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Collocations

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  Matching and collocation worksheets
  
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  Collocation worksheets and exercises
  
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  List of collocation worksheets *
  

Compounds

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   Teaching Compounds *
  
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  List of compound worksheets *
  

Phrasal verbs

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  Teaching phrasal verbs
  
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  Phrasal verb PDF worksheets
  
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  Exercises to phrasal verbs
  

Idioms

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  Cambridge Worksheets – Idioms
  
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  Idiom worksheets
  
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  Idioms – word lists, worksheets, activities, and more
  

If this course work was helpful and you know other useful exercise resources feel free to write a comment.¹
In English grammar, a phrase is a team of two or extra phrases functioning as a significant unit within a sentence or clause. A phrase is often characterised as a grammatical unit at a level between a word and a clause.
The size of the phrase may additionally range from two words to many greater words. This does no longer have any connection to whether or not it is a phrase or a sentence. For example “old dog” is a phrase. So is “the old, smelly, shivering dog” is also a phrase.
Collocations are the common or frequent combos of phrases we use together. Here are some simple examples:
•take a photograph do a photo make a picture
•a rapid shower a fast shower
When you make mistakes with collocations, the different man or woman will typically recognize you – however your English won’t sound “natural” – due to the fact it’s one of a kind from the way a native speaker would say it. Although it’s feasible to communicate efficiently with improper collocations, using collocations correctly can help you speak extra fluently.


Traditional teaching has often adopted a structuralist view of language, placing a greater value to syntax than to lexicon. The recent development of corpus linguistics, however, has brought forth the awareness of language as a predominantly lexical phenomenon. Grammar and vocabulary are not considered isolated parts of English as they once were. Grammar now assumes a subordinate role as various methods and approaches such as Michael Lewis’ Lexical Approach put vocabulary in the center of language discussions. Hill (writes about the dynamics of language learning and what role collocations play in that regard: Language has proven to be mixture of the totally novel, the absolutely fixed, the relatively fixed, and all held together with fairly simple structures which we call grammar. The largest learning load and the one which is never complete – even for native speakers – is mastering the lexicon. Within the lexicon, collocation is one of the biggest definable areas to which all learners need to be introduced from lesson oneх[1].
Collocations are not easily defined. The term is used in a variety of senses in the fields of linguistics and language teaching. They can appear more often than expected or not. Because it occurs repeatedly, a collocation can be identified through corpus analysis. The phraseological view considers collocations a type of word combination, distinct from idioms on one side and free word combinations on the other, as McKeown and Radev assert:
Idiomatic expressions are those in which the semantics of the whole cannot be deduced from the meanings of the individual constituents. Free word combinations have the properties that each of the words can be replaced by another without seriously modifying the overall meaning of the composite unit and if one of the words is omitted, a reader cannot easily infer it from the remaining ones. Unlike free word combinations, a collocation is a group of words that occur together more often than by chance. On the other hand, unlike idioms, individual words in a collocation can contribute to the overall semantics of the compound.
Woolard attempts to define the term in a simpler, more pedagogical way. He considers collocations as groups of words that language students do not usually expect to find together. From that perspective, the expression heavy furniture/loads would not be considered a collocation, whereas heavy seas/smoker would. He also restricts the use of the term to relations between nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs only. In that view, guilty of, dependent on and reason for would not be called collocations[2].
A hundred different authors could come up with a hundred different ways to describe the term. Regardless of the definition, collocation acquisition is a major step in the English learning process and should be given greater attention in class. Hill (2000) points out several reasons why it is important to teach collocations, three of which are mentioned bellow. Further, he proposes a new approach to teaching the subject.
One reason why collocations should play a central role in ELT has to do with the predictability of vocabulary use. When a speaker thinks of drinking, s/he might say have. Automatically, the listener conjures up a list of possible continuations – coffee, water, tea, whisky, but not oil or shampoo. Similarly, when someone says do, the listener might expect something like the right thing or his best, but never a mistake. The way words combine in collocations is fundamental to language use.
Another reason to teach collocations is the fact that they improve thought processing and lead to effective communication. Native speakers read, talk and listen to quick-paced discourses because they have a vast repertoire of chunks of language in storage, ready to be produced and recognized. Having these ready-made pieces of speech makes it easier for us to express complex ideas and think faster, since all our brainspace is not occupied searching for words[3].
Thirdly, collocations facilitate the acquisition of correct pronunciation. Producing speech from individual words often results in bad stress and intonation because the speaker cannot utter correct chunks of language. On the other hand, fixed expressions provide the students with the stress pattern of the phrase as a whole, allowing for a better pronunciation. Besides, students cannot recognize and store chunks if they do not know them correctly.
In addition to what has been said, Hill emphasizes that collocations should be given the same emphasis in class as individual words. In fact, students cannot really learn a new word unless they learn how to use it. That is why teachers should teach new words along with their most common collocates. If the word is ferry, the teacher must also mention go on the car ferry, a roll-on roll-off ferry, take the ferry from_____ to _____. To higher level students it is interesting to mention that less common vocabulary – like impetuous and initiative – is used in very few collocations – impetuous behavior, take the initiative.
Syntax and lexicon together are two central aspects of language learning. Through collocation acquisition a student is able to enhance vocabulary skills as well as gain knowledge on how English is structured. Slowly but steadily, collocations are proving to be a major facilitator to ELT and should be further explored inside the classroom[3].
The development of word lists based on frequency counts for English directed the attention of teachers, ELT practitioners and curriculum specialists alike to the upper ends of these lists at the expense of the lower ends on the premise that mastering the upper ends would be adequate for the development of a good measure of proficiency in the language, and the upper end can be efficiently exploited for learning the phonology and syntax of the language. This view of the vocabulary, beside its notional inaccuracy from a statistical point of view as will be shown in the next section, has led to learners' lexical deficiency and inability to function in real-life situations. Judd ( rightly states that "upon leaving the sheltered atmosphere of the classroom, students often find themselves at a literal loss for words in the uncontrolled English speaking environment which they encounter in the normal American university. He suggests that more emphasis should be given to direct vocabulary teaching. This view is strongly supported by Wilkins who firmly asserts that "...there is not much value either in being able to produce grammatical sentences if one has not got the vocabulary that is needed to convey what one wishes to say.
It seems that difficulty level of collocations depends largely on the use of primary and non-primary sense of the component words. Collocations in which the words are used in their primary sense are easily understood and translated. Many authors do not even consider them collocations. Understanding and translating collocations becomes more and more problematic when one or both of the component words depart from their primary sense. The word which is used in its primary sense acts as a clue for the translator to guess the meaning of the unknown or less transparent element, and consequently plays a major role in helping the translator retrieve the TL word. In fact, the word in the primary sense helps a translator form a mental image, and this works as a context in which the less transparent word must be used. As a result, the number of possible candidates to fill the slot or to be used as a collocate is limited. Thus it may be claimed that the type of collocations in which no SL element is expressed in its primary sense will cause more problem for the translator than other types of collocations in which the expected TL equivalent for one of the elements is missing or is considered redundant, the translator will unconsciously be inclined to include a word for the missing element. In processing collocations, grammatical competence will not be of considerable help. Relations between lexical items in a collocation, and also between SL collocations and their TL equivalents are independent of grammatical considerations[4].
In the absence of bilingual dictionaries tailored to the needs of translator, and without proper exercises on dealing with collocations, the learner/translator can only rely on contextual clues and his TL competence to solve problems.²