Collocations for Confident Communication
NOTICE • INVESTIGATE • PRACTISE • REFLECT
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Career growth often depends on practical experience, useful feedback and the ability to adapt while managing competing priorities.
Professional growth is rarely accidental: it develops through purposeful choices, practical learning, feedback and adaptation.
Explore the readingLexiLink · Careers and Professional Development B2–C1 80 minutes
Complete the tasks, investigate career and workplace collocations in SkELL, and use the expressions to describe professional situations.
Teacher-facing timing plan; the tasks below follow this sequence.
By the end of this lesson, you will be able to interpret and use collocations related to career planning, workplace performance and professional development; distinguish their meanings in context; test hypotheses with SkELL evidence; and write about a realistic professional goal using natural English word partnerships.
Study each word partnership, its precise meaning and related expressions. Pay attention to combinations that may be translated word for word from your first language.
Read the text carefully or listen to it. Target collocations are shown in bold.
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Career development usually begins with a clearer understanding of a person's interests, strengths and priorities. Graduates may pursue a career that matches their abilities, but a good choice also requires them to set realistic goals and actively seek opportunities to learn. A career plan is not a fixed route: interests can change, new industries can emerge and unexpected responsibilities can open different paths. Successful planning therefore combines direction with the willingness to adapt to change.
Qualifications can open doors, but people also need to gain practical experience and acquire new skills. Communication, problem-solving, organisation and teamwork are examples of transferable skills because they remain useful across different roles. Employees who share knowledge and build professional relationships can learn from colleagues and make a stronger contribution to a team. These connections may also help them recognise opportunities they would not discover on their own.
At work, performance is often judged by whether employees meet expectations, complete agreed tasks and communicate reliably. Taking ownership matters: effective colleagues take responsibility for their decisions, acknowledge mistakes and look for ways to improve. Professional life can involve tight deadlines and conflicting demands, so employees need to handle pressure while continuing to balance competing priorities. Asking for help at the right time is a sign of judgement, not weakness.
Feedback helps people understand how their work is perceived. Employees who ask for feedback can identify specific areas for improvement and gradually build confidence through practice. As their knowledge deepens, they may develop expertise, attend professional training or take on new responsibilities. These steps can support career progression, although professional growth does not always mean receiving a promotion. Learning to perform a task more independently or contributing more effectively to a team can also represent meaningful progress.
Long-term development depends on more than ambition alone. People need to review their goals, make use of learning opportunities and maintain a sustainable routine. Managers can support this process by recognising effort, offering useful feedback and making expectations clear. Employees, in turn, can protect their well-being by planning workload realistically and working towards a healthy work–life balance. A sustainable career is built over time through experience, reflection, adaptability and a willingness to keep learning.
Choose True or False according to the text.
Choose the paragraph number (1–5). Some paragraph numbers may be used more than once.
Start with recognition: choose the correct ending to complete familiar career and workplace collocations.
Build natural collocations by identifying the verb that combines with career, skills and responsibility expressions.
Use sentence meaning and grammar to select a collocation that fits the context.
Choose verbs that form natural combinations in career and workplace contexts.
Choose complete expressions using context, register and meaning rather than word matching alone.
Open SkELL. Search career, experience, skills and responsibility in Word Sketch, inspect authentic example sentences and open Similar words. For each keyword, record two collocations, write an original sentence for each, add two related words and note one example that helped you test your initial hypothesis. Avoid assuming that a word combination is natural just because each word is familiar.
Teacher scoring: up to 10 points for accurate and varied collocations, original contextual sentences, relevant related words and evidence-based revision of a language hypothesis.
The structured fields are included in the lesson submission and appear as individual records in the teacher's spreadsheet.
Analyse naturalness: identify the expression that does not form a conventional collocation. Some distractors reflect common word-for-word translation errors.
Correct unnatural combinations by considering meaning, grammatical pattern and workplace context.
These tests become progressively harder: recognise career collocations, choose expressions in workplace contexts, distinguish closely related meanings and evaluate realistic professional scenarios. The practice score is reported separately from the 115-point lesson total.
Write at least 100 words on Careers and Professional Development. Use at least eight target collocations from this lesson. Write directly in the box; clipboard paste and drag-and-drop are disabled in this field.
Please compose your paragraph here rather than pasting a prepared text. Normal paste, cut/copy shortcuts and drag-and-drop are blocked in this writing field. This browser restriction supports the task rules but is not a complete plagiarism-detection system.
0 words — 100-word minimum to submit; no maximum
Write at least 100 words about a professional goal, the skills and experience needed to reach it, and how feedback can support progress. Use at least eight target collocations and support your points with realistic examples.
Your name and group from the student profile above, your SkELL collocations and original sentences, related words, corpus notes, writing paragraph and available exercise scores will be collected in the teacher's spreadsheet.
Auto-scored sections: reading MCQ, True/False, paragraph matching, Matching, Sentence Completion, Odd One Out, Find the Collocate, Sorting, Lexical Cloze and Collocation Repair (100 points total). SkELL cluster (10) and productive writing (5) are teacher-scored. Maximum lesson total: 115 points. The 24-point Progressive Lexical Test is submitted as a separate practice result and is not added to the lesson total.
Vocabulary bank informed by the Lesson 20 topic, “Careers and Professional Development,” in the supplied collocation lesson collection. Definitions, reading and interactive exercises were adapted or written for LexiLink.
LexiLink · Connect words. Build fluency. Lesson submissions are sent to the configured Google Apps Script collector. The teacher must verify the saved row in Google Sheets because the browser cannot read confirmation in no-cors mode.