Teaching Collocations with a User-Friendly Corpus-Based Material

Collocations are "the combination of words formed when two or more words are often used together in a way that sounds correct" and the use of collocations can help English learners to speak fluently and sound natural. That’s why my partner Ertuğrul İğdir (click here to visit Ertuğrul's blog) and I chose to create a worksheet as a corpus-based teaching material for one of our ELT courses. 

With this teaching material, we aimed to teach how to use an online corpus to find collocations of words. In other words, after using this material, students will be able to find collocations of words by using a corpus. This will help students figure out which words to use together. 

Specifically, we designed the material for high school preparatory class students, and we used the coursebook prepared by MoE to create the practice exercises on the worksheet. 

Since Canva provides many worksheet templates that are easy to edit and adapt, we used Canva to design our four-part worksheet. In the first part, we asked students to write the correct verbs to test their knowledge. 

In the second part, we asked students to look up the collocations of the verbs and check their answers in the first exercise, and also, demonstrated how to use corpora to find collocations. 

In the third part, we requested students to write down three collocations for the given verbs. Finally, in the fourth part, we wanted students to complete sentences with the correct forms of the verbs. 

As for the possible problems that might occur during the implementation of the worksheet, some students may need assistance to use the online corpora despite the visual instructions. Moreover, maybe they can manage to use the corpus properly but finding the right collocations can take significant time. 

In summary, we have designed simple and user-friendly material to teach students how to use corpora and find useful collocations.