Welcome to the Online English Collocations Platform, an interactive way to learn English collocations and help you develop your collocational competence. It is specially designed to Brazilian Portuguese learners of English, but also to other foreign language speakers who aim to develop fluency in English.

The development of this Platform is the result of an ongoing and larger research project, The compilation of corpora-based teaching materials and specialized glossaries and their contribution to a Pedagogy of Lexicon and Translation, carried out at São Paulo State University (UNESP), by Dr. Adriane Orenha-Ottaiano. It is also a contribution to the research group FRASCORP - Fraseologia e Colocações Baseado em Corpora (PHRASCORP - Corpus-based Phraseology and Collocations), duly registered at CNPq Group Directory (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico/The Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development)..

Collocations are pervasive, recurrent, arbitrary and conventionalized combinations, which are lexically and/or syntactically fixed to a certain degree and may have a more or less restricted collocational range. They are a language and a culture’s specific combinations and, as such, the collocability of their elements may vary significantly from a language to another, being thus made up of their own collocations network:

Collocations are relevant phraseological units in the learning process, as native speakers use “prefabricated blocks” as if they were one single lexical item, only one word. What appears to be spontaneous is actually a stereotyped, fixed and repetitive speech, and if the speaker does not have a vast repertoire of these stereotyped phraseological units at their disposable, their speech may not sound natural.

Hence, the compilation of the Online English Collocations Platform has the goal of helping users learn collocations more effectively, so that they increase their proficiency and thus achieve native-like naturalness.