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ELT Journal 1993 47(1):56-63; doi:10.1093/elt/47.1.56
© 1993 by Oxford University Press
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Articles

Lexical collocations: a contrastive view

Jens Bahns

Director of the Language Laboratory at Pädagogische Hochschule Kiel, FRG, where his work involves teacher training at the undergraduate level. He has a PhD in English Philology from the University of Kiel. His current interests are in second language acquistion, vocabulary learning and teaching, and listening comprehension.

For some time now there has been, in the field of EFL teaching, a growing awareness of the importance of lexical collocations for vocabulary learning. One of the main obstacles to teaching lexical collocations systematically, however, is their number, which amounts to tens of thousands. In this article, it is argued that this enormous teaching and learning load can be reduced by a contrastive approach to the concept of lexical collocation. An exemplary German-English contrastive analysis of noun + verb and verb + noun collocations shows that there is, for a considerable portion of them, direct translational equivalence. Such lexical collocations do not have to be taught. The teaching of lexical collocations in EFL should concentrate, instead, on items for which there is no direct translational equivalence in English and in the learners' respective mother tongues.1


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D. Shin and P. Nation
Beyond single words: the most frequent collocations in spoken English
ELT J, October 1, 2008; 62(4): 339 - 348.
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