A grand problem and a jolly solution: Unmasking false friends with corpus analysis

False friends (i.e. L2 words or phrases which share a form with lexical items in the L1 but have different meanings) can be difficult to recognise, complicating reading and listening comprehension in a second language. Learners cannot know intuitively which seemingly familiar expressions in the L2 are true – that is, “friendly” cognates – and which are false friends. In this lesson, students use the collocation feature of the British National Corpus to practice distinguishing between false friends and cognates in reading and to deduce the meanings of false friends from context. Examples are provided for students and teachers of English with French as an L1, but the procedure can be adapted for speakers of other languages.