Collocations and Teaching: Investigating word combinations in two English textbooks for Norwegian upper secondary school students

Abstract

This master thesis is concerned with the teaching of collocations in upper secondary school level in Norway. The scope of this study is to investigate vocabulary exercises in two textbooks used for the teaching of English at the first year of upper secondary school in Norway. The first aim is to investigate if words presented as single items in the vocabulary exercises are part of collocations in the texts they are taken from. Two research questions are also addressed: how many of these words appear in collocations and which of these collocations would be useful to teach students at the level in question. The second aim is to offer suggestions on how the vocabulary exercises can be improved based on the Kunnskapsløftet and previous research and the third is to give other ideas on how collocations can be incorporated in vocabulary teaching. The results show that more than one third of the words from the selected vocabulary exercises are found as part of collocations in the texts they are taken from and that most of these are useful for teaching.