Teachers’ intuitions about near-synonyms (trouble vs problem) are often vague or wrong. Corpus tools give checkable evidence on collocation, frequency and patterns. ‘You shall know a word by the company it keeps’ (Firth 1957).
Procedure
- Write down your intuition first (he asked four teachers).
- Check collocates and patterns: Sketch Engine’s Sketch Difference; COCA (collocates within ±4 words).
- Compare learner-dictionary entries (Cambridge).
- Triangulate before concluding. Mutual Information (MI) > 3 usually signals a meaningful collocation.
Theory
Firth (1957); Sinclair (1991) Corpus, Concordance, Collocation; O’Keeffe, McCarthy & Carter (2007) From Corpus to Classroom.
Limits
Results depend on the corpus (BNC vs COCA = British vs American English). Tools change; some links are dead.
Apply in my context (Claude)
- IELTS learners ask “Can I say make a decision / do a decision?” daily. Teach them to check it themselves in a free corpus or SkELL. That’s learner autonomy plus lexis.
- For DELTA M1 language analysis, corpus evidence makes “use” answers more precise.
Connections
Teach lexically - collocations as minimum units of meaning · The lexical syllabus began with Willis and COBUILD