Lesson 11 activities (hands off)

Does it collocate?

What are collocations?

Collocations are frequent combinations of words or “words that go together” that are commonly used by speakers of a language. Collocations can cause difficulty for learners and speakers of other languages. Some examples of academic collocations are ‘do research’, ‘effective use’, and ‘data suggests’.

Activity 1

Collocaid provides suggestions of academic collocations for your English text. The user chooses the most appropriate collocation(s) for their text, which are marked in the inserted text, as shown in the screenshot below.

Examples of academic collocation from Collocaid.
Figure 4. Screenshot of Collocaid. Retrieved on September 14, 2022. © Collocaid, all rights reserved, used with permission.

Activity 2

Activity 3

Check the collocations suggested by Collocaid with the summary below. Then, categorise the collocations as verb collocation, noun collocations and adverbial collocations and fill the chart below.

Collocations suggested by Collocaid for 'presents'.
Figure 5. Screenshot of Collocaid. Retrieved on September 14, 2022. © Collocaid, all rights reserved, used with permission.
Collocations suggested by Collocaid for 'specific'.
Figure 6. Screenshot of Collocaid. Retrieved on September 14, 2022. © Collocaid, all rights reserved, used with permission.
Collocations suggested by Collocaid for 'principle'.
Figure 7. Screenshot of Collocaid. Retrieved on September 14, 2022. © Collocaid, all rights reserved, used with permission.

Activity 4

Activity 5

Discuss the following questions with your peers:

  • What have you learnt about collocations in this lesson? Why are collocations so important?
  • What have you learnt about writing abstracts in this lesson?
  • Can Collocaid help you learn other aspects of language? If so, which one(s)?

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Using Language Data to Learn About Language: A Teachers' Guide to Classroom Corpus Use Copyright © 2023 by The University of Queensland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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