This activity has students searching Google News on their mobile browsers to generate ad hoc concordance lines for the purpose of discovering collocations.
Objectives
Skills
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Materials
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Levels
High-intermediate to Advanced Time Needed 15-20 minutes |
Procedures
1. After reading an article or reading from the textbook, ask the class as a whole to decide on key vocabulary words.
2. Put students into small groups. Assign 2-3 key words to each group. Some example words might be: population, income, labor. (Note: income and labor are Academic Word List [AWL] words)
3. Each student group uses Google on their devices to search for each word, looking at Google’s “news” results. Ask students not to use newspaper headlines for their concordance lines, as these often omit auxiliary verbs and are not grammatically correct.
The photo below shows the results of a search for the word “income.”
1. After reading an article or reading from the textbook, ask the class as a whole to decide on key vocabulary words.
2. Put students into small groups. Assign 2-3 key words to each group. Some example words might be: population, income, labor. (Note: income and labor are Academic Word List [AWL] words)
3. Each student group uses Google on their devices to search for each word, looking at Google’s “news” results. Ask students not to use newspaper headlines for their concordance lines, as these often omit auxiliary verbs and are not grammatically correct.
The photo below shows the results of a search for the word “income.”
This search generates an ad hoc set of concordance lines made up of the following phrases:
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4. Students report their findings to the class. For "income," Ss should be able to deduce from their quick Google news search that some common collocations for "income" are:
Note
Some students may struggle to find patterns which are not immediately obvious and may require additional training and support.
Related posts
Which words do my students need to know?
Which lists do these words belong to?
- income tax
- low-income [person]
- average income [person]
- to earn income
Note
Some students may struggle to find patterns which are not immediately obvious and may require additional training and support.
Related posts
Which words do my students need to know?
Which lists do these words belong to?