Chapter 1 the study of collocations

3.1.3  Activities and Tasks 
 
 
Each unit in the textbooks has a central theme, which is further divided 
into several topics and issues leading to situations where the learner is invited 
to participate by using her/his communicative skills.  Before each task is 
performed, the sociolinguistic context of the situation is given. 
 
The team of authors designed the tasks, aiming to develop in learners 
both receptive and productive skills and to encourage them to discover new 
knowledge rather than impose it on them.  They also wanted to offer the 
students opportunities  for metacognition and metacommunication (Dendrinos 
1988:6).  For example, learners are asked to look at the usage of different 
grammar tenses in a comparative way, or they are informed about the roles of 
certain grammatical structures, e.g. Passive Voice is used when we are 
interested in the action rather than the agent (TWE3, p.57). 
 
The last part of each unit in the three textbooks aims to help the learner 
systematise the knowledge that she/he acquired throughout the unit.  For 
 
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example, in TWE2, Unit 6, p. 84, an alphabetical list of more than eighty English 
verbs with irregular past tense forms is presented in order to help learners 
systematise their knowledge of irregular past tense verb forms.  However, the 
effectiveness of such tasks depends to a large extent on the way these are 
presented to the learners, and the use that learners make of them. 
 
The writers of the series did not design activities that could raise the 
students' awareness of collocations in a systematic way.  In TWE1, there is only 
one activity that asks students to list nouns that could be accompanied by a 
certain adjective, e.g. big: toe, finger, foot, hand, mouth, ear, eye.  In TWE2, 
there are no activities that would help learners acquire specific collocations.  
Finally, in TWE3, there is one activity in which students are asked to make 
adjective-noun and noun-noun compounds using specific words on a list, e.g. 
'classified advertisement', 'natural resources', 'entertainment section'. 
 
Instructors follow the curriculum closely and the TWE series textbooks 
are the only textbooks used in the classroom.  So the textbooks control the 
learners lexical acquisition in the classroom.