An ESL Writer's Collocational Aid

Abstract

Collocation is one of the most difficult aspects in second language learning, but has been largely neglected by researchers and practitioners. A questionnaire survey shows advanced Chinese learners' collocational ability in English to be significantly inferior to that of native speakers. Our research attempts to correct this problem by developing an on-line correcting program which is able to detect some collocational errors in the learner's English writing and offer examples of standard collocations from a large corpus for reference. The system is based on two kinds of corpora: a learner corpus which is used for the study of known collocational errors, and a reference corpus which is used to extract standard English collocations. The system also makes use of a Dictionary of Synonyms derived from WordNet to discover the potential collocational errors in learners' input, as well as a Paraphrase Database gathered from the learners themselves to help diagnose un-collocational learner phrases. Altogether, it is hoped that the result of this research has not only produced a usable on-line collocational aid, but also demon-strates a simple and efficient way of using learner corpora and reference corpora to support CALL software design.