Collocations, Phrasal Verbs and Idioms

Two weeks ago I gave a workshop on phrasal verbs, idioms and collocations.

I believe that teaching collocations is similar to teaching any other vocabulary area and similar rules and principles do apply to it; similar types of activities and games can be used in the classroom.

However, many of us feel less confident when teaching collocations and we do it rather randomly …. unsystematically … once in a blue moon … only if there is an exercise in the coursebook  … even though it should be a part of our every day regular classroom practice from elementary level of students.

CALL MY BLUFF! Which is the correct definition of a collocation? 

e) a word or a phrase not used literally, but used to describe somebdy or something in a more graphic way and to make the description more powerful, e.g. he flew to the door

b) informal words and expressions that are more common in spoken language, especially used by a particular group of people, e.g. teenagers. They often go in and out of fashion very quickly.

c) a frequent combination of words in a language. Often they are the only possible combination to express the concept, e.g. heavy rain

 openclipart.org

Give it a try. Play the Call my bluff game with your students to pre-teach or to recycle vocabulary. Give students words and ask them to prepare three definitions (making use of their monolingual dictionaries); one correct, two distractors. Or, give them collocations, idioms, or phrasal verbs to define!

Here are some statements on collocations. Do you agree with them?

Cllcatins, hw wrds ccr togthr in spech nd wrtng, re n imprtnt prt f spekng and wrtng flently.

Usng cllcatons crrctly cn mke yur Englsh sund ntral, flent and mre prcse.

Cllcatns occr s frquntly in Engish tht stdnts ned to mstr thm if thy ar evr ging to prgrss.

OOPS, MY DOG HAS EATEN ALL THE VOWELS! Can you identify the message?

Btw, try this activity with your students to introduce a new topic, a text (e.g. a headline, the first paragraph), to warm them up.

Look at these expressions. Can you use three of them in a personal sentence(s).

• make a mistake
• apply for a job
• totally unaware 
• shrug shoulders
• live dangerously
  heavy rain
• to see eye to eye
• film star
• give up
• half understand
• to set the ball rolling
• run out of money

Can you identify any types of collocations, e.g. adverb + adjective (e.g. completely incomprehensible).

Here are some practical tips for teaching collocations:

• Fristly, make students aware of collocations.
• Help them identify them in context.
• Teach collocations, practise them and use them in context and full sentences.
• Help students to group them and record them effectively (e.g. by topic, or using collocation forks). 
• Help them remember them with images, stories, TPR activities.
• Do not teach them in isolation and/or through long lists from a coursebook. 
• Do not overwhelm them (up to 6, 8 expressions at one go?)

Present and recycle collocations in groups. You can use so called COLLOCATION FORKS. 

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E.g.     make                                               

            earn

            save                     money

           spend

Think of collocation forks your students should know.

A)     dictate the verbs, ask students to guess the missing nouns, e.g. pass/take/fail … an exam.

B)     Write down the forks on the board. Erase the verb; keep first letters only, gap it out for students to reconstruct coming to the board one after another.

BANANA STORY  

Make students put all related collocations into a short story to remember them beter.

openclipart.org

I banana(ed) my final exam last week but I banana(ed). Hopefully I’ll banana next time.

PHOTO OF MY COLLOCATIONS

Distribute collocations/groups of collocations to your students. Ask them to take a photo on their mobile phone (give them a time limit in the classroom or ask them to do it for homework/on their way to work/in the office). Then they work in pairs/small groups and recycle the collocations. Be creative with the follow-up activity. Make them use the collocations.

DICE GAME

Write numbers 1-6 on the board. Elicit collocations from a text students have just read. Then students roll the dice. They use the word they have chosen in a story/first line of a story/in a poem/in a personalized sentence/in a question/in the “I´d like to find someone who…” phrase.

Make sure to replace the collocations you have used with another examples from the text. You can look for different types, e.g. 1 – noun + noun, 2 – adjective + noun. 

BUSY BETTY, LAZY LEO

Introduce characters such as Busy Betty, Lazy Leo, Happy Henry, Exhausted Eve, Cool Cathy, or Frustrated Fionna to students. They choose one character and write a diary entry/tweet using as many collocations as possible. E.g. On Monday … 

COLLOCATION TENNIS

Learners take turns to add collocations to create a chain of collocations. The word which collocates can come before the previous one (presenter – sports (presenter)) or after it (television – (television) presenter).

You could have a string such as:

Heavy – traffic – light – colour – television – presenter – sports – adventure – hair-raising – film  - series – crime – appalling – weather – forecast …

I use an online collocation dictionary with students. They enter the word into a seach engine,scan the entry and choose the  next collocation.

Make it authentic

It is important to see and teach collocations in context. Do not forget to use authentic sources, show them the language in magazine articles, songs, cartoons, adverts.

Google Run out of

Simply, google the collocation (e.g. run out of) and use authentic headlines, song titles, etc. to help students understand and use the collocations.

Guess the collocation

When working with a text, I often use an activity in which students listen to the story and when I pause, they try to guess what comes next. Then read more, pause, and let them guess the word(s) again. Of course, the process of guessing is more important the “correct” answers.

A success story

In 2005, Sheri Schmelzer was a 40-year-old stay-at-home …

mom when she decided to get …

creative with …

her family's multiple pairs of Crocs …

shoes. The plastic slip-on …

shoes have ventilation …

holes across the top and Schmelzer, armed …

with …

clay created mix-and-match designs that would fit in the …

holes.

Collocation Treasure Hunt

Before reading a text, give each student/pair a note indicating a type of collocation, e.g. noun + noun, or instructions such as “Find an expression which means … Find a two-part verb which means …a chunk which means…” . They read the text and find the lexis.

Of course, make the task learner-centred. They create the prompts for another pair themselves.

 Mime the Collocations

Before students read the text, write the collocations from a text on the board. Students work in pairs and prepare to mime the collocations.

Then read the text aloud and students act out the collocations when they hear them.

Variation: Students read silently the text and they mime the words as they come along them.

It´s my Collocation – Do not Jump the Queue

Distribute collocations to students, each on a separate poster/card. Students listen to a song and when they hear the phrase, they have to put up the card.

Variation: With a bigger group, they are asked to come to the board when they hear their phrase and stand in a line. If they hear the phrase for the second time, they have to move to the end of the line.

The activity was done in the workshop.

So, would you like to add your own collocation activity? Share it with us! 

Intriguing Pronunciation Activator

Do the textbooks you use help you to teach pronunciation? Can your students pronounce and understand spoken language better at the end of your course?  Is there a wide range of activities and features you cover in the class? Are individual sounds practised? Do students develop awareness of spelling-pronunciation rules? Are students able to use monolingual dictionaries to check pronunciation? Is there enough focus on rhythm, intonation, sentence stress in conversation?

Which of these statements are true for you?

• I often tend to avoid/skip the pronunciation activities in the coursebook.
• I do these activities once in a blue moon.
• I do not know how to add activities my students need from other sources.
• I hardly ever “recycle“ what students have learned about pronunciation.
• I don´t know how to help them get rid of their fossilized mistakes in the area of pronunciation.
• I have never played a “pronunciation“ game with my adult students.
• I simply do not feel like teaching pronuncation to my students.
• IPA, phoneme, contrastive stress, what the hell is that?

We will not have a look at a lecture on pronunciation. Today, we will have a look at a couple of activities and games to help you bring pronunciation to the classroom. Make it part of your everyday teaching.

Just do not make big fuss about it. Do not scare your students with IPA and theory. What they need is to play with the language and increase their awareness of some pronunciation-related features. Saying words aloud, playing with rhymes, reading and recognizing homophones, creating tongue twistes, enjoying limerics or knock-knock jokes … this is what really makes the difference.

Read my lips warmer

Silently mouth some words (topic-related,e .g. sports – football, cricket, golf, tennis, yoga) in front of the class and let them lip read and guess the words. Then they can practise in pairs.

Rhyming Pair Memory Game

Prepare cards with words such as a name, box, day, bee. Students work in groups and prepare rhymes for these words on separate cards. Then they pass the set of cards to another group who place them face down and play pellmanism looking for rhyming pairs. 

 Homophone Fairy Tale

Intoduce homophones through my favourite fairy tale. My students love it. Read it. Rewrite it. Play pelmanism with the pairs of words.  Act the story out. Sing it. Record it. Take photos on a cell phone to illustrate it. Write your own homophone-packed fairy tale or story … 

Homophone Relay Race

Divide students into two groups and have one person from each group come to the front board. Read a sentence which uses one of a pair of homophones. The first student to correctly write that homophone on the board scores a point for his team.

Tongue twisters – students create them based on different sounds – do not only limit it to „th“ etc. use the i:  symbol, for example. Meeting people is easy, leaving them is really queasy.

I introduce tongue twisters at Christmas with sentences such as Seven silly santas sitting slightly stuffed instead of sledging silently down the slope … 

The “Yes?!” Game: Write a simple phrase on the board, e.g. Yes. Or How are you.  Student A will say is repeatedly expressing different feelings by varying their stress and intonation. Student B tries to guess the feeling A is trying to express.

Text Treasure Hunt

Students read a text (a paragraph of a text) and try to identify every use of a certain sound, e.g. i:.

Nowadays, many course books use IPA. Students are not required to transcribe words using IPA but they are required to understand the words. This is especially important so that they can look up new words in a dictionary and be able to pronounce them correctly. However, many of them use electronic dictionaries and they just click on the pronunciation button and can hear how the word is pronounced by a native speaker.

Here are some things to do to make students less scared of the IPA symbols. Focus on sounds in words or in context, do not teach isolated sounds.

IPA warmer

Write a couple of topic-related words in IPA on the board. Students try to recognize the words and guess the topic of the lesson.

Song IPA quiz

Write some song titles, movie titles, book titles, etc. in IPA and ask students to decode.

IPA Letter

Write a short email/letter to your students in IPA script (e.g. telling them something about you, the course they are studying). Students can try to reply witing 1-2 sentences about themselves.

Variation: Write a secret message to your students, e.g. what the topic of the lesson is, what activities they can choose from, etc.

Mr/Ms Right

This is an activity to pair students up. Each has a word in IPA, they mingle and look for their partner. The activity can be based on synonyms, opposites, collocations, etc.

Dominoes – word plus word in IPA. Make the learners create the cards !

Boardgames – Use any board grid. Add phonems (symbols) for students to come up with different words or add word stress patterns (using small/big circles) for students to come up with words which copy the pattern or come up with difficult words to pronounce (fossilized mistakes) for them to pronounce correctly or use correctly and say right in a sentence

Phonemic noughts and crosses – write a sound in each square on the board. The Student needs to say a word which contains the sound in the square.

Pronuciation Scavenger Hunts: Ask students to find as many objects as they can with a specific vowel or consonant sound in the classroom or decribing a picture in their coursebook.

A board race – they race to the board to write as many words as they can with the sound of the phonemic symbol you have written at the top.

Dice game  - A variation to my favourite dice game. Write numbers 1-6 on the board. Brainstorm difficult sounds and add one symbol to each number. Then they roll a dice and they have to write/say as many different words containing the sound as possible.

Variation: Match the numbers with „difficult“ words to pronounce. Then they have to make as many sentences using the word as the number indicates. Focus on Czenglish words /fossilized mistakes, e.g. sweater, early, although …

Here are some activities to focus on stress and rhythm.

Syllable pyramids: Have students build syllable pyramids.  The teacher gives a topic (clothing, objects in the classroom, subjects at school, animals, food, etc.) and students race to build a pyramid. (One syllable word at the top, the a 2-syllable word, 3-syllable word, etc.)  

Word stress columns: For the word-stress game, divide the class into two or three groups. On the blackboard, draw a table with three columns, marking each column with the numbers one through three (representing which syllable should be stressed). Read a word with three or more syllables out loud and have the first team to start write the answer in the correct column. For example, if you say the word "happily" the team should write the word under the first column; if you say "understand" the team should write the word under the third column.

Tapping: In pairs, one partner taps a stress pattern and the other partner identifiees any words with that pattern.

Silent Conversation

Students try to identify which sentence in a dialogue the teacher or a student has chosen without them using any English sounds. Either they can wave their arms around to show sentence stress or intonation, or beat out the rhythm on the sentence on the table…

Limerics

Limerics are good for showing them the rhythm of the language. Use these links and listen to, pronounce, and write your own lymerics. 

Well, what do you do to practise pronunciation? Share your board games with us, add examples of homophone fairy tales you have created, lists of words you managed to teach, domino cards you have prepared, rhyming quizes you used!

/bai bai/

Katka

PS Do not forget to go back to the statements at the beginning of the post again next month. Do you feel better teaching pronunciation? What are your tips for teachers who struggle with it?