Knowing the network of associations between a word and other words is called collocation. Activity 4 focused on this aspect in a decontextualized way, but we need to ensure that we do not merely teach new items of vocabulary in isolation, but via a meaningful context for the word, if possible with several examples of its use in connected discourse.

Hoey (2003) notes a factor that is related to collocation, for which he coins the term semantic association. He defines this as the tendency of a word to keep company with a semantic set or class, only some of whose members will be collocates. It is important for learners to be aware of the semantic associations of a word, especially at advanced level. Using as an example the word, 'consequence', Hoey shows that this has semantic associations with concepts of logic, eg 'unavoidable', 'inescapable', 'ineluctable'; (un)expectedness, eg 'likely', 'probably', 'planned-for'; negative evaluation, eg 'awful', 'dire'; and (in)significance, eg 'serious', 'dramatic', 'prominent'. He has no evidence from any corpora that 'ineluctable', 'planned-for' or 'prominent' are collocates of the word 'consequence', however.