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Lists of Word Combinations

Introduction

• Long lists of examples of the different 'types' of two-word combinations are shown here. The purpose of  these lists is to familiarize you more with the ideas that were mentioned on the page, "Answers to Diagnostic Test 1."  If you have not done the self-test on sentence stress or have not read the explanations on the page, "Answers to Diagnostic Test 1" then you probably will not fully understand what these lists represent and how to speak them.  

• The idea is that you practice reading these lists aloud. By doing that, you will become familiar with some of the typical 'sets' of word combinations and later, when you come across new examples that fit into these or similar sets, you will be more likely to guess the correct placement of the stress. It is not necessary to spend a lot of time actually memorizing the contents of these lists.  

• I must emphasize that, for the average IELTS test taker in China, who is about a Band 5, spending a lot of time reading these lists is not the most productive use of your time. Your time is best spent improving your grammar in a speaking context. For example, you should be spending a lot of time using a self-study speaking book and CD combination such as 'Side by Side'. Nevertheless, it is useful for the average test taker to at least be familiar with the concepts that lie behind these lists and to spend a small number of hours reading some of these sets of word combinations aloud.  

• For those of you who are already quite good at spoken English (i.e., a strong Band 6 or Band 7), practicing reading these lists is one way to help improve your spoken English to a Band 8 level. But even for you, these lists are focusing on only one small part of pronunciation and only one way to improve your pronunciation enough to get an 8 for pronunciation. These lists would be most useful for people who use English every day in their job, especially professional language experts such as T.V. & radio newsreaders, tour guides and simultaneous translators. For you, making improvements to your spoken English is not so easy because you are not sure what to focus on. Most of you could benefit a lot by spending time reading these lists aloud.

• The lists are not 100% complete  – I have listed the most common examples here and sometimes there are many more possible examples but these are usually very specialized language that is rarely used. At other times, you could guess more examples yourself. For example, for TYPE 1, under 'TEACHER',  I have listed 13 examples, starting with 'a Chinese teacher', 'a dance teacher', 'a dancing teacher' and 'a history teacher'. It was not necessary to list every possible kind of teacher.  

• These are not meant to be IELTS vocabulary lists. Although it is true that you will improve your vocabulary by reading these lists and looking up a few words that are new to you, some of these word combinations would be rarely used in the IELTS test. Understand that the main purpose of these lists is to help you get used to the 'rules' of stress placement in word combinations and to familiarize you with common 'sets' of combinations. There are better word lists than the ones here that you could use as IELTS vocabulary lists.  

• The word that is in bold, heavy black print is stressed more than the other word.  

• Later, I will include an audio file with these lists to help you mimic the stress pronunciation. But this will only cover some of the list items, not all. Until then, you can use the audio file for Diagnostic Test 1 as your guide.

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Click on a link below to see the lists.

Type 1: Typical compound Nouns – STRESS ON FIRST WORD  

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The lists below have not yet been uploaded to this website.

Type 2: Adjective + Noun (not joined) – STRESS ON SECOND WORD

Type 3: Adjective + Noun (joined) – STRESS ON FIRST WORD

Type 4: Special Compound Nouns: Noun + Noun – STRESS ON SECOND WORD

Type 5: Names: “The X Y”, Stress on X 

Type 6: Names: “The X Y”, Stress on Y

Type 7: Names of People and Roads (including Avenues and Lanes): “ X Y”, Stress on Y

Type 8: Names of Streets: “ X Street”, Stress on X

Type 9: Adjective (implied contrast) + Noun  –  STRESS ON FIRST WORD

Type 10: Example of a Compound Adjective – STRESS ON SECOND WORD