Choose the word that keeps the right company — not just a correct word, but the expected one.
At C1, the gap between grammatically correct and genuinely idiomatic English is closed by collocation — the habitual partnerships that words form. Native speakers say heavy rain, not strong rain; they make a decision, they do not do a decision. Nothing in the grammar forbids the wrong pairing, and the meaning still comes through, yet the mismatch quietly marks a writer as non-native. Precision at this level is less about rules than about hearing which words travel together.
This unit treats collocation as a system rather than a list to memorise. You will work through the four great support verbs (make, do, take, have), the adverb + adjective pairings that intensify meaning (highly likely, deeply concerned, bitterly disappointed), and the verb + noun combinations that carry academic weight (reach a decision, pose a threat, draw a conclusion, raise awareness). You will also learn to spot the most frequent errors and to match a collocation to its register. The goal is fluency you can hear: the right partner, every time.
The commonest collocation errors involve the "empty" support verbs make and do, which carry little meaning of their own and simply activate a noun. A rough guide: make tends to go with producing or deciding something (a decision, a suggestion, progress, an effort), while do tends to go with work, tasks and vaguer activity (research, the housework, business, harm). The guide is only a tendency, so the safest habit is to learn the noun and its verb together.
| Verb | Typical partners | Example |
|---|---|---|
| make | a decision, a suggestion, progress, an effort, a mistake | She made a suggestion that saved the project. |
| do | research, business, harm, the work, a favour | The team spent months doing research. |
| make an effort / do your best | two fixed pairings learners often swap | If you make an effort and do your best, that is enough. |
The other two support verbs behave the same way. Take collocates with actions you choose to perform (a risk, a break, a decision, responsibility, a look), while have collocates with experiences and states (an impact, an effect, a chance, difficulty, an argument). Once again the noun fixes the verb, and swapping them — "do a risk", "make an impact" instead of "have an impact" — is a classic C1 slip.
| Verb | Typical partners | Example |
|---|---|---|
| take | a risk, a break, responsibility, a look, action | They were willing to take a risk on an unknown supplier. |
| have | an impact, an effect, difficulty, a chance, an argument | The new rule will have an impact on every class. |
| take action / have an effect | two high-frequency academic pairings | Unless we take action, the plan will have no effect. |
To intensify an adjective, English rarely lets you use just very. Each adjective attracts its own intensifying adverb, and the pairing is fixed: something is highly likely (not strongly likely), a person is deeply concerned (not highly concerned), and a supporter is bitterly disappointed (not strongly disappointed). Getting the intensifier right is one of the clearest signals of an advanced speaker.
| Adverb | Adjectives it partners | Example |
|---|---|---|
| highly | likely, unlikely, effective, controversial | A rerun of the vote is highly unlikely. |
| deeply | concerned, rooted, divided, grateful | The community remains deeply divided. |
| bitterly / painfully | disappointed, opposed / aware, obvious | Fans were bitterly disappointed by the loss. |
| widely / fully | available, believed / aware, aware | The report is now widely available online. |
Beyond the four support verbs, academic and professional English relies on stronger, more specific verb + noun pairings. You reach (or make) a decision, draw a conclusion, pose a threat, raise awareness, meet a deadline, strike a balance and play a role. Each verb has been chosen by convention, not logic, so a literal alternative — "do a conclusion", "give a threat" — sounds instantly wrong.
| Collocation | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| draw a conclusion | arrive at a judgement from evidence | It is too early to draw a conclusion. |
| pose a threat | be a danger to something | Rising seas pose a threat to coastal cities. |
| raise awareness | make people more conscious of an issue | The campaign aims to raise awareness. |
| strike a balance / play a role | find a compromise / contribute to an outcome | Referees must strike a balance and play a key role. |
A handful of collocation errors recur even in otherwise strong C1 writing: swapping make and do, choosing the wrong intensifying adverb, forcing a literal verb onto a noun, and mixing registers. Audit your writing against every row.
| Wrong ✗ | Right ✓ | Why? |
|---|---|---|
| The pupils did several mistakes in the report. | The pupils made several mistakes in the report. | "mistake" collocates with make, never do. |
| We need to do a decision before Friday. | We need to make (or reach) a decision before Friday. | a decision is made or reached, not done. |
| The new rule makes a serious threat to the club. | The new rule poses a serious threat to the club. | a threat is posed; "make a threat" means to threaten someone directly. |
| Residents are strongly concerned about the plan. | Residents are deeply concerned about the plan. | "concerned" partners deeply, not strongly. |
| In the essay he grabbed a bite of the main argument. | In the essay he engaged with the main argument. | "grab a bite" is informal and out of register in academic prose. |
Two friends polish a draft article for the school magazine before it goes out. Read it twice and watch the collocations work as a system: a support-verb pairing, an adverb + adjective intensifier, a specific verb + noun combination, and a register fix that swaps a casual phrase for a formal one.
Choose the correct answer. — 10 questions, each one is marked instantly. Questions get harder as you go.
Learn the vocabulary of word partnership and register, then argue a point using natural collocations.
Argue a position on a debatable topic — for example, "Does technology make us less sociable?" Write 8 sentences and use at least 8 of the words above. Make every collocation an idiomatic pairing, not a literal guess.
Sentence starters (you can begin with these):
Değerlendirme öğretmenin tarafından yapılacak. (Your teacher will review your task.)
Read the feature, then work through the five tasks.
Skilled readers prepare before they start. Before you read, think about these three questions (you do not need to write the answers):
Words to spot (from the Speaking section): idiomatic · register · connotation · intelligible · jarring · polished · arbitrary · subtle
Ask any advanced learner what separates fluent English from merely correct English, and the answer, more often than not, is collocation — the habitual company that words keep. A native speaker does not stop to weigh the options and then choose; instead, the pairing simply sounds right. We say "heavy rain" and "make a decision", whereas "strong rain" and "do a decision" strike the ear as subtly wrong. These partnerships are rarely governed by logic, which is precisely why they pose such a persistent challenge.
It helps to recognise that collocations come in several recurring shapes, and that learning to notice the pattern is half the battle. Some are built from a verb and a noun, as when we "do research", "draw a conclusion", or "take responsibility" for a mistake; swap the verb and the phrase collapses, even though the individual words remain perfectly ordinary. Others pair an adjective with a noun, or an adverb with an adjective, so that an outcome is "highly likely", a community is "deeply concerned", and a supporter is "bitterly disappointed". None of these partners could be deduced from a dictionary definition alone; each has simply settled into place through long use, hardening over the years into the version that fluent speakers now expect to hear.
Linguists who study vast databases of real language — corpora running to hundreds of millions of words — have shown just how systematic these preferences are. Certain words travel in remarkably consistent company: "torrential" clings to "rain", "commit" gravitates towards "crime", and "vested" is scarcely ever seen without "interest". The strength of such bonds can be measured statistically, and the tightest of them behave almost like fixed expressions, admitting no substitute at all. This is at once reassuring and daunting for the learner: reassuring, because the partnerships are stable rather than random, and daunting, because there are so many of them, each to be met and remembered in turn rather than worked out from first principles.
Getting collocations wrong seldom prevents understanding; however, it quietly marks a speaker as non-native. A sentence such as "the report did a strong impact" is perfectly intelligible, yet it grates on the ear, since the idiomatic choice is to "have a profound impact". Small slips of this kind accumulate, and consequently they can undermine the authority of an otherwise polished piece of writing.
The trouble is that the wrong partner is often a perfectly good word in its own right. A learner who writes "make a research" or "do a mistake" has not reached for anything obscure; they have merely chosen a plausible neighbour of the correct verb. English is unusually rich in these near-misses, and a first language frequently supplies the culprit, since a pairing that is entirely natural in one tongue may be quietly absurd when translated word for word into another. This is why even confident speakers, whose grammar is impeccable and whose vocabulary is wide, may still betray themselves the moment they "give a decision" instead of making one, or call an outcome "strongly likely" when idiom demands "highly likely". The reader rarely misunderstands; they simply register, half-consciously, that something is off.
Register complicates matters further. To "grab a bite" and to "have a meal" describe the same act; by contrast, they belong to different worlds, one casual and the other neutral. Skilled writers therefore pay close attention not merely to whether a collocation is correct, but to whether it strikes the right tone. Reaching for an informal pairing in an academic essay can be just as jarring as a grammatical error.
Register, moreover, is not a single dividing line but a whole spectrum, running from the intimate slang of close friends to the measured cadences of a scholarly journal. A phrase can be flawless as collocation and still land in the wrong place: "kick off a meeting" and "commence proceedings" describe much the same event, yet the first would raise eyebrows in a formal report and the second would sound absurdly stiff over coffee. Idioms such as "grab this problem by the horns" carry an unmistakable air of the spoken word, and dropping them into academic prose signals, however unfairly, that the writer has not quite judged the occasion. Conversely, the careful writer learns which pairings are register-neutral, at home almost anywhere, and leans on them when the tone of a passage is uncertain.
Collocations, nonetheless, are learned mainly by exposure rather than by rule. Memorising isolated lists rarely works; wide reading, arguably, remains the surest way to absorb them. The more good English you meet, the more naturally these partnerships take root, until choosing the right partner word becomes second nature. What looks effortless on the page is, in truth, the product of countless small choices that a fluent writer no longer even notices making.
The stakes are higher than mere elegance. In school and later in serious writing, where a writer's credibility is built sentence by sentence, a text studded with awkward pairings invites the suspicion that its thinking may be equally imprecise. An examiner marking an essay, a judge reading a competition entry, or a teacher skimming a report will seldom fault a collocation slip explicitly; more often the impression simply forms that the writing is not quite authoritative, and the judgement, once formed, is hard to reverse. Mastery of collocation, then, is not a decorative flourish but a quiet guarantor of trust — the difference between prose that is merely understood and prose that is believed.
How, then, might a determined learner accelerate a process that seems, on the surface, so stubbornly slow? The most reliable answer is to read widely and to read attentively, treating every well-made sentence as a small lesson in which words prefer which company. It rewards the reader to keep a notebook not of single words but of whole phrases, recording "raise awareness", "draw a distinction" or "pose a threat" exactly as they were met, complete with the sentence that gave them life. Isolated in a list, a word offers little; embedded in its natural surroundings, it carries the memory of how it is actually used.
Reading, however, is only half of the discipline; the other half is noticing. Fluent writers develop an ear that flinches, almost involuntarily, at an ill-matched pair, and this sensitivity can be cultivated deliberately. When a sentence feels subtly wrong yet breaks no grammatical rule, the culprit is very often a collocation, and pausing to ask which word the language would ordinarily choose turns a vague unease into a concrete lesson. Over time, the learner who reads much, notices often, and revises honestly will find that the right partner arrives unbidden, and that the laborious weighing of options gives way to the quiet confidence of someone who no longer has to think about it. We are, in the end, deeply grateful for a resource we can scarcely see at work: the invisible web of partnerships that lets one word summon the next, and turns a string of correct words into English that genuinely sounds like English.
Choose the correct answer.
Are these sentences true or false, according to the text?
Complete each sentence with ONE word from the text. Choose the exact collocation word the writer uses.
Write your answer in your own words. These questions are not marked automatically.
1. Why, according to the writer, do collocation errors "quietly mark a speaker as non-native" even when the meaning is clear?
2. According to the text, why does register matter as much as accuracy? Do you agree?
3. The text says collocations are "learned mainly by exposure rather than by rule." What do you think this means for how you should study?
Find these connectors in the text — each one appears at least once: instead, whereas, however, consequently, by contrast, therefore, yet, nonetheless. (You will reuse these same C1 connectors in the Writing section.) Note them down, then check.
Repair a paragraph full of wrong word partnerships, then drill your collocation choices with 10 quick questions.
Below is a paragraph that is grammatically correct but full of wrong collocations and register clashes. Every sentence pairs the wrong verb, adverb or noun, or reaches for a phrase that is too casual. Your job is to re-tell it in natural, idiomatic academic English, fixing every pairing.
Sentence starters (you can begin with these):
Değerlendirme öğretmenin tarafından yapılacak. (Your teacher will review your task.)
10 quick questions on collocation and idiomatic precision. Each one is marked instantly. Questions get harder as you go.
Write and submit a discursive paragraph in natural, idiomatic English; your teacher will review it.
Idiomatic argument still needs to flow. At C1 you gain a sharper, more formal set of connectors — whereas, however, consequently, by contrast, nonetheless and therefore — which let you concede, contrast and conclude in a polished academic tone. These are themselves fixed pairings, so learn how each one is punctuated and positioned.
| Connector | Use it to... | Example |
|---|---|---|
| however | qualify or contrast the previous sentence | The plan will have an impact. However, the risks are real. |
| by contrast | set one case sharply against another | Older users take few risks; younger ones, by contrast, take many. |
| consequently | state a result or effect | Funding was cut; consequently, the team missed the deadline. |
| whereas | draw a direct, balanced contrast | Automation poses a threat, whereas it also creates jobs. |
| nonetheless | concede a point, then hold your position | The effect is small; nonetheless, it makes a difference. |
| therefore | draw a firm conclusion | The data are strong; therefore, we can draw a conclusion. |
See the difference — the same idea, written two ways:
| Wrong collocations ✗ | Idiomatic C1 register ✓ |
|---|---|
| Online lessons do a big impact on teamwork. It makes serious harm to friendships, and teachers must do an effort to take a balance. | Online lessons have a significant impact on teamwork; however, their effects vary widely. They can do real harm to friendships, whereas working from home often raises focus. Consequently, teachers must make an effort to strike a balance that plays to the strengths of both. |
A strong C1 argument is not a run of bold assertions. It states a position, supports it, weighs the counter-case, and lands a conclusion — and at every stage it reaches for the idiomatic collocation rather than a literal guess. The skeleton stays the same; you change the content, not the shape:
| Part | What to write | Collocations to reach for |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Position | state your claim clearly | it is highly likely that / X poses a threat to |
| 2. Support | give a reason and an example | have a profound impact / play a key role / do real harm |
| 3. Concession | admit a counterpoint | however / whereas / it is worth conceding that |
| 4. Conclusion | round off the argument | therefore / we must strike a balance / draw the conclusion that |
Write a discursive paragraph on a debatable question — for example, "Should children have a smartphone before the age of 13?" or a topic of your choice. Argue like a careful writer, and make every word partnership idiomatic and register-appropriate.
Değerlendirme öğretmenin tarafından yapılacak. (Your teacher will evaluate your writing.)
Mixed questions from the whole unit, then check what you can do.
14 questions: grammar + vocabulary + reading + practice. Each question is marked instantly.
Tick what you can do now. Honest answers help your teacher.
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