A Corpus-based Analysis on Distributional Patterns of Collocations in Chinese High School English Textbooks

Abstract

The paper explores the distributional patterns of collocations identified in Chinese high school textbooks in comparison with collocations found in the native reference corpus. Six series of Chinese high school English textbooks from the six publishers were compiled as the textbook corpus. The British National Corpus (BNC) was selected as the native norm. Three collocation types, adjective + noun collocation (ANC), verb + noun collocation (VNC) and noun + noun collocation (NNC), were investigated in the paper. The distribution of the collocations was compared between the two corpora in terms of four statistical measures: density, diversity, repetition and association strength. The results showed that whereas the diversity of collocations was higher in the native reference corpus than in the textbook corpus, the other measures showed the opposite pattern. This may partly be due to the pedagogical nature of the textbooks. Moreover, the findings revealed that the textbooks represent a comparable number of VNCs, over-represent ANCs and under-represent NNCs in comparison with the native reference corpus. The findings suggest that textbook authors take account of incorporating more diverse collocations and more NNCs to model more native-like texts in the teaching materials targeting higher-grade students.