Promoting Awareness of Teaching Collocations Techniques To Beginners (Adjective-Noun Collocations)
Promoting Awareness of Teaching Collocations Techniques To Beginners (Adjective-Noun Collocations)
Promoting Awareness of Teaching Collocations Techniques To Beginners (Adjective-Noun Collocations)
Abstract
Since the ELT career is updating itself on daily basis, teachers should
develop their teaching techniques to cope with modern teaching
methodology. It is essential to experiment theories and modify them to suit
various teaching environments. Teaching collocations has become a top
priority in language teaching. Therefore, this paper discusses the issue of
teaching collocations for beginners. Although a lot of teachers might not
agree on teaching collocations before upper intermediate-level, this study
claims that exposing low-level learners (especially, beginners) to language
chunks rather than individual words enhances their abilities in writing and
speaking (communicative power). Learners may know many individual
words which they cant use, along with their grammatical knowledge, but
they lack the ability to use those words in a range of collocations which pack
more meaning into what they say or write. In addition, learning collocations
was found also beneficial in developing learners' skills such as critical
thinking and autonomous learning.
Keywords: Lower-level, beginners, collocation, teaching, activities
Introduction
Without grammar little can be conveyed, without vocabulary
nothing can be conveyed Wilkins D. (1972, 11)
Recently, teaching collocation has become a top priority in language
teaching. This paper discusses the issue of teaching collocations for
beginners. Although a lot of teachers might not agree on teaching
collocations before upper-intermediate-level, it is not helpful to delay the
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course books (e.g. Touchstone, Cutting Edge, Headway) teachers can find a
huge variety of collocations to draw students attention to them. This
highlights the importance of teachers awareness of collocation types.
Collocation in low-level courses appears in various types such as adjectivenoun (e.g. strong tea), verb-noun (e.g. have a shower) and noun-noun
collocation (e.g. shower head). This concurs with Lewis (2000) findings that
verb-noun, adjective-noun and noun-noun collocations are the most
convenient for early stages, asthey present language chunks to learners
attention as single choices.Also, adjective-noun collocation is a common
area of errors for learners. Therefore, the next section introduces various
collocation types which could be beneficial to beginners.
Collocation types
For the purpose of this essay our attention will be directed to lexical
collocation more than grammatical collocation (Colligation; collocation
categories noted by Benson el al. 1997, ix). It has become obvious that any
lexical collocation is formed of two content words. It is worth mentioning that
some other collocation types are formed of more than two words. Therefore, it is
recommended to use the term chunks which better describes the nature of
collocation. The term chunk refers to a combination of more than one word that
conveys a specific meaning as a unit. The most common lexical collocation
types as listed by (Stroh P. 2004) are:
1- Adjective-noun
heavy smoker
2- Noun-verb
prices fall
3- Verb-noun
do the dishes
4- Verb-Adjective
defend sth vigorously
5- Adverb-verb
half understood
At this stage, it is very crucial to differentiate between collocation,
idioms and phrasal verbs. On the one hand, lets agree that every phrasal
verb could be considered as a collocation; this relies on the fact that
collocation is mainly based on the ideas of co-occurrence, and phrasal verbs
are one of the fixed combination in the English language lexical structure.
On the other hand, it is crucial to stress the fact that not every collocation is a
phrasal verb. Therefore, the next section clarifies the idioms collocation
overlap.
Idioms-collocationsoverlap
The relationship between idioms and collocations is one of the hottest
areas in the study of lexis. Since idioms refer to those fixed chunks not only
used by native speakers, but also represents the bulk of their daily language
use, it is essential to consider teaching idioms to language learners.
Therefore, it is important here to investigate the clear overlap between
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References:
Benson, M., Benson, E. &Ilson, R. 1997. The BBI Dictionary of English
Word Combinations. John Benjamins Publishing Company.[Rev. edn. of:
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Firth, J.R. (1968). A synopsis of linguistic theory. In Palmer, F.R. (ed.)
Selected Papers of J.R. Firth 1952-59 (168-205). London: Longmans.
Gairns, R. and S. Redman(1986) Working with Words: A guide to teaching
and learning vocabulary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hill j. (2000) Teaching Collocation: Further Developments in the Lexical
Approach. Hampshire: Heinle Cengage Learning.
Lewis, M.(2000) Teaching Collocation: Further Developments in the Lexical
Approach. Hampshire: Heinle Cengage Learning.
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Lewis, M.(2002) The Lexical Approach: The State of ELT and a Way
Forward. Boston: Thomson Heinle.
Stroh Ph. M.(2004)towards a bilingual adjective-noun collocation dictionary
of English and German.
Thornbury, S.(2002) How to Teach Vocabulary. London: Pearson Education.
Wilkins, David A. (1972). Linguistics in Language Teaching. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Willis, D.(2003) Rules, Patterns and Words: Grammar and Lexis in English
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