Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, 11, 2 (2019) 103–118

DOI: 10.2478/ausp-2019-0015

Words That Go Together: Teaching Collocations

in the EFL Classroom
Tünde NAGY
Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania (Cluj-Napoca, Romania)
Department of Human Sciences
[email protected]

Abstract. Using the right collocations in a foreign language is often a

challenge for language learners who may not be familiar with their use and
characteristics. After presenting the types of collocations and the importance
they have in the acquisition of a foreign language, the paper draws attention
to the necessity of raising students’ awareness of collocations, and at the
same time it reflects on possible ways of teaching them. Focusing especially
on verb-noun collocations, the paper examines the learning materials used
in the EFL classes at Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania,
Miercurea Ciuc, with special regard to the exercises on these constructions.
In line with construction grammar theories (Goldberg 1995, 1997, 2006), it is
assumed that collocations are to be treated as constructions, pairings of form
and meaning, including patterns with different degrees of predictability.
Collocations, consisting of both predictable (e.g. read a book, blue sky) and
non-predictable forms (e.g. run a program, safe and sound) can be more
easily remembered if regarded as constructions where all the constituent
elements contribute to the meaning of the construction as a whole (but
whose meaning is more than the sum of the constituent elements). In order
to gain a better understanding of collocations, the use of electronic corpora
and electronic databases as well as additional materials on collocations
that would complement the language materials used in class is highly
encouraged. By making use of these resources, students can see examples of
everyday language use and become more aware of the use of collocations as
well as the similarities and differences between them in different languages.

Keywords: collocations, teaching practices, corpora and electronic databases,

awareness-raising

1. Introduction
When it comes to teaching vocabulary in foreign language classes, a common
practice is to teach the meaning of words in isolation, without regard to the context
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in which a word appears. This practice, while useful in itself, does not always
bring satisfactory results, especially in the case of collocations, constructions that
combine two or more words of different lexical and functional categories (nouns,
verbs, adjectives, prepositions) and whose constituent elements are often not
interchangeable (in the case of restrictive collocations). An important aim of this
paper is to draw attention to the importance of raising students’ awareness of the
co-occurrence of words in a language and to show how introducing additional
teaching materials as well as electronic resources in the classroom can serve this
purpose. It is assumed that the passive (recognizing the presence of collocations
in a text) and the active knowledge of collocations (the ability to reproduce them)
should be given equal attention. After presenting the types of collocations and
the importance they have in foreign language acquisition, the paper will explore
some ideas on how collocations could be presented in class in a suitable way.
While teaching collocations is important in all language combinations, the main
focus in this paper will be placed on teaching English collocations to bilingual
Hungarian-Romanian students.

2. Defining collocations
Due to the complex nature of collocations (having varying degrees of predictability,
consisting of two or more elements belonging to different parts of speech, in
most cases with adjacent elements (yet not always – consider he kept his terrible
promise…, where terrible is inserted in the construction (Schmid 2003: 241)) and
cultural differences (e.g. the collocation bread and butter has a larger semantic
field in English than in Hungarian, referring both to food and one’s means of
subsistence), the notion of collocation is hard to pin down. The term itself can be
dated back to Palmer (1954), who is the first to introduce the term “collocation” in
his dictionary, A Grammar of English Words, as well as to the work of Firth (1957:
196), who talks about “meaning by collocation”, which he sees as lexical meaning
at the syntagmatic level. Distinguishing between paradigmatic relations of words
(words belonging to the same class) and syntagmatic relations (words combining
with words belonging to other parts of speech), Firth understands lexical meaning
as the ability of a specific word to collocate with other words. In Firth’s view,
collocation is “the company a word keeps” (Firth 1957: 11). Later approaches
to collocations pick up on the ideas expressed both by Palmer (1976) and Firth
(1957); among the numerous definitions, we can mention that of Leech (1974: 20),
according to whom collocative meaning is “the association a word requires on
account of the meaning of words which tend to occur in its environment”, or that
of Hoey (1991: 6–7), who sees collocations as “the relationship a lexical item has
with other items that appear with greater than random possibility in (its) textual
Words That Go Together: Teaching Collocations in the EFL Classroom 105

context”. While there are many collocations that contain two co-occurring lexical
items (e.g. rancid butter, heavy rain), a collocation can consist of several items,
just as Sinclair (1991: 170) notes, defining collocations as “the co-occurrence of
two or more words within a short space of each other in a text”.
From a semantic point of view, collocations are made up of two parts: the base
that bears most of the meaning of the construction and that selects a collocator
(McKeown and Radev 2000). To illustrate the presence of the base and that of the
collocator, we can say that in the collocations give a lecture or deliver a lecture,
for example, lecture is the base, and this then selects the collocators give and
deliver or another collocator, e.g. present (present a lecture). While in some cases
a base can select several collocators, as has been the case in the previous example,
in the case of more restrictive collocations, the base only triggers the use of one
specific collocator: e.g. in the construction commit a suicide, suicide as the base
can only select the collocator commit. In some other cases, the collocator itself can
be semantically empty; so, for example, in the construction take a bath, take does
not give any additional meaning to the construction other than have (McKeown
and Radev 2000). Collocations are often included in the same category with
idioms. Nevertheless, in spite of the similarities they share, they are also different.
An important characteristic that differentiates collocations from idioms is their
compositionality: idioms are non-compositional, unanalysable constructions,
whereas collocations, though to some degree non-compositional and often lacking
semantic transparency (Taylor 2017) (e.g. running a business does not have
anything to do with running), are more analysable semantically than idioms are.
Collocations can represent a free or more restricted combination of words, with
a weak, medium, or strong bond between the constituent elements. While in the
case of free combinations the parts are interchangeable with slight difference
in meaning or style (e.g. give, deliver, present all collocate with lecture), other
collocations are more restrictive – for example, take a picture vs *make a picture,
speak or tell the truth vs *say the truth. Regarding the morpho-syntactic properties,
collocations pertain to two major groups, lexical and grammatical collocations,
depending on the part of speech the constituent elements belong to (Benson,
Benson, and Ilson 1986). The first category contains a variety of combinations,
such as verb + noun, e.g. make a promise, adjective + noun, e.g. strong tea, noun
+ verb, e.g. plane takes off, noun + noun, e.g. child care, adverb + adjective, e.g.
hopelessly devoted, verb + adverb, e.g. argue heatedly. Different from lexical
collocations, grammatical collocations often contain a noun, a verb, or an adjective
proceeded or followed by a preposition such as at night, extend to, be interested in
or a to-infinitive construction such as be inclined to do something.
Concerning lexical collocations (and, more specifically, verb-noun
collocations) in English, Romanian, and Hungarian, the differences between
them often become apparent. Apart from cases when the collocation is the same
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in these languages (e.g. keep in mind, a ţine minte in Romanian, észben tart in
Hungarian), collocations often differ from each other due, among other things,
to the high amount of preverbs in Hungarian – consider, for example, keep your
word, a-şi ţine cuvântul in Romanian, betartja a szavát in Hungarian; the different
requirements for case, e.g. play a musical instrument (accusative case), a cânta
(sing) la un instrument (different verb + dative case) in Romanian and hangszeren
játszik (musical instrument in superessive case) in Hungarian (Hungarian has
27 cases), etc. The similarities between English and Romanian with regard to
vocabulary on the one hand and the distinctiveness of Hungarian (as part of the
Uralic language family) on the other hand often come into view. Examples are, for
instance, collocations with hot verbs, such as make (a face in Romanian, csinál,
készít in Hungarian), e.g. make time for something with the same construction
in Romanian, a face timp pentru ceva, whereas in Hungarian the construction
is different: időt szakít valamire; similarly, we have make friends, a-şi face
prieteni in Romanian but barátokat szerez in Hungarian or make a promise, a
face o promisiune in Romanian but ígéretet tesz in Hungarian or keep (a ţine, a
păstra in Romanian, (meg)tart in Hungarian), e.g. keep score – a ţine scorul in
Romanian, jegyzi az eredményt in Hungarian, keep a journal – a ţine un jurnal
in Romanian but naplót ír in Hungarian, keep quiet, a ţine gura/a păstra tăcerea
in Romanian, csendben maradni in Hungarian, etc. Generally speaking, it can
be said that due to the similarities between English and Romanian, Hungarian-
Romanian bilinguals with a good knowledge of Romanian may have it easier
when it comes to the acquisition of collocations. While the influence of L1 and
L2 on the acquisition of collocations would be a very interesting topic to analyse,
it falls beyond the scope of this paper.

3. Collocations and foreign language acquisition

Several studies suggest that learners are generally quite slow at acquiring
productive knowledge of L2 collocations (e.g. Durrant and Schmitt 2010, Laufer
and Waldman 2011, Li and Schmitt 2010, Nekrasova 2009, Yamashita and Jiang
2010). Boers et al. (2014) draw attention to the fact that L2 learners produce
word combinations that sound odd to native speakers (e.g. *do a mistake; *say
the truth; *make a dream). Similarly, Faghih and Sharafi (2006) investigating
the use of collocations by Iranian language EFL learners find that most of the
errors learners make in their productions are rooted in their lack of proficiency in
collocations, and Bahns and Eldaw (1993) note that the knowledge of collocations
lags behind the knowledge of general vocabulary. An interesting observation is
made by Demir (2017: 75) who argues that as learners progress to intermediate
levels they tend to make fewer collocational errors; nevertheless, their knowledge
Words That Go Together: Teaching Collocations in the EFL Classroom 107

of collocation stagnates as they are still dependent on the prefabricated routines

they have acquired before.
The correlation between language proficiency and the knowledge of collocation
has been pointed out by many experts in the field (e.g. Zhang 1993, Sung 2003,
Keshavarz and Salimi 2007). By analysing texts of native and non-native speakers
of English, Waller (1993) remarks that EFL learners’ deviant use of collocations
is the most tangible marker of their non-nativeness. The reason for this might
be, as Kjellmer (1991) notes, the fact that native speakers use large prefabricated
sections, whereas language learners use bricks rather than strings of words as
their language material, having automated few collocations.
The reduced and sometimes unusual use of collocations by EFL learners can
be attributed to several causes. Besides a possible negative transfer from L1 and/
or L2, students are often not made aware of the presence of collocations in a
language. This is in line with Begagic and Dubravac’s (2014) observation, who
list as possible explanations for this deficiency the negative transfer from L1,
students’ unawareness of collocations in their process of language learning, and
also the fact that students are mostly taught grammar rules. That awareness plays
an important role in the language learning process is a leading thought of many
studies (Ramirez 2012, Fan 2009, Lewis et al. 2000). According to Ramirez (2012),
the strategy of noticing fosters performance and accuracy in language production.
Thornbury (2002) goes even further by stating that there is no acquisition without
noticing. This line of thought is in compliance with Schmidt’s (2001) noticing
hypothesis, which considers noticing as a first crucial step for language structures
to be retained in memory. With regard to foreign language teaching, Ellis (1997)
proposes that teachers should make students familiar with the method of noticing
by providing them with strategies to use outside the classroom.
While learner’s attention may be attracted to a certain linguistic structure
without external intervention (the teacher), this rarely happens because of several
reasons. One of them, as Wray (2002) notes, is that post-childhood language
learners tend to view and learn words separately instead of multiword chunks.
Adult learners are used to seeing words separated by white spaces, and so they
are inclined to learn them in isolation. Another cause is salience, which refers to
the novelty a certain construction bears to the learner. Eye-tracking experiments
have shown that learners look at the construction unknown to them for a longer
period of time than at words they are familiar with (Godfroid, Housen, and Boers
2013 as cited by Boers et al. 2014). The novelty effect of a construction is often
reduced by the fact that many collocations contain hot verbs (e.g. get, take, have)
or frequently used function words. As a consequence, even if a combination of
words contains a word that the learner is not familiar with, due to the presence of
a frequently used word the importance of the collocation as a phraseological unit
is often overlooked. This is especially true in the case of verb-noun collocations
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where it is the noun that carries most of the meaning of the construction (e.g.
have a discussion, make an assumption, do business). Finally, the lack of
perceptual salience, attributed to the fact that frequent linguistic structures
(especially prepositions, articles, and auxiliaries) are often phonetically reduced
in the stream of discourse (Bybee 2002) makes it harder for language learners to
perceive the right word. The fact that several collocations contain an element that
has a phonological neighbour, sharing every phoneme except for one (e.g. make
a photo instead of take a photo), can also partly explain why learners often err in
their word choices.
Taking all this into account, it is assumed that incidental learning is likely
to occur only in cases when constituents of a collocation are new to the learner
(Boers et al. 2014). Bearing in mind the great variety and complexity (transparency
vs non-transparency) of collocations, it is essential that more attention be given
to them in foreign language classes. In what follows, the paper will look at
the language books used in EFL classes at Sapientia Hungarian University of
Transylvania, Miercurea Ciuc (henceforth Sapientia University) and address the
question of what other resources and additional materials would be suitable for
teaching collocation to language learners.

4. Language books used in the EFL classroom

The language books currently used in the EFL classroom at Sapientia University
are the New English File series, edited by the Oxford University Press, having
young adult learners as the target group. They comprise 6 levels (beginner,
elementary, pre-intermediate, intermediate, upper intermediate, and advanced)
and consist of a student’s book, a workbook (which follows the content of the
student’s book), and also a teacher’s book. Taking into consideration the fact that
students entering the university already have some knowledge of English, the
beginner level is not used in class; similarly, the advanced level is used to a
lesser extent since the number of students having a proficiency level of English
is relatively low. The paper intends to analyse the content of these series with
regard to the presence of collocations in the student’s books and workbooks.
While it focuses primarily on verb-noun collocations, it also looks at other lexical
collocations as well as grammatical constructions. It should be noted that these
series also include additional online materials suitable for self-study, yet they do
not constitute a part of the present analysis.
The New English File book series contain interesting lessons on a wide range
of topics, appropriate to the field of interest of young adult learners. The reading
and listening exercises often focus on real life experiences or reports about well-
known people (sportsmen, actors, etc.) students can relate to; in addition, the
Words That Go Together: Teaching Collocations in the EFL Classroom 109

lessons include interactive speaking exercises. Each unit has a What do you
remember? section where students can test their knowledge on what has been
covered in that specific unit.
While these language books constitute a good teaching material, when it comes
to teaching collocations, a few shortcomings become apparent. By thoroughly
analysing the content of both the student’s books and workbooks, the relative lack
of collocation exercises (especially lexical collocations) is noticeable. Collocations
can be found starting from the elementary level, where there are several exercises
containing lexical – and among them verb-noun – collocations (the main focus
of attention of this analysis). It seems, however, that besides collocations related
mainly to everyday activities and containing hot verbs, such as get, have, and take,
other verb-noun collocations are relatively few, and when they do occur they are
not highlighted at all. While the introduction of these collocations might suffice
for the elementary and pre-intermediate levels, higher-level students should be
made familiar with other verb-noun collocations as well. In fact, except for one
shorter section in the upper intermediate book (p. 85), where attention is drawn
to collocations (introducing them together with idioms), no reference is made to
the existence of such constructions. Another shortcoming of this series has to do
with the type of vocabulary exercises. Generally, it can be said that the book series
contains a fair amount of vocabulary exercises, among which also several examples
of collocations can be found. Nevertheless, these exercises are usually of the similar
type such as matching the constituent elements of collocations, matching phrases,
filling in the missing word, or giving the opposite of a given construction. The type
of exercise that outnumbers the rest is where the missing word (usually a verb)
has to be filled in (see Figure 1). There are relatively few cases where students
can see the collocations in their entirety, wherefore recognizing and treating these
elements as collocations would require extra effort on the part of language learners.
The same applies to the reading exercises in these books, where apart from a few
highlighted examples of collocations (where both elements of a collocation are
highlighted) it is mostly individual words that are put in the foreground.

Verb phrases. Complete the verb phrases.

_____make_____your bed
_____________________________________________________
do pick up take out tidy waste
_____________________________________________________
_________your room
_________things from the floor
_________the rubbish
_________the washing up
_________time

Figure 1. Exercise on collocations (New English File, Pre-Intermediate, p. 50)

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Regarding the presence of multi-word constructions, there are several exercises

in higher-level books (intermediate, upper-intermediate, and advanced levels)
focusing on phrasal verbs, prepositional verbs, and phrasal-prepositional verbs.
It can be said then that lexical collocations are only moderately present in this
series, whereas grammatical collocations are more in focus. In order to correct
this shortcoming, it is essential that students be given additional materials on
collocations and be introduced to resources (including electronic databases) that
facilitate the acquisition of such constructions.

5. Teaching collocations in the EFL classroom

In order to become more aware of the presence of collocations in a language,
students should have the opportunity to observe these constructions in context
and also to use them frequently in different activities. Despite that vocabulary
exercises are included in each unit of the New English File book series, they
do not show great variety. In addition, as it has been pointed out above, the
number of activities that highlight collocations in their entirety is quite low, so
students are often required to match the constituent elements of collocations or
fill in a missing word. As a consequence, they may not regard collocations as
constructions or recall them as such. It is beyond dispute that such exercises
improve students’ vocabulary; nevertheless, seeing collocations in their entirety
would raise the chances of a more thorough understanding of these constructions.
In light of the above, it is considered that the exercises in these books (and
possibly other language books) should be completed with additional materials
that focus on collocations in their entirety, treating them as constructions. In
what follows, examples will be given of exercises that are suitable for teaching
collocations in EFL classes; the language books referred to are Oliveira 2013 (from
pre-intermediate level upwards), Marks and Wooder 2007 (from pre-intermediate
level upwards), O’Dell and McCarthy and O’Dell 1999 (elementary level), and
also O’Dell and McCarthy 2008 (advanced level). All these books contain a
variety of topics (e.g. appearance, character, feelings, houses and apartments,
eating habits, movies/books, sports, computer, academic English, work, business,
money, travel, weather, etc.), are user-friendly (collocations are highlighted, and
in some cases a synonym is given or the collocation is explained briefly), and
can be used both in the classroom and as self-study. They are useful in different
respects: Oliveira’s 1000 English Collocations in 10 Minutes a Day (2013) starts
each unit with a short story or explanation, including many useful collocations.
Marks and Wooder’s Check Your Vocabulary for Natural English Collocations
(2007) contains a variety of exercises ranging from matching parts of collocations,
crosswords, looking for the opposite of a certain expression, choosing the most
Words That Go Together: Teaching Collocations in the EFL Classroom 111

natural collocation, correcting mistakes, choosing between two alternatives (e.g.

make or do), ordering jumbled letters to speaking activities where language
learners have to answer questions with collocations. Similarly, McCarthy and
O’Dell’s English Vocabulary in Use (elementary) (1999) is a good introduction to
collocations, containing, on the one hand, expressions with hot verbs (e.g. have,
go, come, take, bring) and also grammatical constructions with conjunctions and
prepositions, while, on the other hand, concentrating on topics that are useful for
learners at this level (e.g. everyday activities, movement, family, birth, marriage
and death, parts of the body, clothing, describing people). An important strength
of this book is that it introduces collocations within subpoints of a specific
topic (e.g. within the topic of Health and Illness: How are you today? Everyday
problems, Problems people have for many years, Illness in hot/tropical countries,
Serious illnesses, How to keep fit and well?) that can serve as good introductory
questions for speaking activities. In addition, this book also contains questions
that are good for group work or pair activities and that encourage the use of
collocations (e.g. What do you think is a good diet? What illnesses are connected
with smoking? etc.). Some exercises also make room for creativity, especially
in cases where language learners are asked to complete speech bubbles with
imaginary questions or sentences. Finally, McCarthy and O’Dell’s English
Collocations in Use (advanced) (2008), targeting advanced learners, points out
the different connotations of collocations (formal, informal use and also positive,
negative connotation) and also draw attention to possible common errors related
to their use (e.g. *make research instead of do research).
The following items taken from different exercises are good examples of how
collocations can be practised in EFL classes. They are taken from the books
mentioned above.

1. Choose the correct word to complete the collocations:

The process of creating friendships is called….
a) getting friends b) earning friends c) making friends (Oliveira 2013: 6)

2. Choose the best word or phrase to complete these sentences. Other collocations are in
bold type:
Before he left the house, he ______________the fire and raked over the embers.
a. put out b. turned out c. stopped
(Marks and Wooder 2007: 48)

3. What’s the opposite of these expressions?

straight hair/___________hair (Marks and Wooder 2007: 2)

4. Complete the two-word expression using the jumbled letters.

knife and ________________KORF (Marks and Wooder 2007: 3)
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5. Which of these expressions is not possible to complete the sentence?

The dog was running________________ in the park.
a. side to side b. round and round c. up and down
(Marks and Wooder 2007: 7)

6. Which is not a natural sounding collocation?

The train ______________ London at 10.35.
a. gets to b. gets into c. arrives in d. arrives at
(Marks and Wooder 2007: 8)

7. Which of these two versions sounds more natural?

He’s travelled far and wide. He’s travelled wide and far.
We’ve been there and here. We’ve been here and there.
(Marks and Wooder 2007: 7)

8. House or home? Complete the sentences with the correct word:

I’m going to move ___________ next week, so I’ll give you my new address.
(Marks and Wooder 2007: 17)

9. Correct the mistakes in the underlined expressions.

We did cycling this weekend. (Marks and Wooder 2007: 37)

10. Complete the expressions:

A flock of_____________
A swarm of___________
A heard of ___________ (Marks and Wooder 2007: 40)

11. What is the person saying in the picture?

12. Ann and Bill meet in a bar. Bill usually says the wrong things. Correct his mistakes!
13. Write a conversation using as many as possible of the phrases from the opposite page.
(Mc Carthy and O’Dell 1999: 75)

Due to their variety, these types of exercises offer a good insight into the nature
and use of collocations. As they encompass a wide array of topics, they can be
easily implemented as additional materials in the EFL classroom, both at higher
and lower levels. By containing a high number of collocations that are frequently
highlighted, these exercises can help language learners become more aware of the
presence of word combinations as well as the context they appear in.
Apart from these exercises, another important means of making students
familiar with the use of collocations is to introduce them to electronic corpora and
other electronic databases. This is especially true in the case of advanced learners
who already have a good knowledge of English but are rather unsure when it
comes to the use of collocations. While it often requires some extra effort to use
electronic corpora in class due to several factors (lack of time or possibility to use
computers in class, the need to follow a certain curriculum, etc.), it is assumed
Words That Go Together: Teaching Collocations in the EFL Classroom 113

that students will remember and understand collocations more easily if they
search for them in an electronic corpus or database. A possible way of applying
corpus linguistic methods is by adopting the exploratory approach as understood
by McCarthy (1998), also called the “three I-s” – illustration, interaction, and
induction –, where illustration refers to looking at real data, interaction to
discussing the findings with others, and finally induction implies formulating
conclusions based on the findings. According to this approach, after looking up
specific constructions in a corpus, students could talk about the findings among
themselves (e.g. as part of a group work) and also try to formulate deductions
regarding the frequency of a certain word combination, the context in which it
appears, and the connotations it can have (negative/positive, formal/informal).

Collocations and corpus linguistics

An important advantage of corpus linguistic methods is that they offer natural

language data and can show the larger context of a specific word or construction.
With the help of concordance programs that turn electronic texts into databases,
it is possible to look up any word, parts of words as well as word combinations.
Specific features can show the collocates of a particular word (the collocates
option) and also highlight and centre a collocation, showing its context (KWIC
– key word in context option). In addition, concordance programs can show the
frequency of a word or word combination and can also indicate the specific field
(documentaries, reports, political documents, law, medicine, etc.) a construction
is used in. As such, corpus analysis allows both for a qualitative (showing a
specific construction in context) and a quantitative (showing its frequency)
interpretation of findings.
There are many varieties of corpora that can be used for this purpose, among
them written corpora (e.g. The Brown Corpus), spoken corpora (The Lancaster/
IBM Spoken English Corpus), or of a mixed type such as the British National
Corpus with 90% written and 10% spoken part; there are also monolingual and
multilingual corpora as well as synchronic and diachronic corpora (an example
of a diachronic corpus is the Helsinki Corpus of the English Texts). Some of
these corpora are freely available and can be used for several queries a day after
an account is created. Such corpora are the BNC (British National Corpus with
around 100 million words) and Coca (Corpus of Contemporary American English
with more than 560 million words). While for the study of certain rare linguistic
phenomenon the COCA would yield better results, for the analysis of collocations
both corpora are suitable. Below you can see the collocate display for the verb
gain as found in the BNC (Figure 2) as well as the KWIC (key word in context)
display of the collocation gain access in the BNC (Figure 3).
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Figure 2. The collocates of the verb “gain” in the BNC corpus

In addition to using these databases, language learners can eventually make

their own corpus and use it for the search of several linguistic phenomena
(maybe as part of an assignment). Other databases that can foster the acquisition
of collocations are online dictionaries (besides traditional ones), such as bab.
la (https://en.bab.la/dictionary/), or online resources that contain collocation
dictionaries, such as the ProWritingAid grammar checker, style editor, and
editing tool (https://prowritingaid.com/Free-Online-Collocations-Dictionary.
aspx). Finally, Ozdic, the online English Collocation Dictionary, which is based
on the British National Corpus and includes over 150,000 collocations, is also a
useful tool for showing multi-word constructions.
Words That Go Together: Teaching Collocations in the EFL Classroom 115

Figure 3. The KWIC display of the collocation gain access in the BNC

6. Conclusions
The acquisition of collocations is often neglected in EFL classes due to the
fact that language coursebooks tend not to discuss them in detail. The paper
points out the necessity of teaching collocations in foreign language classes by
complementing the usual teaching materials with additional learning resources.
It advocates the idea that students should be made aware of the existence of
collocations as constructions (acknowledging them in their entirety) and have the
opportunity to notice their use in a larger context containing authentic language
use. Besides the type of exercises described above, reading and listening tasks
on collocations also improve students’ vocabulary and facilitate the acquisition
process of collocations. Despite the fact that the paper has not dealt with their role
in vocabulary practices, they contribute significantly to vocabulary development
and the acquisition of word combinations (collocations) as well.
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References
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Books with exercises on collocations:

Marks, Jon–Alison, Wooder. 2007. Check Your Vocabulary for Natural English
Collocations. London: A&C Black Publishers.
McCarthy, Michael–Felicity, O’Dell. 1999. English Vocabulary in Use: Elementary,
Cambridge University Press.
— 2008. English Collocations in Use: Advanced. Cambridge University Press.
Oliveira, Shayna 2003. 1000 English Collocations in 10 Minutes a Day.
https://vk.com/doc2603620_443968436?hash=e26c890e53d982b059&dl=ff14
10487708ec0017 (Last accessed: 20 May 2019).

Analysed books:

Clive Oxenden–Christina Latham-Koenig. 1997a. New English File: Beginner:

Student’s Book, OUP.
— 1997b. New English File: Intermediate: Student’s Book, OUP.
— 1997c. New English File: Upper-Intermediate: Student’s Book, OUP.
— 1997d. New English File: Advanced: Student’s Book, OUP.
Clive Oxenden–Christina Latham-Koenig–Jane Hudson. 1997a. New English File:
Upper-Intermediate: Workbook, OUP.
— 1997b. New English File: Advanced: Workbook, OUP.
Clive Oxenden–Christina Latham-Koenig–Paul Seligson. 1997a. New English
File: Elementary: Student’s Book, OUP.
— 1997b. New English File: Pre-Intermediate: Student’s Book, OUP.
— 1997c. New English File: Pre-Intermediate: Workbook, OUP.
— 1997d. New English File: Intermediate: Workbook, OUP.
Clive Oxenden–Christina Latham-Koenig–Paul Seligson–Jane Hudson. 1997.
New English File: Elementary: Workbook, OUP.