What Is Collocation - Definition in ESL Usage

Collocation refers to a group of two or more words that usually go together. A good way to think of collocation is to look at the word collocation. Co - meaning together - location - meaning place. Collocation​s  are words that are located together. A good answer to What is collocation? is: Collocation is a group of two or more words that like to hang out together. Here are some examples of common collocations that you might know: make tea - I made a cup of tea for lunch.do homework - I did all of my homework yesterday. Even though it possible to use other word combinations, understanding  collocations  help  English learners  improve their fluency because they are words that usually go together. Make and Do I begin with make and do because they provide perfect examples of why collocation is so important. Generally, make refers to things that are made that werent there before.  Do refers to actions that we take or do such as chores.   Collocations with Make make a cup of coffee / teamake noisemake the bedmake a business dealmake a fussmake sensemake time for someone Collocations with Do do the laundrydo the errandsdo business with someonedo a choredo the shopping Make and Do are perfect examples of verbs that go together with specific nouns. A verb noun combination that always go together are considered collocations. Why Do Words Collocate? There is often no reason for a collocation. People just put certain words together more often than they put other words together. In fact, the use of collocations has become popular in English and language teaching because of corpus linguistics. Corpus linguistics study huge volumes of data of spoken and written English to come up with statistics on how often people use certain words and word combinations. Through this study, corpus linguistics has been able to define what are strong and weak collocations. Collocations are used especially often in business English and there are dictionaries such as the Oxford Dictionary of Collocations that can help you learn these common collocations.   Strong Collocations Strong collocations refer to words that almost always go together. Its possible that people might understand you if you dont use a strong collocation. However, if you do not use a strong collocation it will sound funny to native speakers. Lets return to our example of make and do. If you say: I did a cup of coffee. native speakers will understand that you mean: I made a cup of coffee. Correct use of strong collocations shows an excellent command of the English language, and can certainly help impress native speakers of your ability to speak English well. Of course, if you are speaking to other non-native speakers the ability to use collocations correctly all the time becomes less important. That doesnt mean that correct collocation use is not important, its just not AS important as something like correct tense. Imagine for a moment that you are speaking about a future meeting: Our meeting was on Friday at four oclock.Ive done an appointment at four oclock for the meeting room on Friday. In both of these sentences, there are mistakes. However, in the first sentence instead of using a future tense, the past tense is used. If you want your colleagues to come to the meeting, this mistake is very serious and will lead to no one coming to the meeting. In the second sentence do an appointment is a misuse of a strong collocation. However, the meaning is clear: You have scheduled a room at four oclock. In this case, a mistake in collocations is not nearly as important as a mistake in tense usage. Here are examples of strong collocations that you might not be familiar with: high earnings (not big earnings)long-range planning (not long-time planning)urban guerrilla (not city guerrilla) More Information Why are Collocations Important? There is an entire world of collocations to explore. Learning collocations is important because you begin to learn words in larger groups or chunks of language. Putting together these chunks of language leads to more fluent English. More information on other word groups in English