Thursday, April 23, 2009

GVD Class : Collocations Exercise

In class you generated lots of phrases, some of which were great and some of which were not so great. REPAIR A COMPUTER, for example, is a good collocation, wheras EAT A TABLE is not. We can say RIDE A BICYCLE and DRIVE A CAR, but not RIDE A CAR or DRIVE A BICYCLE. I've been experimenting with some software to produce online tasks for you to do as homework, and I've created a simple quiz for you based on the phrases you produced. All you have to do is decide whether each of the twenty phrases are acceptable or not. At the moment my skills are quite limited, so the quiz is ugly and perhaps unexciting, but I will try hard to improve and create more attractive online tasks in the future.
To access the quiz, click here, or e-mail me if you really don't understand!

After you have discovered which phrases do not collocation, try to provide a correct alternative and post it as a comment on this website. Good luck!
One last thing...if you'd like to take a look at the powerpoint version of our lesson on future forms and e-mails, you can download it here.

5 comments:

Azhar ALhindi said...

Read a public newspaper.
Study a good education.
Move a green table.
Drink a hot tea.
Speak a clear language.
Buy ab interesting computer.
Arrange a beautiful books.
Treat bad healt.

ABDULLAH ALANAZI said...

Hi MR.Mark

How are YOU?

it seems a nice Blogger and has a lot of information.

according to our home work, I tryied to make the words as Collocations and I hope my soluation is riyht.

here are my Exampls:

surf a useful website.
speak another language.

arrange a new appointment.

treat a children kindly.

drink litres of water or drink a hot tea.

pull as hard as you can.

buy a daily newspap

Mark said...

Thanks for your suggestions so far...we'll look at these in more detail in class but you should know that

surf a website
study a good education
read a public newspaper
and speak a clear language

are not collocations in English. With the last example, I guess that you're thinking of "speak clearly", which is a good verb-adverb collocation.

Nada-Alkhorayef,G2 said...

Speak a common language.
Surf the net/Use a computer.
Creat a big garden.
Have good health.
Have hot coffee.
Buy classic table.
Complete highr education.
Buy local newapaper.

Sorry Mark ,I don't know why you didn't get my comment,maybe I made a mistake.

Mark said...

No problem Nada. There are some nice suggestions there. I like "speak a common language" in particular because it applies to all of us. I'm not so sure about a "classic table" though. We can have a classic DESIGN for a table, but I wonder if you are thinking about an ANTIQUE table?