Mining reading passages for collocations 1

Today we are going to ask Claude to generate collocations (clusters of two or three words that commonly appear together in spoken and written English more frequently than they would occur by chance) aligned with reading passages from coursebooks or the web. The aim is to use this material for both communicative activities and raising awareness of collocations before the reading task.

I will be using coursebook material from Solutions 3^rd edition Pre-Intermediate. For copyright reasons, I won’t be displaying the reading passage, but you can access it from the publisher’s site, Oxford University Press, by downloading a free sample HERE. The reading passage is found in Unit 2, page 23 (Lost at Sea).

First I am going to ask Claude to identify ten interesting ‘adjective + noun’ collocations and ten interesting ‘verb + noun’ collocations and create some teaching materials for me by copying and pasting the digital text.

Prompt: I am going to copy and paste a story from a Pre-Intermediate level English coursebook and you are going to select 10 useful collocations from it for an English student learning English at that level. The collocations must be “adjective and noun” based. From this list I want you to jumble up these collocations and place them in a table, with adjectives in the first column and nouns in the second column for students to match. Next provide the answers. Here is the story: [story].

Now, here are the correct matches:

1. dream holiday
2. stunning island
3. huge fish
4. awful weather
5. terrifying thought
6. sharp rocks
7. sandy beach
8. tragic news
9. astonishing news
10. fishing trip

My next step is to get Claude to perform the same task with ‘verb + noun’ this time. Prompt: Now I am going to copy and paste the same story and this time you are going to select 10 useful collocations from it for an English student learning English at that level. The collocations must be ‘verb and noun’ based. From this list I want you to jumble up these collocations and place them in a table, with verbs in the first column and nouns in the second column for students to match. Next, provide the answers. Here is the story again: [story].

Now, here are the correct matches:

1. enjoy trip
2. fight lives
3. pull fish
4. send message
5. wear jackets
6. break waves
7. reach beach
8. pick bananas
9. spend days
10. appear news

So I have the two tables with the jumbled collocations ready to copy and paste into a Word document. I will be printing copies for the students to work on in pairs (Student A and Student B). If there is an uneven number of students, one group can be formed of two students A or two Students B.

In class, just before diving into the text, I would tell the students that we are going to read and discuss a reading passage. However, before that, they will explore some language from the text and be engaged in a speaking activity.

Students get into pairs (As and Bs). Student A gets a printed copy of one table and Student B gets a printed copy of the other table. They have about 5 to 7 minutes to match the collocations and try to predict the story they are about to read based on the collocations. Next, students take turns sharing their stories with each other in about one or two minutes. Then, based on the collocations they were given and the stories they shared, they work in pairs to come up with a new version of the story, now that they have more information about it (one story per pair). After that, I would elicit stories from volunteering students and, finally, give them time to read the passage from their coursebook.

This pre-reading activity –though it does take up a fair amount of time- is highly valuable from several angles: it provides speaking practice with key vocabulary, fosters creativity, sparks interest in the reading task and, last but not least, offers plenty of exposure to language chunks in different ways.

In a future blog post I will be sharing a few more ideas on how to mine collocations from a reading passage. This time the focus will be on classroom activities that take place after students have read the passage. I will be using the same reading passage again.