Dissertation analysis of phraseological content in English teaching: materials and teachers’ attitudes

5.1.2 Examination of Bridges 1 for Bachillerato 
Bridges 1 by Burlington is also a well-known English teaching book in Murcia. As in 
the previous example, it follows the same pattern in all its units: Vocabulary-Reading-
Grammar-Vocabulary-Writing-Listening-Looking Back and a cultural section every three 
units called: A bridge to: History/Literature/Geography. 

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If we have a look at the book, at first sight, we can see how, unlike English Alive! 3, it 
devotes some specific exercises at the teaching of particular phraseological units. For 
instance, in every unit, we find an activity presenting two or three idioms and another one 
called Bridge to Everyday Language in which we encounter most social routine formulae. 
Regarding collocations, we have just found a couple of exercises (Unit 3 and 5) intended to 
focus our attention on some fixed noun-noun and verb-noun collocations. It is also important 
to mention that the terms „collocation‟ and „idiom‟ appear in the book as new terms for 
students to be aware of. Finally, as for proverbs, they are virtually nonexistent and, therefore, 
they are not given particular attention either in this book. 
If we collect the global results of the survey, this time we obtain the following: 
COLLOCATIONS 
IDIOMS 
PROVERBS 
ROUTINE 
FORMULAE 
1.386 
42 
2 
84 
As we can see, the figures are quite similar to the previous book. Again, collocations 
are the category most widely used, followed by social routine formulae. The number of 
idioms has increased significantly with respect to the one contained in English Alive! 3 and, in 
this case, we find, at least, two proverbs. 
As far as the main focus of the activities is concerned, we obtained the following 
results: