Aneta Naumoska is an Associate Professor in Linguistics at the English Department, Faculty of Philology (“Ss. Cyril and Methodius” University in Skopje, North Macedonia) and a CELTA-holder. She has been in EFL teaching for 20 years and presented at many Conferences both at home and abroad. Email: naumoska.an@gmail.com 

“Collocation is important from a pedagogical point of view for many reasons” (Lewis 2000: 54). In order to evaluate and exemplify this statement, one needs to first have the groundwork laid in defining the term ‘collocation’. According to the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber et al. 1999), collocations are associations between lexical words which co-occur more frequently than expected by chance; statistical associations rather than relatively fixed expressions, e.g. rapid growth. The individual words in a collocation retain their fixed meaning. Moreover, synonyms are often distinguished by their preferred collocations, e.g. little and small, but little money vs. small company (*little company vs *small money).

This statement is true for my teaching context, i.e. University students of economics taking a mandatory Business English course (aged 20-22, CEFR B2-C1), for the following reasons:

1 These students are to enter the business world in a few years (or few have already entered it) and since collocations are readily used in written business correspondence, topic-specific collocations are in fact a major defining aspect of such an area. In addition, most business English coursebooks I’ve encountered cover the aspect of lexis through collocations, which is based on corpora and the real-life use of business English. Language proficiency within this field and all its sub-fields will be largely determined by the students’ mastery of the common collocations particular to the field. This is why a focus on business collocations is a major priority in my teaching context.

2 Students need to be provided with a broad arsenal of collocations so as to become sensitized towards certain linguistic constraints in word combinations and gain collocational competence. They need to have their awareness of lexis raised when using specific combinations (what is acceptable and what isn’t), especially when those differ from their L1, so as to avoid mis-collocation. Focusing the students’ attention on mis-collocations will make them aware that learning more vocabulary is not simply equivalent to learning new words, but rather it's often learning familiar words in new combinations, all the while developing their mental lexicons, making collocations more tangible for students. The more exposure students have to good quality input and the more they develop the lexical nature of the language, the more they will recognize and eventually produce longer chunks themselves. The metaphor of a puzzle works well in this context: each piece in a puzzle is a constituent to a larger and comprehensive whole that the students are working towards.

3 Viewing things more broadly, integrating collocations practice in classes can provide a useful tool for teachers in their future planning, i.e. the adaptation of the syllabus. The errors students make will paint a picture for the teachers and make them aware of difficulties their students have, which in turn will help teachers to create activities specifically targeted to their own students. This applies not only to novice teachers, who are still learning the ropes in this profession, but also to more experienced teachers. What I’ve noticed in all the years I’ve been teaching is that it feels like the students are becoming more and more impatient in classes, with a declining attention span, uninterested in language they feel they won’t need, so it might be worth trying to increase the time spent on collocations, while slightly limiting the time spent on grammar explanations. In fact, while in the process of preparing the business English coursebook I co-authored (for these specific students), for most of it I was led by the question of which collocations the students are going to come across in their future endeavors, therefore including examples of those. 

A task I have used which focuses on collocation was inspired by a vocabulary-learning activity in Webb & Nation (2017), which I adapted to my context and goals. For homework, I asked students to read several online texts I’d chosen for them (taken from BBC Culture: Worklife), then to highlight all the adjective + noun collocations they could locate, and afterwards, to make a gloss with those collocations. I was aware that it might be a time-consuming homework assignment for the students, so I gave them 2 weeks to complete it. By creating a gloss of collocations, my students gained meaning-focused input (from reading). The learning goal was for them to learn new collocational combinations by noticing them while reading. I had previously discussed the difference between idiomatic expressions and collocations, as well as the organization of dictionaries and what information each entry word contains, so I asked the students to consider this along the way. My students don’t use dictionaries so much, which pushed me forward to do this task and open their eyes as to how much they benefit from dictionaries. There’s evidence that is generally in favor of glossing contributing to vocabulary learning. Furthermore, I see glosses not as a means of learning a single word, but more extensively, as an aid to learning collocations and comprehension of a text. We then checked all the collocations as a group, together with the contexts they appeared in, avoiding translation into their L1 and making use of English as much as they could. Examples of collocations from these texts include skilled workers, inevitable consequences, prospective employers, social capital, vacant role, long-standing issue. Moreover, I suggested that they do this in the future on their own, so I tried to make it clear that this task can be turned into a learning strategy for collocations (learner autonomy). After reflecting on the task and its goals, I can state that it was effective for my students from a receptive aspect as they found approximately 95% of the collocations and could explain their meanings easily. The next time I give this task, I’d definitely make it more complex and challenging, with the addition of collocations of the type: verb + noun (e.g. drop communications) or adverb + adjective (e.g. increasingly discourteous).

To summarize, collocations are essential in teaching Business English due to their frequent use in professional contexts. Defined as common word pairings (e.g., rapid growth), collocations help enhance communication. Mastery of business-specific collocations improves language proficiency and aligns with authentic usage reflected in course materials. Teaching collocations raises students’ awareness of acceptable word pairings, helping them avoid errors, especially when these differ from their L1. Exposure to quality input builds their mental lexicons, enabling them to use familiar words in new combinations. Teachers can additionally use students’ collocation errors to refine syllabi and design focused activities, fostering engagement and practical language use.
 

Bibliography

Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan E. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education Ltd.

Lewis, M. (2000). Language in the lexical approach. In M. Lewis (Ed.). Teaching Collocation: Further Developments in the Lexical Approach. London: Language Teaching Publications.

Webb, S., & Nation, P. (2017). How Vocabulary is Learned. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/worklife
 

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