​Imagine this. You’re an upper-intermediate student. You chat online in English, binge entire Netflix series without subtitles, and follow influencers from three countries. You turn up at your advanced English course expecting something stimulating.
And what do you get? 
“Fill in the gaps in these ten unrelated sentences.”

Yes. That’s your advanced vocabulary task. But wait — there’s more.

“Find the word which is misspelt in these ten unrelated sentences.”

You begin to wonder if you’ve stumbled into Year 3 spelling club. But no, this is your internationally published advanced vocabulary book. And finally:

“Replace the underlined word with a single word that has a similar meaning.”
So big becomes large. Bravo. Curtain down.

Meanwhile, in history you’ve analysed facsimiles of primary documents. In physics and chemistry you’ve run experiments, collected data, reported results. In literature you’ve explored metaphor, alliteration, cultural references. In every subject you’ve been expected to observe, question, and discover. Except in vocabulary study. Here your intelligence is politely ignored.

​One such book introduces tomboy. A definition is solemnly provided: “A girl who enjoys activities and behaviours usually associated with boys.” Very helpful — except every student already knew what it meant. So… why teach it?

The book had no interest in how the word is actually used. But the teacher did. And SKELL made that possible. With 40 student-friendly examples, each from a different text, students could ask:

• Which determiners appear before tomboy?
• What adjectives modify it?
• What nouns follow it (tomboy stage, tomboy persona)?
• Which verbs collocate with it?
• Are tomboys usually children, teenagers, or adults?
• Are they described positively or negatively?
• What cultural references appear?

Now students aren’t parroting a definition they already knew. They’re making discoveries about usage. They’re noticing patterns, testing assumptions, reaching conclusions. And all of this is mediated through their existing knowledge of English.

They have to read, notice, compare, infer, decide — in other words, they are using their English to grow their English. That’s not a trivial task. That’s an opportunity to use higher-order thinking skills and socially construct knowledge with classmates, mediated by the teacher and the language itself.

​And here’s the deeper point. By working with tomboy in this way, students aren’t just learning one word. They’re learning how to learn vocabulary. They learn what features of words are worth knowing:

• collocations
• compounds
• colligations
• semantic features.

They learn why those features matter: because they make words usable, not just knowable. And they learn how to investigate: how to search, observe, interpret, and record.

This is metacognition in practice. It is procedural knowledge. It is training learners to keep learning. And it is done through English itself: students are using their English to analyse English.
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Isn’t that exactly what upper-intermediate and advanced students should be doing? Not hunting misspellings in ten random sentences, but engaging in real inquiry — the kind that deepens knowledge and develops independence.

​SKELL provides a dataset of English at large, allowing students to observe the consensus patterns of thousands of speakers. If teachers want to focus on the language of a specific text — which has its own rewards — they can paste it into VersaText. Between them, these tools enable learners to treat language as evidence, not opinion; as data, not trivia.
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And once you’ve seen students interrogate a word like tomboy with curiosity and intelligence, it’s very hard to go back to filling in the blanks of ten unrelated sentences.

• warm and fuzzy
• furry and fuzzy
• cuddly and fuzzy
• cute and fuzzy.

None of these eight combinations occur frequently enough in SkELL's billion word corpus to be anointed chunks. English can certainly boast many very high frequency “and” chunks, such as:

• first and foremost
• tried and tested
• doom and gloom
• chalk and talk
• part and parcel
• pen and paper
• trials and tribulations.

With their poetic alliteration and their internal rhyming scheme, these are chunks with their own semantic and pragmatic functions in the language.

Our fuzzy examples, however, are properties of the word. Make a word sketch for pretty much any noun, verb, adjective, or adverb in the English language and you will find words that and links it with. The more arcane the word, the more arcane the partners. See arcane, for example.

Search for words that are in a text you are studying or on a word list you are working with. Explore the "and" relationship by clicking on a word to see it in sentence examples. For example, in the "and" relationship of class, we see among others:

• gender
• category
• method.

Clicking on gender shows 40 example sentences that include class and gender. This must be more than a lexical relationship – it is cultural and political.

Clicking on category shows 40 sentences related to categorisation. Once again, this represents the way this topic is written and spoken about.

Remember that we do not need to read and grasp the sentence examples that corpus searches yield. A concordance page is not a text – it is a source of language data that we skim and scan to identify patterns of normal usage from which we learn how the language works so that our use of the foreign language approximates that of the many native speakers whose output has turned up in the corpus.

The "and" pattern, connecting two words of the same part of speech and with similar semantics, often offers lexical support. Rather than expressing something new, this quasi repetition reinforces the meaning or general impression being communicated. This is particularly noticeable with subjective and emotive words. Look at the "and" relationships of:

• angry
• funny
• modest

There is also the matter of word order. Words in these and relationships are usually said in a set order.

• Coffee and tea is much less frequent than tea and coffee.
• Compare and contrast vs. contrast and compare.
• When and where vs. where and when.
• Reading and writing  vs. writing and reading.

As language teachers and speakers of foreign languages, we are always interested in the properties of words. Knowing a word’s patterns of normal usage is key to using words as native speakers do. And the confidence that emerges from this knowledge impacts on fluency.