Adhering to my principle of not adding to the overflow of the information on the Internet, I’d recommend you to watch this useful video by Oxford Online English. It provides a clear and professional explanation of what a collocation is:
In brief:
A collocation is a standard word combination which sounds natural to the ear of a native speaker, e.g. graduate from university – this is a collocation, which sounds natural; complete university – this is not a collocation, so it sounds understandable but weird.
Moreover,
Referring to the official IELTS writing task 2 band descriptors, students aiming for band 7 and higher are required to use collocations. They are also supposed to be able to express their thoughts with “some flexibility” and “awareness of style”, which is impossible to do without using collocations.
To conclude:
Score* – here I mean an approximate score of a non-native speaker in the part of Writing. The estimate is based on the information from the official IELTS band descriptors, as well as on my teaching experience, and backed up by IELTS test takers’ results.
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