studied within the scope of corpus linguistics and the older discipline of phraseology as

multi-word units. While the former relates to a frequency based continuum of words’ co-occurrence, the

latter is more traditionally concerned with collocations as word combinations (Nesselhauf, 2003:223).

Although one cannot draw a clear distinction, collocations as multi-word expressions differ from other

expressions, mainly idioms based on their semantic transparency, the level of which is determined by the

extent to which each constituent contributes to the meaning of the whole. For instance, comprehension

of the collocation pay attention is more likely than that of the idiom a hot potato since transparency

decreases with the second one, so does predictability (Boers, 2018:1).

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Vildan Özkan/Helping Intermediate Students Improve their Understanding and Use of Lexical Collocations
From the perspective of corpus linguistics, an immense list of concordances leads to a revelation of

collocates of a word in more detail and this requires the knowledge of collocational strength to prioritize

the most frequently used collocations in limited class time. Hill suggests four rankings as follows (cited

in Lewis, 2000: 63):

2a1. Unique Collocations

Some words in English happen to co-occur with other specific words exclusively lacking the flexibility

of other similar alternatives. An example could be the verb form of the word ‘foot’ used with the word

‘bill’ as foot the bill allowing no room for other similar uses such as *foot the meal or *foot a fine. This

simply refers to the formulation of collocation in quite a restricted manner.

2a2. Strong Collocations

Strong collocations refer to the words which could be paired up with quite a limited range of possibilities

although other variations are not impossible as in the examples of rancid butter and ulterior motive.

Very few things could be rancid other than butter and, so is this the case with the word ulterior (Hill

cited in Lewis, 2000:63).

2a3. Weak Collocations

A good range of words could be qualified as good, bad, expensive, fast, slow, blue… as in the examples

of slow machine, fast car, blue flower, white shirt, good meal, good man… They are defined as weak

collocations because there is a strong likelihood of seeing these adjectives with a huge possibility of

different nouns.

2a4. Medium-Strength Collocations

Medium strength collocations account for a huge part of our written and oral production, thereby,

deserving the most attention and the class instruction time. Expanding their vocabulary may not always

help Intermediate learners to form appropriate collocations with full communicational competency as

long as they persist in seeing the words as independent units. Although they are often familiar with the

words ‘major’ and ‘factor’ individually, ‘a major factor’ seems alien to them without purposeful

teaching of it the collocation through recurrent exposure and practice. This impedes the development of

their mental lexicon which would indeed equip them with the abilities to convey meaning with minimum

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Vildan Özkan/Helping Intermediate Students Improve their Understanding and Use of Lexical Collocations
effort and constraints on both the speaker and the listener (Hill, cited in Lewis, 2000:64). Verbs such as

‘make, have, get’ are called de lexicalized and bear little meaning alone, however, paired with other

words, they gain multiple meanings depending on their collocates e.g. have trouble, have breakfast

(McCarthy, O’Keeffe & Walsh, 2010:32).

b. Form

Collocations are grouped into two as grammatical/syntactic and land lexical/semantic (Benson, 1985;

Biskup, 1992; Bahns, 1993, cited in Schmitt, 2000: 76). As for grammatical collocations, a content word

which is more dominant (e.g. a noun, adjective or a verb) pairs up with a grammatical word, typically a

preposition as in the examples of an interest in and familiar with. Lexical collocations, however, consist

of two equally influential words such as a noun-noun (interest rate), adjective-noun (environmental

pollution) or verb-noun (sing a song) combinations contributing to the meaning of the lexical unit more

or less the same. Here is a table listing seven categories of collocations (Hill, cited in Lewis, 2000: 51).

category example

adjective-noun rapid increase

noun-noun population explosion

verb-adjective-noun improve social skills

verb-adverb increase dramatically

adverb-verb strongly support

adverb-adjective vitally important

verb-preposition-noun comply with the law

c. Phonology

Composed of multi word expressions, lexical collocations are pronounced according to the rules of

connected speech. They are not individual words spoken in isolation as many Intermediate learners tend

to do, but they constitute a flow of speech different from a total of the individual words. Therefore, some

reduction and simplification of sounds must be applied to achieve ‘comfortable intelligibility’ in both

learners’ receptive and productive pronunciation (Underhill, 1994:171-172). For instance, the conversion

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Vildan Özkan/Helping Intermediate Students Improve their Understanding and Use of Lexical Collocations
of /d/ sound in ‘good boy’ /ɡʊd bɔɪ/ into /b/ as /ɡʊb bɔɪ/ or the omission of /d/ in ‘old man’ /əʊld mæn/

as /əʊl mæn/ are the examples of assimilation and elision. Regarding stress, it may shift since it is

subordinate to the speaker’s intended message to convey and can be placed according to their choice of

emphasis (Underhill, 1994: 58). What complements a good command of collocation and other language

expressions is the study of accurate stress pattern of the whole phrase (Hill, cited in Lewis, 2000:56).

2. LEARNER PROBLEMS

a. Lack of Recognition and Collocational Competence

Not until the Intermediate level, are students exposed to texts with a certain lexical density that may

challenge them while providing an opportunity to notice new language. Moreover, what they understand

from vocabulary learning is studying the Turkish equivalents of target words. The tendency among

learners is not to see collocations in chunks but to misidentify them with phrases consisting of individual

words which bear individual meanings. Being intimidated by the complex linguistic structure of

Intermediate texts combined with a lack of knowledge and confidence in L2 is often a reason for

learners’ close reading or listening of texts word by word (Bollas, 2017:64). According to Hill (2000),

another reason is the lack of collocational competence to express their ideas. They often produce longer

utterances than needed (e.g. The increasing number of people in the country… because of not knowing

the noun-noun collocation population growth) and speak and write below level expectations. Wordiness

also increases the likelihood of inaccurate grammar, which is indeed not a problem of grammar but that

of a gap in collocational knowledge (cited in Lewis, 2000: 49). I observe that doing extensive reading

and listening practices remains inadequate for raising my students’ awareness of collocations in their

receptive and productive skills.

b. L1 Interference and De- lexicalized Verbs

One reason why collocations are difficult for learners is that no rules exist concerning why it is

acceptable to say ‘do your homework’ but unacceptable to say ‘*make your homework’ (Elturki,

2017:63). To top it off, in some languages such as Greek and Turkish, one word suffices in certain cases

where English requires two as in the examples of make and do (Bollas, 2016:64). This often confuses

students and leads them to misuse such de- lexicalized words ‘make, do, get, have, take…’ inaccurately.

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Vildan Özkan/Helping Intermediate Students Improve their Understanding and Use of Lexical Collocations
I hear them say *do a mistake instead of make a mistake or *make research to substitute do research

since the meaning of both collocations are expressed with one and the same word in Turkish which is

‘yapmak’. The problem mainly derives from their habit of translating from their first language to

compensate for their deficiencies in the second language and particularly in the area of collocations. This

problem, however, must be addressed as Woolard states “the more de- lexicalized a word is, the wider its

collocational range is” making it important for the learners to encounter, acquire and store it (cited in

Lewis, 2000:33).

c. Arbitrariness of Collocations

Collocations are “an arbitrary pairing of words” and unless the learners are trained about their

formulation and how to notice, select and collect them through multiple resources, they may never

achieve mastery (Williams, 2016:10). Raise your hand collocates while *lift your hand doesn’t or light

wind sounds appropriate unlike *heavy wind which should be replaced with strong wind. According to

Lewis, this non- generalizability is an indication of the idea supported by lexical approach that native

speakers encounter and record words as inseparable chunks (2008:26). As for the non-natives, misuse of

collocations causes awkward use of language (Elturki, 2017:63) as in the case of my students’ search for

the antonym of the word ‘rough’ in rough calculation, eventually coming up with *smooth calculation,

which is not standard English.

d. Teaching Suggestions

Activity 1: To raise students’ awareness of collocations through a series of short controlled activities.

Procedures: Through power point slides, students cover a series of noticing activities. The first activity

draws on students’ pre- existing knowledge of some well-known collocations in English and Turkish

successively by providing accurate and some inaccurate examples formed with the synonyms of words in

both languages, such as fast food but not *quick food, siyah çay but not *kara çay (App 1, Activity 1) It is

followed by a mini translation exercise to draw attention to L1 interference (App 1 Activity 2). A final odd

one out activity (App1, Activity 3) is to remedy the problem with de-lexicalized verbs which partly stems

from L1 interference and partly from the arbitrariness of collocations.

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Vildan Özkan/Helping Intermediate Students Improve their Understanding and Use of Lexical Collocations
Commentary: Schmitt underlines the importance of noticing in acquisition (cited in Bollas, 2017:65).

Students first need to develop basic awareness of collocations as prefabricated lexical chunks but not a

compilation of independent word units carrying individual meanings. So, comparison with L1 is a useful

tool to improve their recognition (Williams, 2016). Therefore, they are reminded that collocations exist in

their native language too. By focusing on the inappropriate replacement of words with their synonyms, they

will see that constituents of collocations may not always be substituted by a word with a similar meaning

since there exist no specific rules regarding their formation. My Turkish students also have serious problems

with the accurate use of de-lexicalized verbs ‘make, do, have’ since there is no such distinction in their

native language. Therefore, this odd one out activity can prevent possible L1 interference instances.

Activity 2

Aim: To introduce and train students to use online corpora based resources and further raise their awareness

of collocations.

Procedures: In the computer lab, we briefly talk about what “corpora” is and I elicit some examples of

collocations from the students. Then, I go to flax on the projected screen and show some basic features of

the website to the students. I ask them to notice some language patterns and analyze them in different

contexts as academic or general. Then, I assign them a multiple staged task which is to go to flax (Flexible

Language Acquisition) and type the word ‘significant’ (Appendix 2). Students then click on the synonyms

and antonyms of ‘significant’. They focus on its form as an adjective and find which nouns are followed by

it as adjective-noun combinations. Finally, they save all their findings to My Cherry Basket to later use in

writing.

Commentary: Learners of English often have difficulty finding the right resources to study. They either

tend to use bilingual dictionaries which can be quite misleading or do not benefit collocation dictionaries. As

a solution, they need to be informed about the availability of online resources combining dictionary and

corpora. According to Mc Enery and Hardy (2013) majority of linguists agree that, the most useful way of

spotting the collocates of a word is through the study of patterns of co-occurrence in a text corpus (cited in

Williams, 2016). Apart from being time- consuming, compared to paper based or online dictionaries, the

more effective use of concordances through corpora gives learners a far deeper insight into collocates of a

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Vildan Özkan/Helping Intermediate Students Improve their Understanding and Use of Lexical Collocations
word (Williams, 2016:10). Flax as a corpus based dictionary is a more user friendly option which offers the

advantages of corpora as well. Training my students to use such online resources will make them

autonomous learners and equip them with useful research skills to discover important collocations for

language production and editing purpose. Supplementing traditional dictionary use with innovative

electronic resources will boost their collocational competency by minimizing unnatural uses.

Activity 3

Aim: To help learners notice collocation through text analysis and contextualization to practice them.

Procedures: A reading text about ‘transport in Istanbul’ is studied to notice a set of lexical collocations

(Appendix 3). Through reading the text and answering the comprehension questions, students are guided

towards the target lexical collocations that are related to traffic to focus on their meaning, form and use. A

controlled practice through a gap fill task is followed by a freer production activity (Appendix 4).

Commentary: Activities for noticing chunks through reading/listening texts are useful when supplemented

by contextualization methods (Bollas, 2017). Presenting the target words to students within a contextual

unity will presumably ease their comprehension. As Thornbury claims, unless introduced in their natural

contexts, words may not imply their meaning, register, collocations and syntactic environment (2002: 30).

Having been exposed to the target collocations through a context, students can easily identify them in a

guided practice which will contribute to the accurate and appropriate use of them in their written and oral

production.

Activity 4

Aim: To help learners overcome their lack of proper collocations learning strategies by keeping journals.

Procedures: Students are presented a couple of sample vocabulary journals (Appendix 5) to retain

collocations and keep their mental lexicon active. They are also assigned the task of keeping similar storage

units in the long term.

Commentary: It is essential to encourage learners to store items with the relevant information rather than

keeping lists of isolated words. The use of visuals, topic based classification and word trees are some

effective ways of recording vocabulary (Gains, R. &Redman, S., 1986:95-96). Woolard highlights

encountering a word once doesn’t guarantee its acquisition, so recycling and revisiting of vocabulary items

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Vildan Özkan/Helping Intermediate Students Improve their Understanding and Use of Lexical Collocations
through production activities is necessary (cited in Bollas, 2017). Therefore, learners must be trained to

employ the right strategies for vocab learning with an emphasis on collocations and such techniques may

include use of flash cards, categorizations and diagrams (Bollas, 2017).

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Vildan Özkan/Helping Intermediate Students Improve their Understanding and Use of Lexical Collocations
REFERENCES

Benson, M., Benson, E. & Ilson, R. (1997). The BBI dictionary of English word combinations

Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Boers, F. & Webb, S. (2018). Teaching and learning collocation in adult second and foreign

language learning. Language Teaching, 51 (1), 77-89.

Bollas, A. 2017. Teaching collocations to elementary level adult learners. Modern English Teacher. 26 (3),

62-65.

Carter, R. & McCarthy, M. (1988). Vocabulary and Language Teaching. England: Pearson

Education Limited.

Elturki, E. 2017. Tools for learning collocations and beyond. Modern English Teacher. 26 (1), 63-66.

Gairns, R. & Redman, S. (1986). Working with words. Cambridge: CUP.

Hill, J. (2000). Revising Priorities: from Grammatical Failure to Collocational Success. In M. Lewis (ed)

Teaching collocation: Further Developments in the Lexical Approach. (pp. 47-49). Hove: Language

Teaching Publications.

Lewis, M. Teaching Collocation: Further Developments in the Lexical Approach. Pub. Thomson Heinle

Language Teaching Publications ELT 2000

Lewis, M. (2008). Implementing the Lexical Approach: Heinle Cengage Learning.

Lewis, M. (1993). The Lexical Approach: Hove: LTP.

McCarthy, M., O’Keeffe, A.& Walsh, S. (2010). Vocabulary Matrix: Understanding, Learning

Teaching. Hampshire: Heinle, Cengage Learning.

Nation, I.S.P. (2008). Teaching vocabulary: Strategies and Techniques. Boston: Cengage Learning.

Nesselhauf, N. (2003). The use of collocations by advanced learners of English and some applications

for teaching. Applied Linguistics. 24, (2). 223-242.

Schmitt, N. (2000). Vocabulary in language teaching. Cambridge: CUP.

Thornbury, S. How to Teach Vocabulary. Pub. Pearson Education Limited, 2002.

Underhill, A. Sound Foundations: Living Phonology. Heinemann, 1994.

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Vildan Özkan/Helping Intermediate Students Improve their Understanding and Use of Lexical Collocations
Williams, D. 2016. Teaching collocation through dictionaries and corpus-based resources. Modern English

Teacher. 25 (4), 9-11.

Woolard G (2000) Collocation – Encouraging Learner Independence. In M Lewis (ed) Teaching

Collocation: Further Developments in the Lexical Approach (pp28–46).

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Vildan Özkan/Helping Intermediate Students Improve their Understanding and Use of Lexical Collocations
APPENDICES
Appendix 1

Activity 1

Activity 2

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Activity 3

Prepared by the teacher.

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Vildan Özkan/Helping Intermediate Students Improve their Understanding and Use of Lexical Collocations
Appendix 2
http://flax.nzdl.org

Taken from Elturki, E. 2017. Tools for learning collocations and beyond. Modern English Teacher. 26 (1),

63-66.

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Appendix 3

A. TRANSPORT IN ISTANBUL

Read the text and answer the questions.

Istanbul is such a huge urban area with millions of people and cars everywhere.. As you know, in Istanbul,

sometimes it is almost impossible to get from one place to another because of traffic congestion. Don’t be

surprised if you have to wait for one or two hours on the road! That’s why, my sister and I were careful with

a few important points during our trip in the city. Firstly, instead of buses, we preferred rapid transit such

as metro, metrobus or Marmaray in order not to get stuck in traffic. Rapid transit systems have their own

special ways and they don’t have to wait for the other vehicles to move around. Secondly, we preferred

midday or midnight time to be in traffic. In other words, we avoided rush hour in the morning when people

go to work and in the evening when people come back home. This saved us a lot of time because rush hour

is certainly the busiest part of the day with heavy traffic. During rush hour, some drivers get so stressed that

they may shout at each other or even attack physically in a road rage incident. Unfortunately, we often see

such road rage incidents on TV news. Statistics say, the number one reason for them is the long commute

time. Because of the long commute time, drivers and passengers spend so many hours and get extremely

tired on the way to work or back home. If you don’t live close to work or school, your average commute

time in Istanbul is around four hours everyday! So enjoy your trip if you can…

1. Why is it almost impossible to get from one place to another in Istanbul?

2. What kind of transport did we prefer not to get stuck in traffic?

3. What time of the day did we avoid to be in traffic?

4. What do we often see on TV news?

5. Why do drivers and passengers spend so many hours on the way in Istanbul?

Prepared by the teacher.

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Vildan Özkan/Helping Intermediate Students Improve their Understanding and Use of Lexical Collocations
Appendix 4

B. Complete the Sentences with the Correct Collocations

Rush hour road rage rapid transit traffic congestion commute time

1. The Government should encourage the use of public transport to deal with
_______________________ in big cities.
2. Three people were killed in a _____________________ incident yesterday.
3. Because my sister lives far away from work, her daily ____________________ is about 3 hours
everyday.
4. Paris as a metropolis is famous for its effective ____________________ systems all around the city.
5. The buses are so crowded during _________________ since people go to work or back their home.
C. Write five sentences about the traffic condition in Ankara in pairs. Please use all of the
collocations you have learnt in this lesson.
You can write about:
a) How long does it take you to come to Bilkent?
b) What time do you leave home? And Why?
c) What means of transportation do you prefer?
d) What problems do you experience in traffic?
1._____________________________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________________________

2._____________________________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________________________

3._____________________________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________________________

4._____________________________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________________________

5._____________________________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Prepared by the teacher.

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Appendix 5

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Vildan Özkan/Helping Intermediate Students Improve their Understanding and Use of Lexical Collocations
Prepared by the teachers at the institution.

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