5 exercises — read real IT English texts (code review comments, standups, incident reports, architecture discussions) and identify the collocations: what verb–noun pairs are used, which are natural, and which are non-native mistakes.
How to approach these exercises
Read the full text first — understand the overall meaning
Then scan for verb + noun pairs and adjective + noun pairs
Ask yourself: would a native speaker say this naturally?
The bolded phrases are the focus — but collocations exist throughout the text
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
Read this code review comment and identify the collocations. A reviewer writes:
"I've taken a look at the PR and the overall structure is clean. I'm going to request changes on the auth module — there's a potential security issue. Once you address the feedback and fix the bug, I'll be happy to approve the PR."
How many distinct verb–noun collocations does this comment contain?
2 / 5
Read this standup comment and identify the collocation that is NOT natural English:
"Yesterday I was working on the feature. I encountered a blocker because the API was down. I made the investigation but couldn't reproduce the issue. Today I'll continue and hopefully we can close the ticket."
Which phrase is NOT a natural IT English collocation?
3 / 5
A team lead writes in a post-incident report. Read and find the odd collocation:
"At 14:32, the monitoring system raised an alert for elevated error rates. The on-call engineer was paged immediately. The team identified the root cause as a misconfigured load balancer. We rolled back the deployment, which restored normal service within 8 minutes."
Which of the highlighted phrases is the MOST formal / technical collocation, commonly found in incident reports?
4 / 5
A developer writes a ticket comment. Spot all the collocations (correct and incorrect):
"I need to make a refactoring in the payment module before we can ship the feature. The current code has tight coupling between the service layer and the database, which makes it hard to write unit tests. I estimate this will take 2 days of effort."
Which phrase is the non-native collocation mistake?
5 / 5
Read this architecture discussion message. Count how many IT collocations you can identify (natural verb–noun or adjective–noun pairs):
"We should decouple the notification service before we scale the system. Right now, if the notification service goes down, it creates a single point of failure for the whole platform. I suggest we use an event-driven architecture and publish messages to a queue instead of making direct API calls."
Which of the highlighted terms is an adjective–noun collocation (not a verb–noun collocation)?
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Exercise Complete!
You've finished the Collocations in Context exercise. The more you read real tech English — GitHub comments, Slack messages, post-mortems — the more natural these patterns will become.