Oxford Collocation Dictionary For Windows
Mood Phaneuf
A completely new type of dictionary with word collocation that helps students and advanced learners effectively study, write and speak natural-sounding English. This onlinedictionary is very helpful for the education of the IELTS, TOEFL test.
The dictionary that helps students write and speak natural-sounding English.
Which words usually go together? This dictionary shows you the common word combinations (collocations) that are essential for natural-sounding British and American English. Completely revised and extended, the new edition has over 250,000 collocations and over 75,000 examples.
Based on the English Corpus, a 2-billion word corpus that provides authoritative information on the most typical collocations.
Here are some key features of "Oxford Collocations Dictionary":
- Based on the Oxford English Corpus, a 2-billion word corpus that provides authoritative information on the most typical collocations.
- Collocations only found in British or American English are clearly labelled.
- Examples, using British and American English, show how collocations work in context.
- Headwords printed in blue help you find the right word faster.
- With the complete dictionary, a searchable index that makes it easy to find the collocation you are looking for, and practice exercises.
- Pop-up definitions of every word included in the dictionary, with spoken pronunciation of British and American English.
- Collocations grouped according to part of speech and meaning.
- Usage notes show collocations shared by sets of words such as languages and seasons.
- 16-page Study section.
Corpora have given rise to a wide range of lexicographic resources aimed at helping novice users of academic English with their writing. This includes academic vocabulary lists, a variety of textbooks, and even a bespoke academic English dictionary. However, writers may not be familiar with these resources or may not be sufficiently aware of the lexical shortcomings of their emerging texts to trigger the need to use such help in the first place. Moreover, writers who have to stop writing to look up a word can be distracted from getting their ideas down on paper. The ColloCaid project (www.collocaid.uk) aims to address these problems by integrating information on collocation with text editors. In this paper, we share the research underpinning the initial development of ColloCaid by detailing the rationale of (1) the lexicographic database we are compiling to support the collocation needs of novice users of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and (2) the preliminary visualisation decisions taken to present information on collocation to EAP users without disrupting their writing. We conclude the paper by outlining the next steps in the research.
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Collocations form part of formulaic language use that is considered by many scholars as central to communication (Henriksen 2013; Wray 2002). Today, most scholars agree that teaching collocations to second and/or foreign language users (henceforth "L2 students") is a must. This study offers a reflection on the directions L2 researchers and teachers may explore, and that could contribute to modelling the teaching of collocations or at least spark the debate on this issue. The fundamental point raised here is the extent to which pedagogy may be informed by knowing the most common lexical collocations (combinations of content words) and using frequency of collocates as a key factor in selecting which collocations to bring to learners' attention. The results from this study indicate that out of the eight different lexical collocations, adjective+noun and verb+noun collocations are the most common, and should therefore be introduced first. Furthermore, most collocates ("co-occurring words" in Sinclair's (1991) terms) come from the 1,000 and 2,000 most frequent words. Therefore, this study suggests that the same way that "[u]sing the computational approach as a starting point makes it possible to distinguish between collocations of varying frequency of use" (Henriksen 2013: 32), frequency may be used to select the target words and their collocates once collocations have been identified. This could potentially contribute to addressing the issue of selection criteria of which collocations to teach.
Following Henriksen's examples above, collocations are the focus of this paper. Since it is beyond the scope of this paper to provide an overview of the different definitions and the ways in which research on collocations has evolved through time, it is sufficient to note here that this study retains the definition provided in the Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English (McIntosh, Francis and Poole 2009), namely:
For Ellis (2001), among others, formulaic language - collocations in particular - should be central to language learning. This observation echoes earlier calls to teach collocations based on the growing importance and significance attributed to them. As early as the 1990s, scholars such as Lewis (1993), Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992), and Willis (1990) made a strong argument that the very least that should be done when teaching in L2 contexts is to introduce the formulaic dimension of language to learners. This observation fits Palmer's (1933) definition that collocations are "successions of words [that] must or should be learnt as an integral whole or independent entity, rather than by the process of piecing together their component parts" (Palmer 1933: 4).
These calls were not responded to immediately, however, because collocations are semantically transparent and do not seem to cause any problem for comprehension. They therefore remain unnoticed as problematic by both teachers and learners (Biskup 1992; Gouverneur 2008; Henriksen and Stoehr 2009; Laufer and Waldman 2011; Paquot 2008). Another, more fundamental, reason why collocations have not been a subject of focus in the classroom is that some scholars believe that formulaic language is implicit in nature and thus should be taught implicitly (e.g. Boers and Lindstromberg 2008, 2009; Ellis 2001; Wray 2002). However, given the lack of sufficient exposure to the target language in L2 and foreign-language contexts, this approach may be called into question. Even for single words, scholars such as Nation (2001) recommend recycling the words through multiple exposures. This view is supported by Schmitt (2008) according to whom learners need more explicit reference to the target words even for receptive purposes. The same then can be expected of more encompassing formulaic language of which collocations form the main representatives (Alali and Schmitt 2012; Henriksen 2013; Henriksen and Stoehr 2009). Henriksen and Stoehr (2009: 227), for instance, contend that learners do not have enough exposure regarding both amount and range of input needed for developing nativelike collocational competence. They further argue that even in cases of sufficient input, learners would still be confronted with the challenge of selecting collocations on which to focus. In this line of thinking, Henriksen (2013) observed that mere exposure to collocations is not enough, and suggests adopting more explicit approaches to teaching them. Furthermore, some studies have demonstrated that collocations remain problematic even at an advanced level (Laufer and Waldman 2011; Nesselhauf 2005). Therefore, expecting exposure alone to help learners master collocations could be a utopian idea.
Today, most scholars agree that teaching collocations to L2 students is a must. The main questions that have yet to be addressed are how to teach collocations and exactly which ones to teach (e.g. Durrant and Schmitt 2010; Granger and Meunier 2008; Jones and Durrant 2010; Nizonkiza 2012a, 2017; Nizonkiza and Van de Poel 2014). Although there is still disagreement on whether to adopt explicit or implicit approaches to teaching collocations, a number of empirical studies indicate that teaching collocations explicitly through awareness-raising might go some way to making a difference in students' proficiency gain (e.g. Barfield and Gyllstad 2009; Webb and Kagimoto 2009, 2011; Ying and O'Neill 2009). Adopting an explicit approach to teaching collocations has recently gained the support of studies using corpora as a source for teaching collocations (e.g. Chan and Liou 2005; Sun and Wang 2003). The approach basically adopts awareness-raising of the phenomenon of collocations by involving students in using corpora to identify these collocations. Thanks to corpora, collocations can be identified from their real contexts of use, which may facilitate learning (Biber, Conrad and Reppen 1998).
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