Category Archives: Collocations

What is the next new collocation you are learning?

Academic Writing, Collocations, EAL graduate students, Goal setting, International graduate students, Posts by Kaveh, Productivity, Reading, Vocabulary

By Kaveh Tagharobi

In my last post, I wrote about the importance of learning new collocations through reading and listening activities. Now, I am going to discuss how to record, practice, and learn those new collocations in a way that you can easily use them in your writing and speaking.

You all might have learned new words and collocations that you either forget after a while or seldom use in your writing and speaking. There are probably a group of words and collocations that you frequently see in different texts, and each time you see them, you wonder what exactly they mean. You might have a vague idea, but you are never a hundred percent sure. Or maybe you recognize and understand the word or collocation upon seeing them, but you don’t seem to remember to use them in similar situations when you write or speak. These are very common issues for many EAL writers and speakers, and in the following paragraphs I am going to introduce some simple strategies to help you learn new words and collocations at a level that they become part of your subconscious knowledge and you can effortlessly use them.

The first step is to create a list where you record the new collocations and words that you come across while reading and listening. Many of you might have attempted this in the past: to keep a list of the new words you learn. But has it helped you learn those words better and remember them more easily? Having an effective way of recording information about newly-learned items is the first step in learning them well. I have seen word lists that stretch like two parallel trains; one train is the new words and the one next to it is the translations. This way of keeping new words is not very helpful. Firstly because translations cannot fully capture the meaning of a word or collocation. We can’t always draw parallels between two languages, and translations do not account for the context in which a word or collocation is used. The second reason why keeping translations is not effective is that it does not provide a meaningful learning opportunity, and therefore it is easier to forget the new word after a while. We need something that offers a deeper understanding of the new collocations, and this is why I recommend keeping example sentences instead of translations or definitions. An example sentence features the new word or collocation in context and provides a much better opportunity to both learn and remember it better.

I recommend my students keep three example sentences for each new word or collocation that they add to their list. The first is the original sentence in which they saw that word or collocation for the first time. The second one is a dictionary example, and the last one is a sentence they make. Keeping these three sentences helps you both understand the meaning of the new item and remember it better. You can also keep a definition from an English-to-English dictionary if necessary.

Here is a sample entry:

Imagine you have a conversation with your friend, Doug, who has been running a hipster hangout downtown for the past few years. Unfortunately for Doug, business hasn’t been looking good lately with the population of people with thick rimmed glasses and messy shag cuts on the decline. (This, obviously, can’t be true so don’t take it as a fact! I am just making stuff up for my example.) Before getting into the red and losing money, Doug decides to go out of business while the profits and costs still balance out. This is when he tells you the historic sentence: “I decided to close the restaurant. It only broke even last year.” If you don’t know what “break even” means, this is your golden opportunity to learn it. Even if you know what it means, but you don’t use it yourself, you can still use the chance to make this collocation a part of your active vocabulary. Recording this sentence allows you to learn the meaning of this collocation in context. In addition, you will always remember it with the story of Doug and the decline of his watering hole that was once bustling with cool people in colourful socks and tight-fitted jeans.

Even if you don’t have a story that you can attach to a new collocation, you can make one. Just like what I did with the story of my imaginary friend, Doug.

Writing up a short paragraph gives you a chance to spend some quality time with your collocation, building a narrative around it, adding fun details to it, and in this way making it more memorable.

In that paragraph, you can also use some of the collocations you have learned before. Can you locate some of the collocations that I inserted into my paragraph about Doug’s restaurant?

Keeping a list, however, is never enough, even if it consists of made-up, real-life, and dictionary examples. To make sure these new items enter your long-term memory, you need to review and practice them, and not just randomly; I think to get the best results, it is important to have a system. One recommendation is to pledge a specific number of new items for each week when you can focus and work on those words and collocations. For example, you can decide that you read for 25 minutes every day and pick at least two useful collocations from every reading session (see my previous post on how to identify useful collocations in reading passages). In this way, you will have 14 new collocations by the end of the week. Then you can focus on reviewing those 14 new collocations the following week (while keeping reading and finding new items for the subsequent week). For reviewing, all you need to do is to remember the sentences in which the new words and collocations are used. If you can’t remember the sentence, you can look at your list and review by reading the example sentences. The reviewing part can also be a little organized. You can focus on the first sentence for all your 14 new collocations on the first two days of the week and then move on to the second and third sentences on the next four days. In this way, you will be reviewing your new items six times a week, going back to each item in a new sentence every two days. Finally, you can review all 14 items on the last day of the week.

This is not time-consuming at all, since you don’t have to set dedicated time aside for reviews. All you need to do is repeat the sentences in your head during the day. You can do it while taking a walk, waiting in line, or doing daily chores. If you don’t remember the sentence, you just need a glance to remind you of the sentence. Moreover, as you head into next weeks, keep an eye out for the items from previous weeks. If you keep reading regularly, you will encounter those words and collocations again in new texts. Every time you come across one of your old items, go back to your list and put a check mark next to the entry. Once you have at least three check marks next to your entry, you can be more confident that you will not forget it.

The next step is to insert the newly-learned words and collocations into your speaking and writing. Have a plan to write a short essay every two weeks and use the new items from the past weeks in it. Also, you can prepare a short speaking using the new collocations and present it during a one-on-one session at the CAC. Don’t wait for opportunities to reveal themselves to you; instead, create chances where you can use the new words and collocations deliberately.

It is also a good idea to review your whole list every month. You will find that there are still words or collocations that you do not have complete mastery over. Write them down on a separate piece of paper and stick it somewhere you can always see. Put it on your fridge or next to your monitor, and in this way, you can review these stubborn words and collocations every time you open the fridge or get a chance to use some of them as you are writing at your desk.

My final tip on this subject is about access: where should you keep your list for the most convenient access? What if you are waiting in line in Biblio and want to take a glance at your list to remember a sentence? In the past, I kept my lists in notebooks, which is not the most accessible format. I most probably won’t have my notebook with me when I am taking a walk or standing in line. For a while, I kept my lists in Word files, which was better, but still I had difficulty copying them from device to device. My final solution is to keep my lists on a cloud-based note-taking app. There are several such apps out there that allow you to keep, organize, and update your notes in a space that automatically uploads them to a cloud server. I use Evernote because I think it offers great options to organize your notes. On Evernote, you can create notebooks and keep several notes in the same notebook. You can also group notebooks together under a single topic. This is especially useful if you keep multiple lists, which I recommend. Based on where you find your new collocations, you can have different lists for formal, informal, and academic words and collocations. You can also keep collocations that you have seen before (but can’t quite use) in a separate notebook. Beside allowing you to organize your notes in different notebooks, Evernote synchronizes your data across different devices (you can install it on iOS, Android, and Windows), and you can also access them through your web browser on any device.

Of course, this is only one of many apps where you can keep your lists. Or maybe you want to go old school and stick to the good old paper notebooks. As long as you regularly add to, review, and use your new words and collocation, you will continue to learn and grow as a writer and speaker. In the end, I believe what is most important is that you have purpose, enthusiasm, and a clear plan to add to and expand your vocabulary. So let’s get started. What is the next new collocation you are learning?

About Kaveh

Kaveh is an EAL Specialist at the CAC.

Kaveh Tagharobi has two MA degrees in English, the second one completed at UVic in 2017 with a concentration in Cultural, Social, and Political Thought (CSPT). Before starting to work at the CAC in 2013, he was an ESL/EFL instructor for 10 years in Iran, teaching a variety of topics to high school, undergraduate, and graduate students. At the CAC, Kaveh works with both international and domestic students, helping them to plan their research, organize their writing, edit for grammar, and improve their reading and critical thinking skills.

New or old? How to expand our vocabulary by combining words we already know

Academic Writing, Centre for Academic Communication, Collocations, EAL graduate students, International graduate students, Posts by Kaveh, Vocabulary, Writing process, Writing resources

By Kaveh Tagharobi

“My sentences are too simple.”

“I can’t write professionally.”

“I need to use more big words.”

Have you heard any of these complaints? Or rather, have you been making them yourself? If so, you are not alone. Many EAL (English as an Additional Language) and non-EAL students find themselves in situations where they feel their academic vocabulary is “just not enough.” Whether prompted by feedback received from instructors and peers or just driven by the desire to impress our readers, we always have this urge to use “different,” “more difficult,” or “more academic” words in our writing. English language is also inviting us to do so. According to the Oxford Dictionaries website, “there are, at the very least, a quarter of a million distinct English words,” and “if distinct senses were counted, the total would probably approach three quarters of a million.” This is more than almost any other language. These statistics alone put a huge pressure on student writers to expand their vocabulary and use a variety of words in their writing. But is this a reasonable expectation, and does using new words always lead to better academic writing?

Let’s consider the following sentence written by an EAL student:

“An illustration of this is the school system, which is one of the main sources of distributing cultural capital.”

At the Centre for Academic Communication, I often see sentences like this. At a first glance, such sentences can be confusing because of their word choice, but with a closer look, it becomes evident that the student has tried to replace a word with a synonym that does not quite work in this context. In the above sentence, the word “illustration” has replaced “example” to avoid repetition. Repetition is something many student writers are concerned about, and rightly so. Academic writing often puts us in situations where we have to repeat the same words over and over again. It is just natural that we prefer not to repeat the same words several times in a short chunk of writing. This reluctance is also enhanced by negative feedback most writers receive about repetition. Another reason words like “example” don’t always get much love is that they are thought to be “too simple.”  But is there anything inherently “simple” about the word “example”? It could be that it is shorter than a word like “illustration” and is not an obvious derivative with a formal-sounding suffix. But in reality, what probably makes “example” look simple is the fact that we know it too well; we use it too commonly for it to qualify as a “hard” word, which brings us full circle to the issues of repetition and variety in writing.

But whether these poor “simple” words get discarded for the accusations of simplicity or repetition, what is certain is that many of our students identify the need to have more options when writing. What many student writers and especially EAL writers overlook, however, is that not all synonyms can be used interchangeably. In fact, many synonyms that can be found in thesauri or through MS Word are just similar words that cannot simply replace the original word in the sentence. In such situations, I recommend my students to stick with the words they know rather than trying to add variety to their writing. Common words are common for a reason: they are good words! And repetition is not always bad; it can be a way to consolidate meaning and create consistency. This can be a safe option, but what if they want to improve their writing by using a variety of sentence structures? This is a legitimate need, and there must be a way for it.

This is when I suggest learning academic phrases and sentence structures instead of learning new words.

As counterintuitive as it may sound, learning new “difficult” words is not a priority in improving your academic writing. In my opinion, learning “old” and “simple” word combinations is much more important.

While the previous statistic from OED estimates English words to be at about 750 thousand, other statistics show that of all these words, only a very small percentage are used in everyday writing. The general consensus is that only about 3000 words cover 95% of common texts like newspapers, blogs, and most books[1]. That is only 0.4% of the number OED quotes as the total number of words in English. This means that in order to master the use of words in writing, learning new words like “contumacious”  and “gasconading” is not as important as learning how to combine more familiar words such as “for,” “boastful,” “respect,” “in,” “lack,” and “manner.” (see the end for a fun quiz!) Or to return to our example, finding synonyms like “specimen” and “exemplar” (words that are listed as synonyms for “example”) does not necessarily help us with finding alternatives. It is the use of old words like “true” and “case” that makes the difference between intermediate and advanced level writing. Using these words, our student writer could have written the following sentence as a variation of their sentence:

“This is certainly true in the case of schools which are one of the main sources of distributing cultural capital.”

But where do these combinations come from? How can student writers learn such academic phrases and add them to their repertoire of active vocabulary? We certainly cannot just make new collocations ourselves. Learning a language is one of the very few areas of knowledge in which being inventive is not always a recipe for success. Surprisingly, here, imitation and copying are more fruitful ways of learning and improving. We have to have encountered a certain arrangement of words to be able to reproduce it in our writing.

Therefore, my first suggestion to learn new collocations is to look for them in other people’s texts. Instead of going to vocabulary books or resources that introduce phrases and collocations, you can look for, notice, and try to learn such collocations while reading and listening. Academic articles, books, lectures, and more general texts like news articles, podcasts, and even daily conversations are great sources to find and learn new collocations, phrases, and sentence structures. This can make learning new collocations part of your daily routine without the need for setting aside dedicated time for it. You can form a habit to treat your daily reading and listening activities as learning opportunities to expand your vocabulary circle.

But to do this, first you need to develop an eye for finding useful collocations in written and spoken texts. In other words, you have to learn how to identify word combinations that might look ordinary at the first glance but are in fact specific arrangements of words that you would not normally use in your writing. To give you an example, look at this short excerpt from an academic article[2] on Digital Humanities:

“This essay traces some of the ways modernism and digital humanities have converged of late. It covers some of the key modes in which that convergence has so far found expression.”

They seem like a couple of normal-looking sentences with apparently no “difficult” or “fancy” words. However, with a closer look, you can notice that the authors have used the words “of” and “late” to mean “recently.” This is a very simple word combination; but despite its simplicity, it is an arrangement that an EAL writer would not necessarily know or use. Similarly, the words “found” and “expression”, two more seemingly “easy” words, have constituted a collocation that can replace words like “show,” “demonstrate,’ or “manifest,” all words that student writers overuse and would want to find synonyms for. With more attention, it becomes evident that the collocation “find expression” is used with the preposition “in” and is followed by a noun, but in this sentence, the preposition and the noun have moved before the verb. Therefore, the complete expression that we should extract from this sentence is “to find expression in something.” As you see, this requires attention and bit of experience, but with some practice, you can easily mine valuable collocations by just analyzing ordinary-looking sentences.

Finally, remember that the type and usage of the collocations you find will vary based on the sources where you find them. What you will find in a magazine article or a podcast can be fairly informal and suitable for daily situations. In the same way, if you review academic texts, like journal articles and books, you are more likely to find collocations that are useful for your academic writing.

So far, we discussed the ways to identify new collocations in others’ texts. In a next blog post, I will talk about developing a system to record, practice, and finally master the newly-learned collocations.

And now is the time for this post’s quick quiz. What sentences would you make with the “simple” words “for,” “boastful,” “respect,” “in,” “lack,” and “manner” I proposed to use instead of “contumacious” and “gasconading”?  Comment on this post if you want to play!

 

[1] Fry, E. B., 1925, & Kress, J. E. (2006). The reading teacher’s book of lists (5th, 1st ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

[2] Ross, S., & Sayers, J. (2014). Modernism meets digital humanities. Literature Compass, 11(9), 625-633. doi:10.1111/lic3.12174

Credit for  photo of books: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Alborzagros#/media/File:English-English_and_English-Persian_dictionaries.JPG

About Kaveh

Kaveh is an EAL Specialist at the CAC.

Kaveh Tagharobi has two MA degrees in English, the second  one completed at UVic in 2017 with a concentration in Cultural, Social, and Political Thought (CSPT). Before starting to work at the CAC in 2013, he was an ESL/EFL instructor for 10 years in Iran, teaching a variety of topics to high school, undergraduate, and graduate students.  At the CAC,  Kaveh works with both international and domestic students,  helping them to plan their research, organize their writing, edit for grammar, and improve their reading and critical thinking skills.