TEACHING COLLOCATION

SKILLS: HOW & WHICH

HOW? Teaching individual collocations

( activities & exercises). Making students aware of

collocations. Noticing. Extending what students already

know( de-lexicalised words). Storing collocations: organised

lexical notebook

WHICH? Unique collocations( foot the bill, shrug your

shoulders) Strong collocations ( ulterior motives, rancid

butter, trenchant criticism, to be moved to tears) Weak collocations ( white wine, red hair, a black

mood, a blue movie) Medium-strength collocations ( to hold a

conversation, to make a mistake, to be recovering from a major operation)

Pedagogical implications

Review the language content of the course (consider frequency, type and level of the course)

Increase language input (quantity, type, quality) Review teaching strategies at different levels Translation shouldn`t be discarded What our language model should be?

LANGUAGE...

is proven to be a mixture of the totally novel, the absolutely fixed,the relatively fixed, and all held together with fairly simple structures which we call grammar.

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LESS GRAMMAR, MORE LEXIS!