Using a concordancer to check collocations
Understanding common word combinations ( 'collocations' ) is a key aspect of vocabulary learning, and already on this course you will have become aware of the importance of recording the relationships between words in your notebooks. But how do we check collocation? How do we find out how strongly different words collocate?
Dictionaries may help to a certain extent, though most of the time you will have to rely on your ability to 'notice' language in context and then record it in a structured way. Getting into good habits as a learner is the key to success.
One interesting resource available to students, teachers and researchers is online concordancers. A concordancer is a piece of software which searches huge 'banks' of real written and spoken language (corpora) and presents the language you are searching for in context. This worksheet is an introduction and will help you to:
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generate a list of authentic example sentences of a word in context
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find out how to search adjective-noun collocations , and see how frequently certain words occur together
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Click on the following link to access the BYU-British National Corpus: http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/ .
You can use the website for free, but after 15 uses, you will need register an account (for free).
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Start by reading the introduction.

A Basic Search
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Type the word you want to research in WORD(S) on the left hand side of the page. Click search . For example, the word: generation
example sentences
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Click on the word under CONTEXT to find a list of example sentences (a concordance) of your word in context. Just from these lines you can learn much about how the word is used, e.g. grammar patterns, verb/noun collocations etc.
A more advanced search
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To focus in on a specific collocation pattern go back to the left hand side and click on the small question mark (?) opposite collocates.
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We are interested in the word immediately before generation so click on 1 and 0 in the two drop down menus.
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Now click on the ? opposite POS . We are interested in adjectivenoun combinations , so choose adj.ALL
from the drop down menu.
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Click search to reveal the concordance results organised by frequency.

As we can see FUTURE GENERATIONS is the most frequent collocation.
SUCCESSIVE GENERATIONS is another high frequency collocation. Click on the word SUCCESSIVE to display a concordance list of example sentences. By reading the examples we can understand it is a synonym for LATER/FOLLOWING .
Now, let's check what collocates go with an adjective we've just learnt today.
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Type successive into the WORD(S) box. You will have to make a change to the POS box ( noun.ALL
) and change 0 and 1 in the drop down menus above, because now you are searching for an adjective-noun collocation.
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What are the top 5 most frequent collocations for successive ? Write them in the space below.
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Follow the same method and check collocations for scientific.
Remember once you have the results, click on the words under CONTEXT to bring up the concordance lines with example sentences.
Use the same method for some of the other topical adjectives and nouns you learn.
Write down some useful results your vocabulary notebook. Remember to think about how these words are used in context and record your own examples which will be useful for you or connected to your subject area.