Barry, the main character in this lesson, has wormed his way into a number of our lessons. If you’d like to see his other ones you could try here, here, here, or even here.

With this lesson I have learnt something about myself. I have learnt that try as I might, I cannot write a lesson without including some study skills. I tried to do a straight collocations lesson for my students and came out with a collocations + online concordance lesson.

“Get” is one that my students ask about all the time and I am often reluctant to do a lesson on it as I never feel it will do much good unless students actually go out and start to notice these collocations themselves. It’s the whole fish saying thing:

Give me some “get” collocations and I’ll use them for a day, teach me to find them and I’ll use them forever…

That’s the saying, right?

Objectives:

1. By the end of the lesson students will be better able to notice collocations in context and to use an online concordance to find common collocations.

Time: 1-2 hours

Level: intermediate and above

Material:

1. Barry Deals with Get Collocations – teachers’ copy
2. Barry Deals with Get Collocations – worksheet

Procedure:

1. Display the question: what are the major issues we face in the workplace these days? Sts discuss. Feedback as a class and deal with any emerging language but don’t focus on any one over the others.
2. Explain students are going to read an extract from story. In it, the main character raises an issue with his boss. Read the story and decide in pairs what that issue is. The issue is inequality in the workplace.
3. Discuss as a class if they have similar issues in their countries and what could be done to avoid this in the future.
4. Explain that one word is used quite frequently in the story (get) and see if they can find it.
5. Sts underline all meanings of get and document them and their colocation in the space below.
6. In small groups, sts examine the get phrases and decide what they mean in this context.
7. Optional practice: sts write their own sentences using the phrases to check understanding.
8. Discuss the following questions with sts:
9. Do you avoid get in general? Why?
10. Do you use alternative words?
11. Are these words more or less natural than get?
12. Where can you find more examples of collocations?
13. Depending on your tech, either display the following on an iwb or take sts to computer rooms or encourage them to use their phones. For the purposes of this procedure I will assume you are using an iwb. If you don’t have any tech, I have taken some examples and copied them into the worksheet for you.
14. Display the British national online corpus and explain what it is. Ask sts how this could be useful. Show them how to use it with “get” as an example.
15. Turn over the page and ask sts to analyse the examples. Are they the same as previous examples, are some different?
16. Feedback as a class.
17. Direct students to the controlled practice exercise to do by themselves and then check in pairs.
18. T deals with any errors or confusion. (Note: confusion and errors will probably occur when manipulating these semi-fixed language chunks in context. Students tend to understand them but can struggle when it comes to using them.)

Optional follow up:

1. To encourage some level of autonomy, ask the students to choose another verb they find difficult to use. Suggest “have” or “pick” or something that has a lot of collocations or uses.
2. Students use the concordance and find common collocations. They record them in a spider gram like with get.
3. Students write their own story using as many as they can.

Optional Follow up 2:

1. Students write the conversation between Barry and his boss and act it out, trying to incorporate as many “get” collocations as possible.
2. T gives points for originality, accuracy and use of collocations and decides on a winning pair.