I started using collocation dominoes in two highschool classes in
Lugano(LiLu2). All students are in their second year of English. We are
using Headway pre-intermediate.
The reading text occupies a relatively small part of every unit. This
potentially highly useful part risks leaving very few traces in the
students’ minds if no supplementary activities are introduced. The very
effective technique of having students summarise can be done once, at
most twice. After that they start complaining. To have the chunks “stick” they need to be exposed to them more often. That is the reason I
chose this game.
It is very easy to implement in class: You write the first half of a
two-word chunk into the right side of a box and the second half in the
left hand side of the next box. You  make photocopies of it and cut into
pieces so that every group gets all the boxes. They have to put them
together. It usually takes them 10 min. to do a 15 piece domino.
Afterwards I sometimes have every group write a few sentences using the
chunks. The correction is a plenary activity.
The results are very encouraging: Students enjoy group games very much.
The game is also very challenging because it questions their knowledge
of collocations. They want to do it well but realize how difficult it is
if the text has been read superficially, which, alas, is often the case.
I got the idea of collocation dominoes from Michael Lewis’ Implementing
the Lexical Approach. (Chapter 7)

UNDER CONSTRUCTION