By Daniel Gomes
When consulting with students, we often encounter word combinations that are not strictly wrong; they are simply not quite right. My general response is to provide alternatives that sound more smooth. When doing so, however, I often found myself wondering: is there a more in-depth way to help students decide which words go together?
Recently, our multilingual specialist, Deepti Dhir, introduced me to a great resource for this type of engagement: an online corpus of collocations, “Word and Phrase.” Collocations refer to words or phrases frequently juxtaposed. Imaginations are often “stimulated,” conclusions “drawn,” and buses, colds and fires “caught.” Designed by Mark Davies, Professor of Linguistics at Brigham Young University, the database rank collocations by frequency of usage and allows users to explore individual words and their partner words. I have found this resource to be a really useful supplement in sessions, particularly when paired with a collocations dictionary designed for students.
First, it’s convenient. This semester, a student brought in a paper peppered with “awk” in the margins. Most, she explained, marked places where she incorporated direct translations from her Chinese-to-English dictionary. With “Word and Phrase,” I guided the student to practice a variety of different relationship phrases. A quick search for “care,” for example, yielded phrases such as: “extra care,” “take care,” “standard care,” etc. Particularly in building vocabulary, collocates help students think about the relationships words share with other words—a far more retentive activity than using words in isolation.
Aside from their practicality, the collocations dictionary and database provide an important metacognitive function. I have found that defining collocations for students, as well as the logic of the dictionary and database, is valuable in itself. When struggling with landing on the right expression, we often think in terms of a one-to-one ratio: the perfect word lies in wait for each of our thoughts. But we also know that language is as relational as it is symbolic. Referring to collocations during sessions emphatically demonstrates how many of the lexical decisions we make owe not to an inherent connection, but to the frequency of their usage. Acknowledging this arbitrariness has the added benefit of assuring students that when they misuse pairings (such as with the treacherous “have” or “make”), they have not committed some logical error.
I’m still very much in the process of using collocation resources effectively in sessions. Admittedly, the plenitude of language the database returns can be overwhelming, and its interface can be intimidating, as it is designed for linguistic analysis. I’m finding the most success with the dictionary and database when I use them sparingly. Introducing too much language can overwhelm, and, understandably, students can become anxious when their attention is diverted from their paper for too long. Having students learn and incorporate a handful of collocates into their papers, though, can help them more confident in using words and phrases in a future context.
Published December 1, 2016
