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The Importance of Teaching Collocations
The Importance of Teaching Collocations
Firstly, if you do not teach collocations, you are ignoring a large set of items which express
often complex ideas very simply and yet precisely.
Secondly, the fewer collocations students are able to use, the more they have to use longer
expressions with much more grammaticalisation to communicate something which a native
speaker would express with a precise lexical phrase and correspondingly little grammar.
Notice too, that if native speakers usually express an idea lexically with a collocation, the
non-native speaker not knowing the lexical item, has to use grammar to express the idea in a
way which they have not heard in that context - they have no model to guide them.
Many grammatical errors are caused by lexical deficiencies, and that the best response to
many of these errors at intermediate and advanced levels is to do more lexical work in place
of grammatical correction.
Task What event, situation or topic does each of these collocations suggest:
widely available
routine check-up
disperse the crowd
catch up with the news
boost employment
Here are some authentic examples from a corpora of the two verbs repair and treat: