Abstract
Many scholars believe that collocations are difficult to learn and use by L2 learners. However, some research suggests that learners often know more collocations than commonly thought. This study tested 108 Spanish learners of English to measure their productive knowledge of 50 collocations, which varied according to corpus frequency,t-score, andMIscore. The participants produced a mean score of 56.6% correct, suggesting that our learners knew a substantial number of collocations. Knowledge of the collocations correlated moderately with corpus frequency (.45), but also with everyday engagement with English outside the classroom, in activities like reading, watching movies/TV, and social networking (composite correlation = .56). Everyday engagement also had a stronger relationship with collocation knowledge than years of English study (.45).
Highlights
It is well established that formulaic language provides processing advantages and is essential for using language fluently and idiomatically, both for native and non-native speakers
Can this finding for single words be applied to formulaic language, collocations? frequency counts are currently derived from very large corpora such as the COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English – 450 million words (Davies, 2008)) or the BNC (British National Corpus - 100m), no corpus can replicate the exposure any individual person has, especially L2 learners
Target items included a number of quite lowfrequency collocations: clockwise direction – only 33 instances in the 450-million word COCA, overcome (a) difficulty – 25 instances, and exploit resources – 11 instances
Summary
It is well established that formulaic language provides processing advantages and is essential for using language fluently and idiomatically, both for native and non-native speakers (for overviews, see Schmitt, 2004; Wray, 2002, 2008, and Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 32, 2012). It has been proposed that extensive exposure is a key factor necessary for this acquisition (Nattinger and DeCarrico, 1992; Durrant and Schmitt, 2010; Martinez and Schmitt, 2012) This extensive exposure will largely be driven by the frequency of each formulaic sequence in naturally-occurring language, with more frequent items generally being better learned. It is widely recognized that individual words respond to the effects of frequency, so that learners generally acquire higherfrequency words before lower-frequency ones (Nation and Waring 1997; Leech et al, 2001; Nation, 2001; Ellis, 2002) Can this finding for single words be applied to formulaic language, collocations? Perhaps an useful predictor is the degree to which learners engage with and use the L2 (e.g. when studying an L2, or using an L2 in social networking or watching films and television)? This study will explore how both collocation frequency and measures of language usage relate to knowledge of collocations by Spanish learners of English
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