What’s one skill that really helps push learners over the “intermediate plateau”, towards B2 and beyond? The ability to understand and use collocations! Collocational competence, as it is called, is a fundamental component of becoming a skilled user of English, allowing a learner to be more concise, more precise and more natural in what they say and write. For instance, instead of I felt myself well at the party they learn the simple but more natural I had a great time at the party.
How can we help learners with collocations? Well, one way is familiarising them with some of the valuable online collocation resources such as the Online OXFORD Collocation dictionary, Ozdic and SkELL. If we can encourage learners to use these sites outside of class time (when preparing writing homework for instance) then we have empowered them to use key tools that will help develop their collocational competence through self-study. But we need to introduce them in class first.
There are lots of activities we can use to familiarise learners with such tools; here’s one simple procedure I use: collocation riddles.
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Elicit the idea of riddles – you can show a picture of the Sphinx of Thebes and share her famous riddle: what walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon and three legs in the evening? Man: crawling as a baby, upright as an adult, and walking with a stick as an elderly person.
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Tell the students you will now share a riddle. They need to find out what or who you are. When they think they know, they should write it down, but not shout it out.
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The riddle: I can be hard or soft, salty or fresh. I flow, I pour, I run, I drip. You can boil me, freeze me, bottle me, drink me. You check my temperature before you swim in me.
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Ask the students to check their ideas together, saying how they guessed it. The answer is water. In feedback, point out the clues were all about common collocations with water e.g. fresh water, water flows and drips, we boil water, drink water, check the water temperature before we swim in it etc.
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Tell them they will work in pairs or small groups to create their own riddle now. You will give them a noun, and they need to look up collocations for it using one of the resources linked above (you can print relevant pages if you don’t have internet in class).
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Give out the nouns in secret. I suggest choosing common nouns with a range of potential collocations to choose from e.g. fire, air, food, house, tree, mountain, coffee, chocolate, love. Select ones your students will enjoy creating a riddle for. Advise them not to start with the most obvious collocation – it should get easier as the riddle develops.
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If you feel your learners need more support, give them a frame e.g. I am (3 or 4 adjectives). I (3 or 4 verbs). You can___ me (3 or 4 verbs). One last sentence of your choice.
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Circulate and help where necessary. When they have finished, regroup the students so they are in small groups where each member has a different noun. They take turns to read out their riddle and others write down their guesses. They can then share which words – which collocations – helped them guess it.
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Wrap the activity up by eliciting what is important about collocations: they help us be accurate and rich in our English; and why these sites are useful – because they can use them at home whenever they want to. If your students seemed to enjoy it, ask them to create one more riddle for homework.
Reflection: this is a creative awareness-raising activity that helps reinforce the importance of collocation but also, crucially, introduces tools that learners can use autonomously. A useful next step would be to remind them to use these sites before they do their next writing homework, for instance, looking up key words for an essay and finding useful collocations they can incorporate into it. Come back a little and often to these websites, helping students get used to and comfortable with the idea of them.