Our teachers recently attended a training session on something called the lexical approach. This method is just one of the many methods that teachers at IH Valladolid are experts in. This method has a connection with something called corpus linguistics.
Corpus linguistics is basically using a computer to study the frequency of words and groups of words.
This can be a very useful tool not only for methodologists and for teachers of English as a foreign language but it can also be a useful tool for learning.
This website will show you not only which words collocate (go together) with each other but also how common a word is. This can be very useful for when you are practising writing. Corpus linguistics uses technology that can search through 10s of millions of written texts to see how common a word or groups of words is and which words it appears with a lot in just a few seconds.
If you want to know more information about how to know how common a word is, which words it goes with and what kind of context the word often occurs with then ask your teacher all about how to use a computer or smartphone to help you (just like a corpus linguist does!).
http://www.webcorp.org.uk/live/wlse.jsp
