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Multiple Affordances of Language Corpora for Data-driven Learning
Edited by Agnieszka Leńko-Szymańska and Alex Boulton
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 69] 2015
► pp. 85–108

Stealing a march on collocation

Deriving extended collocations from full text for student analysis and synthesis

| Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University

Full text affords language learners many opportunities to observe a wide range of linguistic features whose typicality they can ascertain through corpus searches. The particular features investigated in this chapter revolve around the collocations of key words in texts. Given that knowing a collocation in no way guarantees its correct use, a procedure referred to as Collocation Plus has been developed in which learners explore the lexical and grammatical environments of collocations in the contexts in which they meet them. This is an important process in making receptive vocabulary productive. Learners may then formalise their findings into ‘word templates’ which are then available for production. This work combines some recent findings in linguistics, language acquisition and pedagogy to help learners produce language that is more accurate, fluent, idiomatic and sophisticated, whilst developing their autonomy in using the resources available and raising their consciousness of the processes involved.

Keywords: affordances, Collocation Plus, guided discovery, Hoey procedure, Sketch Engine, topic trail, two-lexeme collocation, word template
Published online: 13 May 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.69.05tho
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