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Beyond single words: the most frequent collocations in spoken English

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journal contribution
posted on 2020-11-23, 22:25 authored by D Shin, Paul NationPaul Nation
This study presents a list of the highest frequency collocations of spoken English based on carefully applied criteria. In the literature, more than forty terms have been used for designating multi-word units, which are generally not well defined. To avoid this confusion, six criteria are strictly applied. The ten million word BNC spoken section was used as the data source, and the 1,000 most frequent spoken word types from that corpus were all investigated as pivot words. The most striking finding was that there is a large number of collocations meeting the six criteria and a large number of these would qualify for inclusion in the most frequent 2,000 words of English, if no distinction was made between single words and collocations. Many of these collocations could be usefully taught in an elementary speaking course. © The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.

History

Preferred citation

Shin, D. & Nation, P. (2008). Beyond single words: the most frequent collocations in spoken English. ELT Journal, 62(4), 339-348. https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccm091

Journal title

ELT Journal

Volume

62

Issue

4

Publication date

2008-01-01

Pagination

339-348

Publisher

Oxford University Press (OUP)

Publication status

Published

Contribution type

Article

Online publication date

2007-09-25

ISSN

0951-0893

eISSN

1477-4526

Language

en