Collocations: Important But Neglected?

In my opinion and experience, even when grammar is mastered by an ESL learner, expression continues to be a challenge. How can an ESL learner express his or her ideas in a more idiomatic way? What words go with what other words in American English?

Our curriculum typically gives more attention to teaching grammar and the four language skills than to teaching collocates. What then would be an effective way to raise student awareness of English "word friends," besides correcting them one instance at a time? For example, most Spanish-speaking students use "put attention in...," translating directly from their native tongue. Is there a good way to impress upon them that saying "pay attention to" is more idiomatic than "put attention in"?

Concordance programs are basically searching tools to run through a text data base and show the KWIC (key word in context). Here's one such concordancer online: http://www.lextutor.ca/concordancers/concord_e.html. So if you have your students type "put attention" in the "keyword(s)" box and then select a corpus, say "Brown's one million words" before hitting the yellow "Get concordance" button, they will see that there is no such combination. Repeat the same for "pay attention" as keywords, and they will see at least a couple examples pop up.

A better way to have the students discover the collocates would be for them to just input "attention" as the keyword and then try to find out what verb most typically goes with "attention" in English.

There are other ways to use concordances to teach English. This article, though written to advertise an $85, good concordancer called MonoConc, provides a couple suggestions.

Another free online concordance program with three English corpora--two American and one British--is here at http://view.byu.edu/.

I know in our dept., Lynne Henson, Gary Sosa, and Tracy Fung have been using concordancers in their teaching. I would like to hear them and other colleagues share their specific methods.