Abstract
Collocations form part of formulaic language use that is considered by many scholars as central to communication (Henriksen 2013; Wray 2002). Today, most scholars agree that teaching collocations to second and/or foreign language users (henceforth “L2 students”) is a must. This study offers a reflection on the directions L2 researchers and teachers may explore, and that could contribute to modelling the teaching of collocations or at least spark the debate on this issue. The fundamental point raised here is the extent to which pedagogy may be informed by knowing the most common lexical collocations (combinations of content words) and using frequency of collocates as a key factor in selecting which collocations to bring to learners’ attention. The results from this study indicate that out of the eight different lexical collocations, adjective+noun and verb+noun collocations are the most common, and should therefore be introduced first. Furthermore, most collocates (“co-occurring words” in Sinclair’s (1991) terms) come from the 1,000 and 2,000 most frequent words. Therefore, this study suggests that the same way that “[u]sing the computational approach as a starting point makes it possible to distinguish between collocations of varying frequency of use” (Henriksen 2013: 32), frequency may be used to select the target words and their collocates once collocations have been identified. This could potentially contribute to addressing the issue of selection criteria of which collocations to teach.
Highlights
This study gives a reflection on the selection criteria of collocations to teach in L2 contexts by examining three lexical word categories in terms of their distribution, the way they are collocated, and the frequency of their collocates
Exploring the lexical words in terms of their distribution indicates that nouns are by far the biggest category. This means that nouns constitute the most common lexical word category in English or at least top the list of the 100 most frequent lexical words from the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL)
While this is based on a small sample of words – the 100 most frequent words from the AVL – we believe that it is indicative of the most frequent lexical words in English
Summary
Formulaic language is considered by many scholars as central to language in use, and communication in particular (Henriksen 2013; Wray 2000, 2002), which is the reason why it has. As early as the 1990s, scholars such as Lewis (1993), Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992), and Willis (1990) made a strong argument that the very least that should be done when teaching in L2 contexts is to introduce the formulaic dimension of language to learners This observation fits Palmer’s (1933) definition that collocations are “successions of words [that] must or should be learnt as an integral whole or independent entity, rather than by the process of piecing together their component parts” (Palmer 1933: 4). This could potentially contribute to addressing the issue of defining selection criteria
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