Teaching Collocations in Foreign Language Classes: Why and How

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 2,0, Dresden Technical University (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Language as a Topic in Foreign Language Teaching, language: English, abstract: As a recent task, we were creating a teaching module for upper school classes about collocations. The mere theme of collocations, as a grammatical aspect of the English language, is to be seen detached from traditional content domains of language lessons such as 'Landeskunde' or history, as the language aspect itself in this case builds the topic to deal with. In the theoretical part of our paper we will first explore some aspects on language awareness in order to underline its significant role in foreign language teaching. We will go on presenting our findings on motivation as a means to convey language awareness. After explaining the grammatical extend of collocations, we will finally present our exercises and comment on them. Here we are including our findings from the theoretical part of this paper.