Checking A Dictionary Is Not Always Enough
Most upper-intermediate and advanced students of a foreign language find it difficult to choose the right vocabulary in their speaking, but especially in their writing, when they want to use to use more ‘difficult’, abstract or academic language or when they want to be more creative with the language. They end up checking a dictionary and using words that do not work together or which make the language sound unnatural. But there is an easy way for language learners to solve this problem and it does not cost anything. Make Use Of Corpora What is a corpus? A corpus is a collection of samples of spoken and written language from a variety of sources that have been feed into a computer to create a database of words. There are different corpora that you as a learner of English as a foreign language can access. Find a summary here. There are corpora for other languages, too. What Is A Collocation? Without wanting to go into too much detail about vocabulary learning, I am sure you are all aware that words cannot be put together completely randomly in a language. Just to give you an example, you cannot say a ‘handsome’ woman in English as the adjective ‘handsome’ goes together with the characteristic ‘male’. So ‘handsome’ man is correct to say and if you want to express the same idea for a woman, you need to use the adjective ‘beautiful’. This is an example of a collocation. A collocation refers to how words are put together or form fixed relationships and any language is full of these including your native language. The Benefits Of A Corpus And How to Use It A corpus can help you to find the right collocations. Here is how. Once you have accessed a corpus, you can type in any word or a number of connected words. For example, if you want to find out if you can say a ‘big’ burden or if ‘heavy’ or ‘great’ are better alternatives, you would check how many entries each adjective produces in the corpus. In the BYU Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), there are 53 entries for ‘big’ burden, ‘great’ burden has 65 entries and ‘heavy’ burden has 292 entries. So what do you think? Which adjective is the best match for burden? Exactly, the adjective ‘heavy’ because of its much higher frequency. You can say that heavy and burden form a strong collocation. Or you can just see if the collocation you are thinking of actually is a collocation. Type it in and if there are less than 30 entries, chances are that it is not a collocation or not a strong one anyway and you should not use it. But there is more, you can go to the individual entries in the corpus and read the contexts in which the collocation is used to make absolutely sure that this is exactly the context for which you wanted to use the word. Job done! Practice Makes Perfect! This method might not work for beginners or intermediate students as they are lacking the necessary proficiency in the language to use it effectively. But you can still give it a try. After doing this a couple of times you will get the hang of it and you will always choose the right words for what you want to say. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ If you are looking to increase your vocabulary, have a look at the new section of my website with helpful resources for learning vocabulary here. FOLLOW ME ON FACEBOOK: DNK TUITION
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AuthorDavid Koch- Language Teaching Expert Follow Me
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