EOI ESTEPONA
MALAGA - SPAIN
Day 2
Session 1 and 2: The Chemistry of Words: Collocations
The goal of these two sessions is to help students understand what collocations mean and how to use them.
Have you heard of placements? When two or more words go together naturally in English – words that often appear together in sentences. Learning COLLOCATIONS (rather than individual words) helps you to sound more fluent and natural when you use English!
We watch a mmmenglish video about collocations.
Activity 1 : Level B1.Fill in the gaps.
The session begins with the Sting song “Every breath you take”. In this song there are a variety of collocations.
Activity 2: Level B1. Placement cards.
Cards of different colors, placed face down and each one contains a word. You have to make pairs of collocations. The students stand around a table and make pairs. This activity can be done as a “SNAP” game.
Activity 3: Level B2.Common collocations with phrasal verbs.
The teacher has placed a series of cards (strips) face down and you have to make pairs of words that always go together (collocations).
Activity 4: Level B1. We see the photocopy of “Preparation for essay on “flying”. He tells us that we can take a look at this photocopy where there are collocations related to “Fly”
Activity 5: Level C1.Collocations with wide/broad
In the photocopy that you give us, you have to put ticks in the “wide” and “broad” columns that go with the nouns in the other column.
Activity 6: All levels. Pop groups. Photocopy: Fill in the gaps. This activity is another example of collocations. There are names of music groups that are formed by collocations. The activity consists of choosing the second word from a group. Example: Iron…../ Dire…./ Information…./ ( Maiden-Straits-Society)
Activity 7: Level B2.Odd one out. Photocopy where you have to choose the one that does not “collocate” with the words given in capital letters.
Activity 8: Level B2-C1. Processes: an order / a project. Pair work. Photocopy. It is about putting a series of words in order depending on their succession. Identify which words are related to two nouns (Order and Project).
Activity 9: Level C1. Verb/ Adjective- Pair work. In this photocopy you have to think about which verbs and which adjectives can go with the word “expense”.
Activity 10: Level B2. Word association. Pair work. In this activity there are 6 blocks of words and you have to think of others that connect with the words in each group.
Example:
1.River - payment - manager - blood: the word that connects these four would be “Bank”.
Activity 11: Level B2-C1.Collocation grid. Group activity. All the words are on cards and you have to associate verbs with a series of words.
Virtually all photocopies can be presented on small cards to make the activity more attractive.
“Laminate the photocopy and cut the words up in small cards”
Session 3:The Dictation Revival
We started the session talking about the benefits of dictation. The English language, in which the spelling does not coincide with the pronunciation, will improve the student's ability to understand and spell. With the exercises that he is going to propose, reading capacity and memory will be improved.
These exercises are intended to unseat the myth that dictations are monotonous and boring and have nothing to do with the communicative aspect of the language. We are talking about techniques that allow the student to be the protagonist in the dictation process. It is turning this “old” technique (dictation) into something dynamic.
Dictation techniques: All levels
Below is a “hodgepodge” of different exercises that are designed to stimulate participation in the classroom. These dictations can be easily adapted depending on the levels.
Activity 1. All levels. “The running dictation”. (accent/pronunciation/spelling/punctuation)
For this exercise, different fragments of texts are placed on the classroom walls. You work in pairs. One gets up and has to go read the text, then returns to where her partner is and dictates what he has read while he takes note of what he is dictating.
This exercise can be done as a game where the couples compete and the winner is the one who has previously transmitted and written all the text on the wall that had been assigned to them. It's called running dictation because the texts are placed far from where the couple is and so you have the students running around the class!!!
Activity 2. All levels. “Shouting activity”
Mutual dictation with music at full volume in the background. Students work in pairs, dictating to each other. Student A has half the text and Student B the other half. So it would be the same text with different gaps. For this activity he used colored sheets.
Activity 3. All levels. Visual dictation.
All students stand with their backs to the screen and a video is projected (without voice) that only one student will describe. You have to take notes/draw what the student is describing. Once the description is finished, the video is seen. For this activity a scene from the movie “Thriller” was used.
Activity 4. All levels. Dictogloss. (Paraphrasing-Memory exercise)
The teacher explains that this activity will work on the four language skills: listening, writing, speaking and reading. The teacher reads a short text twice and each student individually has to write words and phrases related to the text. (key words). Then, in pairs, the annotations are shared and the text that the teacher read must be reconstructed. Once finished, the text is projected and analyzed.
In relation to this last session, the teacher shows us this page that can be very useful to extract texts.
https://www.english-corpora.org
English-Corpora.org is the world's most widely used corpus collection (highly searchable collections of texts). He tells us that there are many tutorials regarding the use of english-corpora and invites us to investigate its use. also explains COCA corpus which is the largest free corpus of American English available. You can also find spoken texts and a great diversity of linguistic genres (This link helps to understand how COCA corpus works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWq6vOKgZks); it then goes on to explain and show the British National Corpus ( is included in english-corpora ). Finally, it shows us another highly recommended Antconc program for the concordance application.
In this link you can see how english-corpora.org works:
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