Fun classroom practice of collocations

I dont think anyone could argue with the need to learn collocations such as extremely (not
fabulously) sorry, go (not do) jogging and a bird (not chicken) in the hand is worth two in
the bush at every stage of language learning. However, there are all kinds of theoretical and
practical problems with actually using class time to help students learn such things.
Perhaps the biggest problem in class is that the activities which are usually put in textbooks (e.g.
two rows of words which you must link with lines and multiple choice gapfills) are boring,
uncommunicative and could just as easily be done at home alone. It is of course worth spending
some lesson time on things students need to do outside class to really learn collocations, but
sooner or later students are going to need some fun to keep them from giving up the rather
daunting task of learning collocations. There also doesnt seem to be any reason to drop our
emphasis on communication only for this language point. This article gives a few suggestions on
how to retain fun and genuine communication when tacking collocations. The games are roughly
arranged to start with ones that practise collocations with simple pairs of words like fail/
lose. The article then moves onto collocations with larger groups of words, and ends with
games suitable for dealing with collocations with potentially very large groups of words such as
all dependent prepositions. However, most of the games can be used with all those three kinds of
collocation.
Collocations with two words
Textbooks have been teaching things like do/ make (do homework but make breakfast),
have/ take and go/ play sports since long before the word collocations made its way
into the students book, perhaps because with these kinds of pairs there are loads of obvious
games where students race to show their knowledge of which of the two it must be. The most fun
of all is Stations, in which students race to touch one of two opposite walls depending on
whether they think the word they heard goes with do or make, but this is only really suitable
for young learners. Young learners can also throw things (e.g. screwed up paper, paper
aeroplanes or sticky balls) at one of the two words on the board, raise different body parts to
represent each word (e.g. foot up for have and elbow up for take), or pretending to shoot one
for the two words on flashcards in different parts of the room. Adults can also join in by raising
one hand for each word or raising cards with the two words (e.g. make and do) written on
them.
You can also play matching games such as Snap and Pelmanism with paired up collocations, but
these tend to work better with larger groups of words such as do, play and go for sports,
dealt with below.
Collocations with three or four words
For collocations with three or four words like have/ take/ get and go/ go to/ do/
play, it is possible to give students more than two things to hold up, touch etc as described
above, but it is generally better to get them matching expressions that take the same words, e.g.

your time with a while because they both go with take (rather than get or have). The
simplest activity is to give them cut up pieces of paper with the expressions without the three or
four words they collate with, then ask them to work in groups to put them into columns. If they
get stuck, you can give them a clue such as that all of the columns should be the same length.
I then often move onto playing the popular memory game pelmanism with the same pack of
cards. Students spread the cards face down across the table and take turns trying to find pairs of
cards that take the same word, e.g. judo and aerobics because they both take do rather than
play, go to or go. Any pairs of cards that collate with different words must be placed back
down in exactly the same place, making this a test of memory in two different ways. This version
works better than the more common form of collocations pelmanism in which students should
find the two parts of the collocation (e.g. they have to find the do card and the judo card) as
it is closer to the original card game and takes less time to play.
The next stage for me is getting them to remember the collocations more quickly, as they will
need to in real life. This can be practised with the matching game Snap. Students have a pack of
cards each which they cant look at. They take turns placing their top card face up on one of the
two packs of cards on the table, racing to shout Snap if the two packs show matching cards at
any point. The person who shouts Snap fastest when the cards match can take all the cards put
on the table up to that point. Anyone who shouts Snap when they dont match must pay some
kind of penalty, e.g. giving two cards to the other player(s). The person with the most cards when
the game stops (or the person with all the cards while their partner has none) wins.
Other games such as personalised sentence completion guessing games also work with this
number of words, but are easier with the larger number of words dealt with below.
Collocations with a larger number of words
There are also examples of large lists of words students have to mentally choose from to find the
right collocation, perhaps the most famous of which are dependent prepositions (good + at,
depend + on, etc) and adverb collocations (highly + dependent, crucially + important, etc). It is
these kinds of words which are invariably given in textbooks as two columns of words that must
be joined up with lines, which is a shame when it is very easy to add communication to exactly
that exercise. With young learners, you can put the two columns of words up on the board and
get the whole class to shout out instructions for a blindfolded student so that they can draw lines
to make the collocations. With adults and higher level young learners working in pairs you can
simply give the left hand column to one student and the right hand column to the other and get
them to match up tall and story without looking at each others worksheets. This works best
if they also have halves of a complete sentence that they can use to check their match, e.g. I
think you are telling me a tall plus story. I know you dont have a girlfriend, let alone two.
Similar games can be played as a mingle activity or a shouting dictation, although you will need
individual slips of paper rather than worksheets for this.
Another possibility with the last suggestion above is to make the example sentences questions
which they can ask each other after the matching exercise is finished, e.g. Do any of your
friends tell tall plus stories? Does that make them popular? As with any list of vocabulary,

students can also create their own discussion questions, stories or dialogues using the
collocations.
A general vocabulary game that can work with collocations is the Definitions Game. Students are
given collocations such as have a picnic and must explain what is written without using any of
the words included in the collocation (e.g. It means eat in an outdoor place. The verb has a
similar meaning to take.) until their partners guess exactly the words that are in the collocation.
This game can be made more intensive practice by getting them to prepare cards to play Taboo,
in which each collocation comes with three words that the person defining cannot say.
There is also a TEFL game that is most well known with exactly this language point, being
dominoes. Cards are created with just collocations or whole sentences with collocations in them,
split where the collocations occur. The rules of the game are exactly the same as real dominoes.
Unlike the version given in many photocopiable TEFL books, this works best if each word
collates with more than one other card, making it more like the original dominoes game. This can
mean that the game finishes before all the cards are used, but they can simply play again and
then maybe work together to link all the words together in a big circle.
The idea of cards which you put together by their collocations can also be used to make a kind of
jigsaw. Take any text and split it where there are strong collocations, putting the different
sections of the story onto different slips of paper, e.g. by pasting them section by section into a
one-column table in a word processing program. Give each group of students one cut up text.
The students try to reconstruct the text using meanings, collocations and their ideas of how the
information might be organised, then you can test them on their memory of the collocations they
saw.
Students can also use collocations to reconstruct texts in other ways. Write a text full of useful
collocations (or rewrite a text to have more), then get the students to reconstruct it word by word.
One way of doing this is a bit like Hangman but with each gap being a word rather than a letter.
The second game is similar, but you give students the first word of the text and they try to guess
the next word each time, with the real word being given after three wrong guesses.
You can also do another kind of jigsaw task, one that is more similar to actual jigsaws. Make a
table with collocations split up and put into neighbouring boxes, e.g. the top left box says have
and the next one says breakfast, then the box to the right of that has take with a shower in
the fourth column. Cut up the finished table so that the collocations are all split up but all the
cards are connected to at least one other next to, above or below it. This means that students can
use the overall rectangular shape of the table and neighbouring words needing to both match up
if to help them put together all the collocations plus it is a lot more fun than just simple
matching!
Another puzzle-style activity is a collocations maze. Make a table with collocations with the
same word missing tracing a path through from the top left corner to the bottom right one. For
example, you could have Hes the ________ of my eye in the top left corner, An _____ a day
keeps the doctor away under it, Adams ___________ to the right of that etc, until you reach
the bottom right corner. The size of the table will depend on how many useful collocations with

one word you can think of, and if that isnt enough to make a decent-sized table you could also
allow diagonal movements. All the other squares in the table should be filled with similar
distractors, meaning phrases that cant be filled with that one word but people might think you
could like Wow, your new girlfriend is a _________. As with these examples, it is best if the
words in the gaps are similar to each other, e.g. all simple verbs or all prepositions. Once youve
filled the table with collocations and distractors, give it to students to try and trace a route across.
You could then elicit the missing words from the other squares and/ or give them blank grids to
make similar puzzles to test other groups.
A game that Im pretty sure I made up (although Im sure many other people have too) is
something I call Collocations List Dictation. The students are given a list of words which have
many collocations, with each word being given with at least seven examples of collocations they
should know or at least understand, e.g. hand give me a hand, a bird in the hand is worth two
in the bush, many hands make light work, etc. A student reads out collocations with the key
word missing until their partners guess what the missing word is.
A game that I came up with more recently but havent tried yet is Collocations Uno/ Collocations
Blackjack. Students are dealt around ten cards with common words with lots of collocations such
as get, hand and in each (some of the words can be repeated in the pack). They can look at
their cards but shouldnt show them to each other. The first student lays down any card and the
next student should lay down a word that collocates with it. This continues round and round the
group of three to five students until one person cant go. That person takes three extra cards from
the pack and lays down any one and the game continues in the same way. The person with least
cards left when the teacher stops the game is the winner.
The students will need the help of the teacher or a dictionary to check their answers in many of
the games above, e.g. Collocations Blackjack and Collocations Dominoes. There are also games
specifically for prompting use of dictionaries. One is a version of the old TEFL classic Call My
Bluff. Students are given a list of words and must write down a list of real collocations and
wrong ones that they have made up (or perhaps directly translated from L1), all with their
meanings. They read one set of real and false collocations and the other teams try to guess which
are really used in English.
Another good source of collocations is obviously texts that they read. This can be made more fun
by getting them to scan texts as quickly as possible for collocations, guess the story from the
collocations and then read and check, try to remember the collocations and hence the whole text
from it, etc.
Collocations are very difficult to personalise, but this can be done by giving them sentence stems
that end with words which have many collocations, e.g. "I often have ___________", "My
mother makes ______________ for me" and "I _________________ bed". Students can read out
just the part that they have written for their partner to guess which sentence, or they can mix up
their true sentences with false ones for the partner to work out which is which.

Collocation with advanced levels 2- classroom activities

Submitted by TE Editor on 28 November, 2003 - 13:00

This article gives an extensive list of classroom activities that focus attention on collocation. This
is the second of two articles on the topic. The first article - Collocation with advanced levels 1 gives an overview of the topic of collocation in English language teaching and shows how this is
a key area of study for advanced level students.
"The ability to deploy a wide range of lexical chunks both accurately and appropriately is
probably what most distinguishes advanced learners from intermediate ones." (Thornbury
2002:116)

Textual analysis activities

Preparation activities

Speaking activities

Dictionary and matching activities

Conclusion

Bibliography

Textual analysis activities

Students can analyse texts to heighten their awareness of collocations. Depending on the
text, you might ask the students to find, for example, five useful collocations that occur
around a certain topic. Or you could give students a list of words or phrases and ask them
to find what collocates with them in the text. You could also go further than the text and
ask them to find further possible collocations with certain items in the text using a
collocation dictionary.

Make up gap-fills based on authentic texts, particularly deleting verbs from verb + noun
collocations.

Get the students to carry out prediction exercises, using a kind of word association
technique. You could reveal a text gradually (using an overhead projector) and get the
students to predict the next word or phrase.

Asking the students to reconstruct the content of a text from a few words only serves to
highlight the central importance of collocations as against individual words. (There are
software programmes which are good for this but you can also do the activity using an
overhead projector: put a dash for each word you want to blank out and a number against

each dash. Get the students to suggest words and phrases that are missing and write in the
correct answers as they come up.)

Preparation activities

Ask the students to brainstorm nouns on a particular subject, perhaps for a writing task.
Then get them to suggest verbs and adjectives that collocate with those nouns, then
adverbs with the verbs, thus building up a number of lexically dense collocational fields.

Speaking activities

Get the students to do creative drills. For example, devise a 'Find somebody who...'
activity for them to practise collocations. For example,
Find someone who
.....has been on a strict diet
.....has found themselves in an embarrassing position
...has made an inspired choice etc.
The students themselves could make up similar activities.

Get the students to repeat the same activity, for example giving a short talk or telling a
story, perhaps three of four times. This has been shown to boost fluency by activating
collocations.

Dictionary and matching activities

Get the students using collocation dictionaries to find better ways of expressing ideas,
including replacing words like 'new' and 'interesting' with better, stronger words to create
typical collocations, or finding the 'odd verb out'. For example,
o Which verb does not go with 'answer'?
come up with, do, get, require
o

Spot the odd verb

Can you find the verb which does not collocate with the noun in bold?
1. acknowledge, feel, express, make, hide, overcome, admit shame
2. apply for, catch, create, get, hold, hunt for, lose, take up job
3. acquire, brush up, enrich, learn, pick up, tell, use language
4. assess, cause, mend, repair, suffer, sustain, take damage
5. beg, answer, kneel in, offer, say, utter prayer
6. brush, cap, drill, fill, gnash, grit, wash teeth

7. derive, enhance, find, give, pursue, reach, savour, pleasure

8. disturb, interrupt, maintain, observe, pierce, reduce to, suffer silence
Answers
1. make 2. catch 3. tell 4. take 5. beg 6. wash 7. reach 8. suffer (only with suffer in
silence)

Devise some matching games, such as dominoes or pelmanism which require the students
to match up split collocations. For example, focus on adjectives that go with nouns, like
'bitter' and 'disappointment,' or 'inspired' and 'choice'

Give the students a number of words which collocate with the same core word; the
students have to guess this word. For example saying 'year, loss, haven, evasion' to
produce 'tax'. This could be made into a game by awarding points. The teacher reads out
the words one by one and the students in teams gain, for example, 10 points for the
answer after one word, 8 after two, 6 after three and so on.
Which word collocates with all the words given?
1. fried, poached, fresh, raw, frozen, grilled, smoked _________________
2. summer, warm, winter, tatty, shabby, trendy, second-hand _____________
3. dangerous, desperate, common, born, hardened, master _______________
4. massive, huge, crowded, packed, outdoor, indoor, sports _______________
Answers. 1 = fish, 2 = coat, 3 = criminal, 4 = stadium

Get the students used to recording collocations in a variety of ways - in boxes, grids,
scales, matrices and word maps. Learners can add new words in the appropriate sections
as they come across them in texts, during lessons etc.

Raise students' awareness of collocation by using translation where possible and

appropriate to highlight differences and similarities between their L1 and English.

Use songs to give examples of typical collocations, and in a memorable fashion, perhaps
through prediction, filling gaps and so on. This would help with intonation and
pronunciation too, as could recorded radio news items, or TV advertising.

Conclusion
In all these activities, any chance should be taken to enhance deep processing of the language.
Strong personal recollections and identifications tend to lead to greater semantic networks and
associative links. The focus should be on the integration of new material into old. Language
learning is, after all, not linear but cyclical.

Rosamund Moon calls just looking at words "dangerously isolationist" (1997:40), and goes on to
say that "words are again and again shown not to operate as independent and interchangeable
parts of the lexicon, but as parts of a lexical system" (ibid:42). An understanding of collocation is
vital for all learners, and for those on advanced level courses, it is essential that they are not only
aware of the variety and sheer density of this feature of the language but that they actively
acquire more and more collocations both within and outside the formal teaching situation. It is
only by doing this through increased exposure that they can be assured of leaving the
intermediate plateau behind.
Bibliography
Coe, Norman 'Vocabulary must be learnt, not taught' MET Vol 6 No3 July 1997
Ellis, Nick C 'Vocabulary acquisition: word structure, collocation, word-class, and meaning' in
Schmitt and McCarthy
Gough, Cherry 'Words and words: helping learners to help themselves with collocations' MET
Vol5 No1 Jan 1996
Hill, Jimmie 'Collocational competence' ETP April 1999 Issue 11
Hunt, Roger 'The Iron, the Which and the Wardrobe' IH Journal Issue No2 Nov 1996
Lewis, Michael and Hill, Jimmie Practical Techniques for Language Teaching (LTP 1985)
Lewis, Michael The Lexical Approach (LTP 1993)
Lewis, Michael Implementing the Lexical Approach (LTP 1997)
Lewis, Michael Teaching Collocation (LTP 2000)
Lewis, Morgan 'Setting a good example' ETP Issue 22 Jan 2002
Moon, Rosamund 'Vocabulary connections: multi-word items in English' in Schmitt and
McCarthy
Newton, Jonathan 'Options for vocabulary learning through communication tasks' ELT Journal
Vol55/1 Jan 2001
Read, John Assessing Vocabulary (CUP 2000)
Schmitt, Norbert and McCarthy, Michael (eds) Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition and
Pedagogy (CUP 1997)
Skmen, Anita J 'Current trends in teaching second language vocabulary' in Schmitt and
McCarthy
Thornbury, Scott 'Reformulation and reconstruction: tasks that promote noticing' ELT Journal
Vol51 October 1997
Thornbury, Scott 'The Lexical Approach: a journey without maps?' MET Vol7 No4 Oct 1998
Thornbury, Scott How to Teach Vocabulary (Longman 2002)

Dear Jill,
How is everything? I am sorry about not writing to you for a long time. I am very busy these
days.
I want to tell you that I am having a difficult time. I want to have your opinion about what to do.
First, let me explain what's going on.
I made a new friend a few months ago. We became very close. Actually, we became more than
friends. We are lovers now! He is a nice boy, and I like him a lot, but we have some problems.
Maybe this is because our personalities are different. He is a student like me. His name is Hulusi.
His favourite hobby is watching TV or doing nothing. He always talks about making money. I
can't understand why he behaves like this.
I wanted to speak to him about this many times. But he never agrees to talk to me about it. He
says when he makes a mistake, I should forgive him. Yes, I want to help our relationship, but I
am not making any progress. Believe me, I am doing my best to save our relationship. However,
I should say that I am losing hope.
Please give me some ideas.
Write to me soon.
With love
Your unhappy friend Gll.
ill in the blanks with the correct word 'make', 'do' or 'have'. You might need to make changes to
these words.
Suzan : Did you 1)..a good day then?
Hulusi : It was OK. A bit tiring and boring.
Suzan : Why is that?
Hulusi : You know about the homework I had to do. I hate 2) homework. And after school
I met Gll and we 3)a fight.
Suzan : Oh yes. I think you argue a lot. I wonder why?
Hulusi : She asks too many questions.
Suzan : I see.
Hulusi : Yeah.
Suzan : What do your parents say about this?
Hulusi : They don't know about Gll and me.
Suzan : Why not?
Hulusi : They are busy people and I don't want to worry them.
Suzan : What does your father do?
Hulusi : He 4) business with Istanbul's most dangerous mafia-men, and comes home
very rarely. But he 5) a lot of money!
Suzan : Really? What about your mother?
Hulusi : After my mother 6).her second child, my younger brother Selos, she got very

busy doing housework and looking after the baby.

Suzan : That must be difficult for you.
Hulusi : Not really. I am happy.
Suzan : But Gll is not!
Phrases with 'have', 'make' and 'do'
(to) have
(to) make
(to) do
nothing
one's best
homework
business with someone
a difficult time
someone's opinion about something
problems
a good day
a fight
have a child
friends
money
a mistake
progress
Spot the odd verb
Can you find the verb which does not collocate with the noun in bold?
1. acknowledge, feel, express, make, hide, overcome, admit shame
2. apply for, catch, create, get, hold, hunt for, lose, take up job
3. acquire, brush up, enrich, learn, pick up, tell, use language
4. assess, cause, mend, repair, suffer, sustain, take damage
5. beg, answer, kneel in, offer, say, utter prayer
6. brush, cap, drill, fill, gnash, grit, wash teeth
7. derive, enhance, find, give, pursue, reach, savour, pleasure
8. disturb, interrupt, maintain, observe, pierce, reduce to, suffer silence
1. make 2. catch 3. tell 4. take 5. beg 6. wash 7. reach 8. suffer (only with suffer in
silence)

Which word collocates with all the words given?

1. fried, poached, fresh, raw, frozen, grilled, smoked _________________
2. summer, warm, winter, tatty, shabby, trendy, second-hand _____________
3. dangerous, desperate, common, born, hardened, master _______________
4. massive, huge, crowded, packed, outdoor, indoor, sports _______________
The following sentences include collocations highlighted in bold letters. Some of those
collocations are correct but in some of them we have combined a wrong adjective or verb with
the noun (the noun is always correct). Correct the wrong collocations by writing the
appropriate adjective or verb in each case IN CAPITAL LETTERS.

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advantage.

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heavens, he made dramatic discoveries. He saw that there were many stars invisible
to the naked eye.
As well as the 5 Sky Channels, you can tune into more English and foreign
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Council's "green belt" or "anti-dispersal" policy.
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surely, have the right to have "writer" carved on their tombstones.
"Were you an only child?" He shook his head. "I had a sister, younger than me".
This treatment and the prescribed antibiotics started to make effect and after 4 days
Mr Brown's temperature returned to normal levels and his chest sounded clear.
However you feel, do an effort to sound happy every time you speak.
She has strong views on a wide range of issues.