Metaphorical collocations through the prism of language teaching: Why and how they should be included in ESP vocabulary instruction?

Figurative language is part of our everyday interactions to a much larger degree than we are probably aware. Metaphorical collocations (MCs) are a specific subset of figurative expressions and as such are currently deemed a necessary part of any language teaching curricula. In MCs, the base, which is usually a noun, retains its literal meaning whereas the collocator (e.g., an adjective or a verb) is used figuratively (Stojić & Košuta 2021). In this paper, the presence of English (L2) metaphorical collocations in a specific set of maritime newspaper articles is explored from the perspective of L2 corpus frequency and the existence of L1 equivalent expressions. Finally, teaching methods are proposed on how to include MCs in ESP vocabulary instruction in a learner-friendly manner that should yield better retention than the traditional approach to vocabulary instruction.