As a high school student, I did not understand the importance of collocations and idioms in English. Beside the fact that it was difficult for me to learn by heart different combinations of words, I used to ask myself what is the aim of knowing this kind of language chunks. I did not understand why ”fast food” is correct, but ”fast meal” is incorrect, since ”fast” and ”quick” have almost the same meaning in my mother tongue. Only after some time did I realize the importance of collocations and idioms for a proficient English speaker. Furthermore, when I became a teacher I understood the benefits of teaching
collocations in the classroom.
The Oxford Dictionaries define the word ”collocation” in the following way: ”noun [mass noun] the habitual juxtaposition of a particular word with another word or words with a frequency greater than chance: the words have a similar range of collocation.” Michael Lewis, an important linguist interested in lexis mentions in his work ”The Lexis Approach” (1993) that it would not be a mistake if we say that all collocations are idiomatic and idioms are collocations or contain collocations.
In English, there are many words that co-occur frequently. ”Bread and butter”, ”burst out laughing”, ”burst into tears”, ”completely satisfied”, ”keep walking”, ”make a mistake” are only some examples of English collocations. If native speakers use them often in a very natural way, many persons who study English as a second language find them difficult to learn, given the fact that in some cases the meaning of words used together is different from their individual meaning. For instance ”piece of cake” means something very easy, but ”piece” means ” an individual object of a particular type”, while ”cake” is defined as ”a sweet food made by baking a mixture that usually contains sugar, eggs, flour, and butter or oil ”. ”A can of worms” (”a very complicated problem”) or ”it’s raining cats and dogs” (”raining very heavily”) are some other good examples in this sense.
Given the frequency of this type of constructions in English, teachers must understand the importance of word chunks in vocabulary teaching and learning. It is teacher’s responsibility not only to make students familiar with these special word combinations, but also to help students to use them in the appropriate contexts.
Jim Scrivener makes the difference between vocabulary and lexis. If vocabulary refers to the use of single words, lexis is bigger. It refers to ”ready -made” combinations of words that we recall and use quickly without constructing sentences word by word. Jeremy Harmer mentions the fact that vocabulary must be taught in context and that knowing a word does not mean only knowing its spelling and translation. Knowing a word means much more than that because it also involves knowing its collocations, its synonyms and antonyms,
the suffixes and the prefixes that can be applied to it. Using collocations can be very challenging for some students, because these language chunks can be very confusing sometimes. For instance the verbs ” to make” and ”to do” are translated in Romanian by means of the same verb ”a face”. This leads to wrong constructions such as ”to make my homework” instead of ” to do my homework” or ”to do a cake” instead of ” to make a cake”. Somebody can be a ”heavy smoker” or a ”heavy drinker” and ”a devoted friend”, but not a ”devoted smoker” or a ”devoted drinker”. We can have ”a stomach ache”, ”a toothache”, ” a headache”, but ” a pain in my chest” or ” a pain in my leg” and ”sore throat”. It is difficult for a Romanian learner to understand these collocations, because ”sore”, ”ache” and ”pain” are translated by means of a single word (”durere”).
The challenge of ”weaving” collocations in English lessons is to provide students with a reason why they should learn these special language groupings. Despite the fact that learning collocations involves a lot of work, the benefits of being able to use them are evident. The great advantage of collocations is the fact that they encourage students to focus on context and meaning. It is useless to memorize long lists of de-contextualized words and their definitions or translations if students do not know to use them in the appropriate context.
Collocations enrich the vocabulary of students, helping them to speak English in a more natural way and on a more advanced level; they can provide students with real-world expressions, they can improve learners fluency because it is easier for our minds to remember language in blocks rather than as single words; students become aware of the richness and the beauty of English language by means of collocations. Once students understand that collocations are very important and useful if they want to become proficient English speakers, the next step is to treat them as single blocks of language rather than combinations of individual words. They need to analyse these unique combinations of words as an entirety, because their individual meanings, put together, do not have the same connotation.
Despite the advantages of collocations for students, learning how to use them in correct sentences can be very challenging. My personal example as a student in this sense is relevant. Some of the most useful techniques that could help students in their learning are to read as much as possible because reading is a good way to brighten your vocabulary; to revise as often as possible what they have already learnt; to use the collocations in their own sentences; to solve a variety of exercises including collocations (match the following collocations with their meaning, complete the right word in the following collocations, put the following words in the right order to discover interesting collocations etc.); to learn collocations by topic or by a specific word.
The main goal of teaching and learning English is to make students use this language by themselves in real-life situations of communication. It is useless to know many things about a language if you are not able to use it. Grammar rules are important when studying a language, but vocabulary also has its major role, because we cannot communicate without words. Thus, teaching collocations is a good way to bring the excitement of vocabulary building into your classroom.
References
Harmer, Jeremy(2001), ”The practice of English Language Teaching”, Longman, 2001 Third Edition.