A Pedagogical View of English/Urdu Collocations

Abstract

To build a sound vocabulary and to give the basic knowledge of language to ESL students is one of the key issues for English language teachers in Pakistan. They emphasize single word vocabulary build-up along with grammatical construction of a sentence at the same time by making its Urdu translation without taking any considerable notice of the use of collocation (the naturally co-occurring words) not by chance but chosen by the native speakers consistently as a psycholinguistic consideration. This phenomenon results in the development of erroneous writing and speaking skills on the part of ESL students. So, the purpose of present study is to give a concrete description of English/Urdu collocations and to highlight the scope of English/Urdu collocations in Second Language Acquisition and Learning. A corpus based approach has been adopted to give the description of English/Urdu collocations based on contrastive analysis to point out the equivalent and non-equivalent collocations. The data is analyzed to emphasize the importance of teaching non-equivalent English/Urdu collocations to Pakistani students. This brief paper suggests the practical solutions of the present problem.