Cycles of Recycling: Cycle 2

Extending students' word knowledge with Collocation forks

If the previous cycle used collocations that students have come across in texts, this one involves more explicit teaching and elaboration. To help learners fully understand and use a new word, it is useful to provide them with its common collocates. This is particularly important with partially learnt vocabulary items.

Recording collocations

“Collocation fork” is a useful way of recording collocations when you want to elaborate on possible uses of a word. Draw it on the board and make sure students copy it into their vocabulary notebooks. Slowly they will get used to this recording format. For example, this is the word fork expanding the verb “join”

	an organization
join	the army
	the club

Download this HANDOUT where collocation forks appear more clearly or see an example in this photo:

If you want to provide translations, remind your students that they have to translate the whole expression, rather than the word “join”. This will make them aware that words do not correspond on word-for-word basis:

	an organization	devenir membre d’un organisation
join	the army	s'engager dans l'armée
	the club	adhérer à un club

Obviously, if you want to elaborate on a noun, a reverse fork should be used:

take
pass	(an) exam
fail

You can also use collocation forks to highlight impossible collocations, i.e. common learner mistakes which, for instance, can be a result of negative linguistic transfer.

take
pass	(an) exam
fail

make

Activity 1 – Make up a story

For example: I took my final exam last week but I failed. Hopefully I’ll pass next time.

This works well if the key word is a noun. For suggested collocations click here (scroll to page 2).
Online dictionaries, such as Cambridge and Macmillan, or online corpus (http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/) are good sources of collocations.

Activity 2 – Guess the key word

What is the key word in these collocation forks?

	an organization
___________	the army
	the club

	the story
___________	your face
	all the points

You can draw a few collocation forks on the board and as an option provide a list of the key words (join, cover etc).
This works really well if you have an Interactive WhiteBoard (IWB) because all you have to do is go back to the page where you first drew the forks and simply erase the key words.

You can also turn this into a reverse translation activity where you provide three sentences in your students’ L1 and tell them which word (a verb in this case) will be present in all the English translations.

	__________	pagar el alquiler
___________	__________	prestar atencion
	__________	costearse los estudios

Activity 3 – Recall the collocations

At the end of the lesson, after you have collected a few word forks on the board, leave the key word but erase the collocates and get your students to recall them. You can give the first letter as a hint

	o …
join (a/the)	a …
	c …

The idea here is to gradually move from pure recognition (passive knowledge) to actually producing correct collocations (active knowledge). At the beginning of the next lesson, write the keywords on the board again and ask students to provide the collocations, this time without a hint. For example,

	__________
cover	__________
	__________

	__________
attend	__________
	__________

Once again, IWBs allow you to do this activity more efficiently, since you won't have to draw the forks all over again every time. You simply erase the collocates written in the prongs.

Activity 4 – Collocation race

Draw a few collocation forks you have recently focused on in class on the board.

Divide the class into three teams. Each team should send their representative (“captain”) to the board. Supply each captain with a board marker of a different colour. Now each captain should fill one space in each fork with a correct collocation. Each team is allowed to provide only one collocation for each fork so that by the end of the activity each fork has three differently coloured collocations. Each captain is of course allowed to consult with his or her team. The team who finishes first is the winner. However, you have to go through the collocations on the board and eliminate incorrect ones before you announce the winner.

Alternatively, this activity can be done as a relay race. The first member of each team takes a marker, races to the board, writes one collocation and races back to hand the marker to another member of their team. Again, go through the collocations before you decide on the winner.

More recycling activities? Go to Cycles 3 and 4
in ETAI Forum (pp. 9-12)

Also see: Revisiting texts on TeachingEnglish website, which is a variation on Cycle 4 combined with Just-the-Word