Collocations for foreign language learners
By William Roger Jones
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In the jargon of linguistics, English lexicographer Henry Watson Fowler popularized the significant expression and precise term “collocation.” It is the sequence of words or terms which are found to co-occur more often than would be expected by chance, such as “crystal clear” and “cosmetic surgery.”
In the world of corpus (a collection of recorded utterances used as a basis for the descriptive analysis of a language) linguistics and psycholinguistics, it has been discovered that there is a probable, statistical, noticeable arrangement of words that now serve as a best source for fluency for foreign language learners. Collocations present and enable recall much more efficiently and effortlessly than a mere rote memory of any specific vocabulary list.
Exactly, what are collocations? They are words that you see together most often. In other words, they are words that “fit” together. They are culturally embedded conventionalizations that all languages possess. They occur in predictable ways and are natural and sound right.
A language is not just its words. “…you could memorize thousands of a language’s words and still have less ability to communicate than a three-year-old, because how the words are put together is equally central to what a language is.”
For example, were you to examine a corpus for the expression “your homework,” what preceding verb would most often be used, “do, make, or take?” The phrase “make your homework” would be very odd, although it communicates in a sour fashion. “Take your homework” is possible, however, the probability lies with “do your homework”.
There are no collocation rules in the sense that there may be grammar rules. However, there are collocation restrictions for careful use. For example, one would not say “tall mountains” or “high trees,” but rather “high mountains” and “tall trees.”
The foreign language learner is much more apt to create a useful sentence with the combination rather than with the individual words. With the “pre-fabricated chunks of lexis,” one can process and produce language at a much faster rate. Too, learners can express precisely what they want to say and it will not sound affected or stilted. Clearly, “He has a permanent disability,” overrides “He has a disability forever.” Even grammarians agree with us on this aspect of usage.
As a scholar’s books are his tools, so are collocations to the foreign language learner. One will discover that grammar is acquired naturally and secondarily with ease to these tools. These clusters of words or lexical neighbors will do more work for you than any vocabulary list of singular words.
Hereinabove, I sincerely hope the expounding has “piqued your interest” and that you have been quickened to “look into” the benefits of learning collocations and “make a decision” to do so. Collocations have been “tried and tested” and you would “do well” to “take advantage” of this device and “make a list” for review and practice, and you shall find that “little by little” it will “make a difference” in your fluency.
The writer has taught conversational English for 15 years. He currently works for Virginia State University. His e-mail address is: wrjones@vu.edu.