I've always been keen to train learners in developing noticing skills which will help raise their awareness of collocations.  This has involved using texts and encouraging students to identify collocations using a range of techniques.  One of the techniques involves  isolating collocation and identifying the parts of speech so that they can start looking for collocations that adhere to a particular pattern, e.g. noun + noun; verb + adverb etc.  I believe that this equips students with skills they can both in and out of the class to increase their personal vocabulary.  However, this is the only reason I can find for training students, particularly at low levels, to identify which part of speech a word is.  I was wondering whether anyone had any other reasons for doing this. Also, do you think it is benificial to start training low-level (Elementary / Pre-int) students to start noting collocations?

Charles Davis