Day #152 — Silly little things called collocations S01 E06

Language teachers are expected to either make sure students are able to produce pre-determined words, phrases and grammar structures or to provide their own list of language items in accordance with the students’ proficiency level, age range and learning aims.

Inevitably, materials place the study of grammar as pivotal to success of the learning process, while offering opportunities to be exposed to set collocations, the types we can find by looking up a dictionary designed to show which words go with which. What these books fail to do is to provide students with examples of the co-text in which these collocations (usually verb + noun like plan + strategy or adjective + noun like diverse media) occur, and in so doing give an incomplete view of how people actually string words together. We may learn that when describing working conditions negatively, we use the adjective HARSH, but we will be left in the dark as to what verb we would use with that phrase: do we tolerate, put up with, bear, or stand the harsh working conditions? With the aid of corpus and concordancer tools like this, we can find examples like

The long red shadows behind the women represent their difficult struggle to endure the harsh working conditions which life has dealt them.

The grammatical aspect of language blends into the choice of words that users make. These choices transcend the rules of syntax and encompass the social context, the situational register and reflect the arbitrary nature that governs the use of language by a community of speakers.

This analysis of what language is, and not what language can be, is synthesized in the dilemma a teacher of 3–5 year-olds faced when deciding what language they would use to teach their little ones how to go to the bathroom:

Can I go to the toilet?

May I go to the toilet?

I wanna go to the toilet.

Originally published at http://dablog-dablog.blogspot.com on June 1, 2020.