Abstract
This paper analyses the discourse of science through the study of collocational patterns of high frequency noun keywords in science textbooks used by upper secondary students in Malaysia. Research has shown that one of the areas of difficulty in science discourse concerns lexis, especially that of collocations. This paper describes a corpus-based analysis of the lexical collocations, specifically the noun/noun (NN), noun/adjective(AN) and verb/noun(VN) combinations, of high-frequency noun keywords in this science corpus. The study found that the NN and AN syntactic combinations were the more predominant combination type among the collocations of the noun keywords. Most of the collocations have been found to fall into the category between free and restricted combinations. In addition, the analysis have also uncovered clusters of overlapping collocations which show a tendency towards the free end of the restricted category of combinations.
Highlights
This paper describes a corpus-based analysis of the lexical collocations, the noun/noun (NN), noun/adjective(AN) and verb/noun(VN) combinations, of high-frequency noun keywords in this science corpus
This paper describes a corpus-based analysis of the lexical collocations, the noun/noun (NN), noun/adjective (AN) and verb/noun (VN) combinations, of high-frequency noun keywords in a science corpus
The position of the keywords in the NN syntactic combination showed that these nouns appeared both in the head and base positions of the collocates: ‘reaction rate’, ‘acid reaction’, ‘combustion chamber’, ‘stroke combustion’, ‘oxidation number’, ‘combustion oxidation’- showing the commutability of these keywords
Summary
This paper describes a corpus-based analysis of the lexical collocations, the noun/noun (NN), noun/adjective (AN) and verb/noun (VN) combinations, of high-frequency noun keywords in a science corpus. This present study is part of a thesis investigating the language of science in prescribed textbooks used in Malaysian secondary schools. Studies have shown that L2 learners face problems with collocations in their written and spoken language (Howarth, 1998; Nesselhauf, 2005) and that L2 learners rely heavily on language rules rather than lexicalixed routines and context appropriateness when forming language chunks (Foster, 2001; Skehan, 1998) This implies that learners would often use words individually without taking note of the environment or context and have a tendency to combine words that do not belong or ‘mis-chunk’
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