Speaking and writing activities for collocations

Speaking activities

• Get the students to do creative drills. For example, devise a 'Find somebody who...' activity for them to practise collocations. For example,

• Find someone who

• .....has been on a strict diet

• .....has been in an embarrassing position

• .....has made a critical choice in his/her life etc.

• The students themselves could make up similar activities.

• Get the students to repeat the same activity, for example giving a short talk or telling a story, perhaps three of four times. This has been shown to boost fluency by activating collocations.

• Ask the students to brainstorm nouns on a particular subject, perhaps for a 

writing task e.g. what are the collocations of 'money'. Then get them to suggest verbs 

and adjectives that collocate with those nouns, then adverbs with the verbs, thus 

building up a number of lexically dense collocational fields.