Word Association

This is a great way of recycling vocabulary. But word associations can also tell us something about what is going on in our students' minds. We can even compare this with what goes on in the minds of native speakers when given the same key words. See Word Association Thesarus. The associations of drought as they appear in EAT (Edinburgh Associations Thesaurus) are shown here on the right.

One way of obtaining word associations from students is via synchronous chat, for example in Gmail or Moodle.

Using chat software, ask your sts to react to these words with a single word, as quickly as possible.

• • band

  • smile

  • welcome

  • liar

  • shoe

  • history

  • orange

  • notice

  • policy

  • outside

Then compare these with the results of the Word Association Thesaurus.

What sort of semantic relationships do the Stimulus words have to the Response words? Wordnet may be of some use here.

More info about the Edinburgh Word association thesaurus here.

Taking it further

Do the pairs of words also collocate significantly?

Look at their wordsketches.

Do the words form any sorts of clusters? For example,

do people usually associate adjectives or verbs or other nouns with nouns?

do people think of opposites, synonyms, superordinates, etc. ?

Can students create a word rose (like a mindmap) of the associated words?

In this BBC radio comedy, there is a game called Word for Word in which people have to say isolated words one after the other and other people have to find a connection between them. The skill lies in NOT saying an associative word. In Episode 1 of Series 56, in the 14th minute, you can hear this game, though I do not know how long it stays on line.