Did you know that “collocations are found in up to 70% of everything we say, hear, read or write”? (Hill, 2000, p. 53). In fact, English is considered to be similar to the way it is spoken by a native speaker when collocations are mastered and correctly used. Therefore, it is very important to use collocations appropriately as they help develop oral and written communication and production (Nation, 2001; Durrant, 2008; Boers and Lindstromberg, 2009), fluency (Károly, 2005) and proficiency in the target language (McCarthy, 2018).

 

Collocations can be defined as a set of two or more words that usually combine together in order to produce accurate sentences from a grammatical point of view (López Pérez and Benali Taouis, 2019, p. 101). For example, do homework or make lunch are collocations. However, they can be tricky for Spanish learners of English because we can find two verbs (do and make) for the same verb in Spanish, which is hacer. Thus, it becomes important to know the difference between these two verbs before making collocations with them.

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