Learning English

Fun collocation activities

Dan and Sian discuss some interesting things to do while teaching collocations

Watch the video and complete the activity

___________________________________________________________________

Did you like that? Why not try these?

 ____________________________________________________________________________________

Fun collocation activities

Collocations are commonly put together pairings of words. They can be weakly or strongly related. Learning them will greatly enhance your students' use of vocabulary and speaking skills. So here are a few fun and memorable activities you can use to practise them.

Collocation race
The easiest way to practise collocations is to have students sort them into columns on the board. Split the board into columns with half a collocation as a heading. Then call out, hand out or provide the other half and have students put them in the right columns. To make this competitive, create two teams and have a race. 

Collocation place
Divide your teaching space into several areas and assign one half of a collocation to each area. Then call out the other half. Students must move to the space which represents the matching collocation pair. Once they get there, have them make a sentence using the collocation.

Collocation aim
Great for young learners, or just doing something a bit different! Get the students to screw up paper into balls. Draw targets on the board and assign them a collocation half. Then call out the other half and have students throw their balls at the correct target. Or, if you have a class that gets on well, you can assign students as targets for a bit of fun.

Collocation mingle
Print collocations on cards – half of the pair on one card and the other half on another. Distribute these cards to students and have them mingle with each other to try and find their collocation partner. To make things a bit more challenging, use one or two collocations that could have more than one possible pairing.

Collocation gap fill
For higher level students, or those doing academic work. Take an authentic text, find relevant collocations and blank out one half of each collocation pair. Then give the students the text and ask them to work together to complete it using whatever word they think is correct.

To do

Try our quiz to see if you've picked up our tips.

Get involved

Well, those were just a few ideas that we here at BBC Learning English had, but we know that you teachers out there have lots of fantastic ideas too, and we’d like you to share them with us and everybody else.

If you have a great tip or technique for teaching collocations, or anything else, please email us at learningenglish@bbc.co.uk. Your email could be posted here on this page, or may even be mentioned in our show.

We are also looking for video tips to include in the programme. In order to do this, please include whether or not you’d like to be included for video with your tip, and we'll get in touch with you. You could be rewarded with a T-shirt for your efforts.

End of Session 4

Next up is Learners' Questions. What will this week's Learner Question be? Whatever it is, Dan's here with the answer! Join us in Session 5 to find out.