On the Nature of Collocations and Ways of Teaching Them in Foreign Language Classes

When it comes to teaching vocabulary in foreign language classes words are often taught in isolation, without regard to the context in which they appear. The paper draws attention to the importance of teaching words in context so that the meaning of a word often results from the meaning of a larger construction it is part of. After presenting the morpho-syntactic and semantic characteristics of collocations, and the difficulties language learners face in acquiring them, the paper presents a few ideas on how to teach collocations, giving examples of activities and exercises that can facilitate the learning process. The focus has been laid on activities that can complement the lessons in class, can be applicable at different levels and also require relatively little preparation from the part of the teacher. In addition, an important aspect has been to choose activities that language learning have fun doing (that include creativity, problem solving, humor, real life examples, own experiences, etc.) and that integrate the necessary language learning skills (speaking, listening, reading, and writing). Without the intention of being exhaustive, the paper concentrates on those activities and tasks that present collocations in their entirety, as constructions, assuming that these are the most useful for students. While the ideas presented are generally applicable in foreign language classes, the present paper has been written with native Hungarian speakers in mind.