TESTING YOUR COLLOCATIONSAs David Wilkins observed many years ago, "Without grammar little can be conveyed; without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed." The single most important task facing language learners is acquiring a sufficiently large vocabulary. We now recognise that much of our 'vocabulary' consists of prefabricated chunks of different kinds. The single most important kind of chunk is collocation. Self-evidently, then, teaching collocation should be a top priority in every language course.
ODD ONE OUT
One verb in each line does not collocate with the noun. Cross out the one which does not fit.
1 - accept, act on, disregard, follow, ignore, make, solicit, take
ADVICE
2 - come up with, do, expect, get, require, supply
AN ANSWER
3 - build up, close down, set up, put off, take over, wind up
A BUSINESS
4 - deal with, do, examine, ignore, reject, respond to
A COMPLAINT
Adapted from "Teaching Collocation" by Michael Lewis
Check the answers on 27 May
This will be uber-useful for my test!
ReplyDelete@Pri
ReplyDeleteHi honey,
I've got a whole book (not a dictionary) of collocations which I'd be more than happy to share with you and anyone else who might be interested.
How cool is that?
I was stunned by the amount of support I received from this blog. The collocations fired my imagination.I've been garnering valuable information by reading this blog.
ReplyDeleteThanks!!
@Si,
ReplyDeleteI am just in love with the History Trivia. It´s been providing us non stop with very interesting information
@Danuza
ReplyDeleteI agree! I've been learning a lot of interesting stuff in the History Trivia.
Doing by "ear", as I'm most likely to do, these are the results I got:
ReplyDelete1 - make ADVICE (close with solicit!)
2 - do AN ANSWER
3 - wind up A BUSINESS
4 - do A COMPLAINT
This is kind of difficult doing because it's something so natural to natives and yet we have to memorize all that.
Well, the 27th is just around the corner.
@Felipe
ReplyDeleteHi Felipe,
You aren't half bad at collocations, are you?
Check out the correct answers tomorrow.