Skip Navigation


ELT Journal Advance Access originally published online on December 6, 2007
ELT Journal 2008 62(4):339-348; doi:10.1093/elt/ccm091
This Article
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
62/4/339    most recent
ccm091v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Citing Articles
Right arrowScopus Links
Right arrowCiting Articles via CrossRef
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Shin, D.
Right arrow Articles by Nation, P.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.

Beyond single words: the most frequent collocations in spoken English

Dongkwang Shin and Paul Nation

Dongkwang Shin received his PhD in Applied Linguistics in 2007 from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His expertise is in vocabulary learning and teaching, and corpus linguistics. He is currently working for the Korean Institute of Curriculum and Evaluation
Paul Nation is a professor of Applied Linguistics in the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He has taught in Indonesia, Thailand, the United States, Finland, and Japan. His specialist interests are language teaching methodology and vocabulary learning. His book Learning Vocabulary in Another Language was published by Cambridge University Press (2001) and there is a book called Vocabulary Teaching: Strategies and Techniques appearing in 2007 from Thomson Heinle publishers

Email: sdhera{at}hotmail.com

Email: paul.nation{at}vuw.ac.nz


  Abstract

This study presents a list of the highest frequency collocations of spoken English based on carefully applied criteria. In the literature, more than forty terms have been used for designating multi-word units, which are generally not well defined. To avoid this confusion, six criteria are strictly applied. The ten million word BNC spoken section was used as the data source, and the 1,000 most frequent spoken word types from that corpus were all investigated as pivot words. The most striking finding was that there is a large number of collocations meeting the six criteria and a large number of these would qualify for inclusion in the most frequent 2,000 words of English, if no distinction was made between single words and collocations. Many of these collocations could be usefully taught in an elementary speaking course.

Final revised version received June 2007


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.