Leveraging COCA to teach collocations with high mutual information scores

Over the past decade, extensive research has explored collocations with high mutual information (MI) scores. However, second-language learners often struggle to incorporate these collocations into their writing due to a lack of awareness and limited practice opportunities. To address this challenge, the present article presents a 10-week writing course that integrates various activities using COCA, an online corpus tool, to enhance students’ awareness and use of collocations with high MI scores. By analyzing student essays and their reflections on class activities, the article examines the benefits and challenges of using COCA for the instruction of collocations with high MI scores in the English language classroom. Pedagogical recommendations are provided to refine instructional practices.