A teacher asks her learners to find words and word chunks relating to…

Concept

Word collocations are habitual, natural-sounding combinations of words that speakers of a language use together (for example, make a decision, heavy rain). In English-language-teaching terminology, such multi-word combinations are commonly called ‘chunks’ or ‘lexical chunks’ — a broader family of formulaic multi-word sequences that includes collocations among other patterns such as idioms and fixed phrases. Teaching word collocations means training learners to notice and record these recurring word combinations as stable units, rather than learning single vocabulary items in isolation.

Application

In the scenario, learners scan a reading passage for words and word chunks tied to particular themes and sort them into charts by category. The theme supplies the topic scaffold, and the skill being practised is spotting and recording the multi-word chunks that habitually go together within that theme. CBSE's official CTET July 2019 Paper-II answer key confirms that this item's intended reading is exactly that collocation-noticing skill, recording this question's answer as Word collocations.

Cross-check / Contrast

• Thematic language teaching organises an entire unit or course around one central theme across all four skills — it is a syllabus-design principle, not a discrete vocabulary-chunking task like the one described.

• Communicative language teaching centres on meaningful interaction and real communication as the route to learning — the activity here is extraction and categorisation of vocabulary from a text, not spoken or written interaction.

• A writing project requires learners to compose extended original text; here learners are identifying and sorting existing words and chunks, not producing new writing.

So the strategy described — finding words and word chunks by theme and charting them by category — is best identified, per the official CTET key, as teaching word collocations.