Amplifier collocations in the British National Corpus: Implications for English language teaching

This study examines how adverbs of degree tend to collocate with particular words in the 100-million-word British National Corpus and considers some possible implications for English language teaching. The mutual information measure is used to show the strength of the bond between 24 selected amplifiers such as extremely or greatly and other words (typically adjectives or participles such as rare or appreciated, which result in collocations such as extremely rare or greatly appreciated). Each amplifier is shown to collocate most strongly with particular words having particular grammatical and semantic characteristics. Research in cognitive science has shown the extent to which words and collocations become established as units of learning depending on the frequency with which they are experienced. In the light of the corpus-based evidence on the nature of collocations presented in this study, the teaching of collocations might be expected to have a more explicit and prominent place in the language teaching curriculum. In class, teachers can draw attention to collocations not only through direct teaching but also by maximizing opportunities to acquire them through an emphasis on autonomous implicit learning activities such as reading.