Teaching collocations: a learner-centered approach

The focus of the present article is to investigate the role of teaching collocations in raising foreign language proficiency. Students of English as a Foreign Language are facing a variety of problems (overuse of general, delexicalized words; misuse of collocations by neglecting word combinability; tendency of using fancy and complicated words not frequently used by native speakers) that make their speech non-nativelike. One major problem is the lack of appropriate vocabulary which could be related to the ignorance of a subset of formulaic sequences – topical collocations which is one of key aspects enabling native speakers to be fluent. Thus, pedagogical principles have been outlined aimed at raising awareness about collocations and helping students to internalize the acquired units, language learners’ attitudes towards the phenomenon of collocation in the process of foreign language learning have been obtained.

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