Since collocations can be challenging to create practice activities for, consider using some of the free, printable worksheets available in this section. There are 70 worksheets currently listed with more being added regularly. This collocations worksheet is for intermediate and upper-intermediate business students and comes with great teachers notes to help you use the material effectively in class. It focuses on verb collocations with meeting and utilizes some excellent business English phrases. If your students are not ready for this activity consider using another worksheet and feel free to download anything that looks interesting. You can always view the whole worksheet before deciding whether or not you want to use it in class.
Collocations are commonly used word pairings or phrases and as such are important for your students to understand. While the above example is for rather advanced students, you can include this topic in pre-intermediate classes too. Here is an excellent worksheet that students can use to practice pairing do, play, and have with appropriate nouns. Students do not need to have collocations explained to them. It is more important to focus on using words correctly than on specific rules. By completing activities like this one, even beginner students can feel confident using collocations correctly.
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Within the area of corpus linguistics, collocation defines a sequence of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. The term is often used in the same sense as linguistic government. Collocation defines restrictions on how words can be used together, for example, which prepositions are used with ("governed by") particular verbs, or which verbs and nouns are typically used together. An example of this (from Michael Halliday) is the collocation strong tea. While the same meaning could be conveyed through the roughly equivalent powerful tea, the fact is that tea is thought of being strong rather than powerful. A similar observation holds for powerful computers, which is preferred over strong computers. Collocations are examples of lexical units. Collocations should not be confused with idioms although both are similar in that there is a degree of meaning present in the collocation or idiom that is not entirely compositional.
In this quick exercise, learners will complete the gaps of a phone conversation to book a doctor's appointment with the phrases "I would like to book", "I can't make it", "That works for me", "Ca ...
A good episode to show your students Christmas traditions and learn about family related topics. The handout consists of True-False tasks, questions for discussion and lists of new phrases. The le ...
In this activity, students begin by completing some collocations associated with free time activities. From there, in pairs or in groups, they use the target vocabulary to plan a fun evening out. ...
This worksheet is a good tool for working on collocations. Before listening to the song, students have to complete the gaps of the lyrics with the words provided. There are two other exercises, th ...
It's Spring! What better time to do some garden vocabulary with your students. File contains a number of garden-based activities: idioms, collocations match, discussion questions, and design acti ...
This worksheet can be used to practise 'noun + noun' collocations and help students understand the importance of word order in this kind of structure using some common food vocabulary. The words c ...
Do you cringe when you hear students misuse "for" and "since" when they are speaking? This is one page of examples and exceptions with a description of how to use these important everyday words. Y ...
Adjectives make stories more exciting. Students are asked to add adjectives and some more interesting information to make the story more exciting. At the same time students are introduced to adjec ...
This PPP can be used for the course of Business English or in a lesson dealing with entrepreneurship. The presentation contains some proverbs which are split up. At first the students can see the ...
This presentation can be used to help learn some idiomatic expressions dealing with money and expense matters. It contains 15 phrases with definitions illustrated with pictures. It is possible to ...
Make or do lesson for pre-intermediate or intermediate students. The first page: talk about the photos and try to make the students discover the rule. Page two - the students look for the right co ...
Song Worksheet: Roar by Katy Perry. Variety of exercises: fill in the blanks with the words that you hear, put the verses in the correct order, match the sentence halves. Plus some vocabulary/use ...
Here you will find exercises for part 1 of the film "George of the Jungle". The exercises are for before and after watching. Some can be set as homework. Most of them should be done in class. Stud ...
A list of 40 questions about getting finance, drawing a budget etc. The purpose is to activate words students should know at intermediate level but may not be able to use owing to lack of practice ...
The material is intended for intermediate students and aimed at students’ vocabulary enrichment, students’ collocation awareness building and speaking skills development. It is ce ...
In this worksheet, students can practice their knowledge of proper and strong collocations through a series of exercises focused on Use of English Part 4 for CAE and/or CPE candidates. Students mu ...
35 questions to practice vocabulary and concepts related to marketing and sales. Wide range of questions and activities including: giving opinion, providing data, reading and summarising; web link ...
Worksheet on cat-idioms and commonly used expressions. The first page suggests phrases definitions, the second - picture practice and intresting facts about cats and the third - phrases in use (di ...
This is a worksheet I made to revise tourism-related vocabulary for a student at an advanced level. It was created as a test for a chapter of a certain book so it may be a bit specific, but it sti ...
Money as a conversation or writing topic usually arises student's interest. This .doc file provides 83 questions on income, spending habits, bank accounts, financial difficulties. The questions mu ...
This is a worksheet for an episode of Anglophenia on Youtube, regarding British colloquial expressions and their meaning. Students have to complete a table were they have the expression and have t ...
A matching game aimed at learning and revising collocations with take, have, waste and spend. Levels: intermediate and above. All four skills are covered: writing, reading, speaking and liste ...
Practice interesting expressions related to appearance and help your students improve their vocabulary. The text has been taken from a book, and I turned it into an activity. It is great for eleme ...
This is an FCE-like activity. The purpose of this sheet is to check some collocations within the context of causative structures. This task consists of a text in which there are 12 gaps (plus one ...
Firstly the most common adverb collocations are given through example sentences. Students can have an idea about what kind of collocations are possible in English. What I like the best about this ...
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