Vocabulary · Tier 2: academic words
Collocations
Teach the words that naturally go together, such as draw a conclusion or strong evidence. Knowing a word’s usual partners makes students’ writing sound accurate and academic.
- Bands
- 3 to 5
- Stages
- Upper elementary, Middle school and High school
- Settings
- Mainstream class, Push-in support and Pull-out support
- Prep
- Low prep
How to do it
- When teaching a key word, collect the words that often appear with it in your subject’s texts.
- Present these as chunks rather than single words.
- Practice the chunks with matching or gap-fill tasks.
- Model the chunks in your own speaking and writing.
- When a student uses the wrong partner, such as “do a conclusion”, recast it with the right chunk.
In a lesson
English literature (high school)
Before an essay, the teacher shows three chunks: “The writer creates a sense of…”, “This conveys…” and “The image suggests…”. A band 3 student who wrote “The writer makes a feeling of fear” rewrites it as “The writer creates a sense of fear.”
What commonly goes wrong
- Words are taught on their own, and students are expected to find the right partners.
- Long lists of collocations are given with no context.
- Errors are marked in red without showing the right chunk.
Adapting it
For a lower band
Teach two or three fixed chunks per lesson and keep them on display.
For a higher band
Ask students to keep a collocation log for the subject and check partners in a learner’s dictionary.