Photo by Christina Martidou via ELTpics on Flickr How do you explain the notion of collocation to your students? Apart from using this great song , I often employ this simple technique: I write on the board: make and do (in the left column), homework and a mistake (in the right) and ask students to match. I then use the matched combinations ( do+homework ; make+mistake ) as a springboard to talk about how certain words go with certain other words, how these combinations may seem arbitrary and how they may differ significantly from the learners' L1. In fact, in many languages do and make correspond to the same word: cf. ~ faire in French; ~ делать (dyelat') in Russian, which shows how words with similar meanings often differ in their collocational behaviour. To illustrate this phenomenon, Michael Halliday, the founder of Systemic Functional Linguistics, who coined the term "lexicogrammar", used the words powerful and strong . In his 1966 article, Hall...