In this post you will learn about the importance of collocations, plus you can download a free PDF to help you learn the most common collocations in English. So read on!
If you want to write English naturally, then you need to have an understanding of collocations.
Collocations are words that commonly go together.
For example, to describe a large amount of road vehicles moving slowly in English, we use the phrase “heavy traffic”. But we don’t use the phrase “thick traffic” or “intensive traffic”.
Other examples of common collocations in English include ”pay attention“, “fast food“, “make an effort” and “take the IELTS test”.
IELTS Writing Band 7: Lexical Resource
If you are aiming for Band 7 or higher in IELTS Writing, then you need to show some awareness of collocations.
In other words, you need to show that you know how some words go together naturally.
The Academic Collocations List
The following list contains 2,469 of the most common and most useful collocations in written, academic English.
It is a list called the Academic Collocations List, which was created by Kirsten Ackermann and Yu-Hua Chen using a database of academic language, and further reorganised by Sheldon Smith of the EAP Foundation.
How The Academic Collocations List Is Organised
The list is organised under “headwords”. A headword is the most important word, usually a noun or a verb.
Next to each headword you can find derivatives of each headword. For example, under the headword “accept” you can find collocations with “acceptable” and “acceptance”, as well as “accept”.
To make the collocations easier to find, they have been listed twice if they contain two headwords. For example, you can find the collocation “cognitive ability” under both “cognitive” and “ability”.
How to use this list
You can simply study the collocations in this list, or you can use it as a reference tool when you are writing.
For example, if you want to use the word “agree” (or its derivatives, “agreement” or “disagree”), then you can look up the word in the list to see its most frequent and useful collocations.
Please note that the collocations in this list are not the only possible collocations. This list just contains the most common and most useful ones for academic writing such as the IELTS Writing Test.
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