Raising Awareness of Collocation in ESL/EFL Classrooms

Abstract

One of the most problematic areas for foreign language learning is collocation. It is often seen as arbitrary and overwhelming, a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to the attainment of native like fluency. The aim of this study is to increase awareness of the importance of teaching collocations in ESL/EFL classrooms in order for learners to acquire accurate and native-like competence. This paper is divided into four main sections. The first section discusses the definitions and categorizations of collocation from different scholars' perspectives as well as the distinction between collocation and other combinations of words. In the second section, the main sources of collocational errors will be clarified. The third section deals with the importance of collocations in ESL/EFL classrooms. In the fourth section different methodologies and materials for teaching collocations to ESL/ EFL learners will be suggested, as well as the implications of the lexical approach will be analyzed.

Effectiveness of a Proposed Program Based on the Lexical Approach in Fostering EFL Faculty of Management Sciences Students’ Business Collocational Knowledge and Competence

“…Among these activities fostering receptive collocational knowledge are matching parts of collocations, MCQs, identifying chunks in 'text search' activities, gap-filling using given words, matching sentences heads with endings, categorizing collocations according to their constituents parts of speech or their level of formality and deleting words that do not collocate with given nodes in 'collocate deletion' activities as well as rearranging words to form complete sentences with meaningful sound collocations or fixed expressions in 'sentences anagrams'. Searching for collocations in concordance lines and dictionaries in 'collocate search activities' is another useful activity that fosters EFL learners' receptive collocational knowldege as well as their inductive learning ability (Lewis, 2008;Farrokh, 2012;El-Dakhs, 2015b;Abrudan, 2017;Li, 2017;Debabi & Guerroudj, 2018;El-Garawany, 2019;Zhang, 2020).…”

Analysis of noun (direct object) collocations with the high-frequency verb DO by Spanish students in an online learner corpus

“…In line with this, some researchers recommend focusing on a selection of students' miscollocations (Sadeghi and Panahifar, 2013), including those which refer the learners' L1 (Altenberg and Granger, 2001;Sadeghi and Panahifar, 2013) in order to teach them properly. Likewise, studies also point out to the use of concordance exercises extracted from digital databases (Altenberg and Granger, 2001;Farrokh, 2012;Willis, 1998(as cited in Farrokh, 2012 together with the use of collocation dictionaries and different exercises to identify collocations in texts from magazines and newspapers which can be used as authentic material (Farrokh, 2012). In other words, we should motivate our students to learn collocations, and as some scholars have suggested, we should teach vocabulary and lexis in collocation chunks rather than as isolated words (Lewis, 1993;Orosz, 2017).…”

Raising Advanced Students' Awareness of Word-Collocations in English: The Yemeni Context

“…Lewis (2000) encourages teachers to raise students' awareness of collocations and to initiate their own action research to make sure the changes they make are of benefit to students. In order to achieve native-like competence and fluency, second and foreign language learners need to be aware that an important part of language acquisition is the ability to comprehend and produce collocations as unanalyzed chunks, (Farrokh : 2012)  I believe that teachers should first introduce the idea of collocations to students at earlier levels and therefore adopt classroom strategies which constantly remind students of the importance of collocations. Then, teachers should make students familiar with word collocations, provide them with opportunities where they can make use them to their advantage in building their mental lexicons in a systematic way.…”