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 group project. |
| do | research, business, harm, the work, a favour | The class spent weeks 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 unfamiliar topic. |
| have | an impact, an effect, difficulty, a chance, an argument | The new timetable will have an impact on every class. |
| take action / have an effect | two high-frequency academic pairings | Unless we take action, the campaign 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 exam is highly unlikely. |
| deeply | concerned, rooted, divided, grateful | The class remains deeply divided over the topic. |
| bitterly / painfully | disappointed, opposed / aware, obvious | Fans were bitterly disappointed by the loss. |
| widely / fully | available, believed / aware, aware | The study guide 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 | Student reps 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 students did several mistakes in the essay. | The students made several mistakes in the essay. | "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. |
| Students are strongly concerned about the plan. | Students 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 students polish a draft essay before they hand it in. 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
Maya had spent a fortnight rehearsing for the inter-school debate, and she was convinced her argument was airtight. Yet when the adjudicator handed back her feedback sheet, one remark kept reappearing in the margin: her English was grammatically flawless, and yet it somehow did not sound English. She had promised that her team would "do a strong effort" and "make a big influence on the audience", and although every judge understood her perfectly, something about the phrasing felt subtly out of tune. Her English teacher later gave the puzzle a name that Maya had never once met in years of vocabulary quizzes: collocation.
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.
For a student like Maya, this was an unsettling discovery. She had always assumed that fluency was chiefly a matter of knowing more words, so she had filled notebook after notebook with fresh definitions and neat columns of synonyms. Nobody had warned her that words tend to travel in fixed pairs, and that swapping one half of a pair for its dictionary twin could quietly give her away. When she rewrote "do a strong effort" as "make a serious effort", the sentence abruptly settled into place, even though the underlying meaning had scarcely shifted at all.
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.
Her history teacher put the point bluntly during a lunchtime revision session. A single odd pairing, he explained, might slip past a hurried reader, but when a coursework essay is dotted with them, the examiner begins to sense that the writer is reaching beyond a comfortable command of the language. In an exam, where marks are awarded partly for range and accuracy, that impression can quietly cost a candidate a whole grade. Maya started to notice the same wobbly phrases cropping up in her classmates' work, and she realised that even the strongest students in her year stumbled over the very same invisible partnerships.
The lesson took on new weight when her class was assigned a group project: a formal proposal arguing that the school library should extend its opening hours. Working alongside three classmates, Maya noticed how differently each of them handled the language. One boy, who read constantly, produced phrases that sounded almost professional — "address a concern", "reach a compromise" — while another, who leaned on a translation app, kept generating pairings that were technically defensible yet oddly stilted. The draft that eventually earned top marks was not the one with the grandest vocabulary, but the one whose word partnerships felt effortless and natural.
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.
Teenagers, of course, shift between registers constantly, often without even realising it. The messages Maya fired off to her friends were crammed with phrases she would never dream of dropping into an essay, and that instinct usually served her well; a formal debate speech that suddenly slipped into "grab a bite" would sound clumsy, while a text to a classmate written in stiff academic prose would seem faintly ridiculous. The skill she was slowly acquiring, then, was not simply choosing correct pairings, but reading the situation and matching her language to it — sensing when a phrase belonged in the debating chamber and when it belonged in the corridor outside.
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.
Once Maya understood this, she changed the way she studied. Instead of grinding through vocabulary lists the night before each test, she began reading widely for pleasure — novels borrowed from the school library, long articles on subjects she genuinely cared about, even the subtitles of the series she watched at the weekend. She still kept a slim notebook, but rather than isolated words she now jotted down whole phrases as she met them: "raise an objection", "draw a conclusion", "meet a deadline". Slowly, and almost without noticing, she stopped translating from her first language and started simply hearing which partner word belonged where.
None of this happened overnight, and Maya was the first to admit that she still slipped up. She would occasionally write "make a research" or "do a mistake", catch herself a moment too late, and laugh at how stubbornly the wrong pairing clung on. But the errors grew steadily rarer, and, more importantly, she began to hear them, which is arguably the harder skill of the two. A learner who can sense that something sounds faintly off is already halfway to putting it right.
By the time the next debate season came around, the change was audible to everyone who had judged her before. Maya no longer paused to assemble her sentences brick by careful brick; the right pairings arrived on their own, and her arguments carried a quiet confidence that no grammar drill had ever managed to give her. Collocation, she had finally learned, was not a rule to be crammed but a habit to be grown, and the richest soil for it was simply the good English she chose to surround herself with, in the classroom and out of it, every single day.
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 | The trip was cancelled; consequently, the class missed the deadline. |
| whereas | draw a direct, balanced contrast | Social media poses a threat, whereas it also creates opportunities. |
| 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 ✓ |
|---|---|
| Group work does a big impact on friendships. It makes serious harm to trust, and teachers must do an effort to take a balance. | Group work has a significant impact on friendships; however, its effects vary widely. It can do real harm to trust, whereas shared tasks often raise morale. 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, "Do smartphones pose more of a threat than a benefit to learning?" or a topic of your choice. Argue like a careful academic, 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.
İşaretlemediğin madde varsa ilgili bölüme dönüp tekrar çalış — soldaki menüden her bölüme geri dönebilirsin.
Oturum kontrol ediliyor...