Collocations and the Practice of TESOL

Abstract

Not long ago, collocation has emerged as a significant category of lexical patterning and it is soon becoming an established unit of description in language teaching courses and materials. For native speakers of English, this kind of knowledge is largely instinctive. Second language learners, on the other hand, need to put some effort to learn collocation in order to make their speech and writing sound much more natural and native-like. In fact, the pervasiveness of collocations and their arbitrary nature impose a challenge for both, learners and teachers. Even if most collocation learning might occur outside the classroom, formal study is needed, whether the learner is able to acquire collocations immediately or not. Educators and methodologists have set certain guidelines for teaching this important area of vocabulary. They have agreed on three things: first, the necessity of raising awareness of collocation among teachers and learners, second, the importance of selecting what collocations to teach, and third, the importance of providing simple categorization of collocation for the learners. As TESOL practitioners, we should list collocation competence as a teaching objective, and equip our students with the means to gain this kind of competence so that they can continue developing it after they leave the ESL class. This instructional article shed some light on current TESOL perspectives and practices in regard to teaching and learning collocations. The theoretical part focuses on collocation’s definition, types, and features, and discusses the importance of collocations for the L2 learner. The practical part explores the difficulties collocation presents for the L2 learner, and provide teachers with some useful strategies and activities for teaching collocations.