The nativization of verb–noun collocations in Pakistani English

A growing body of learner corpus research underscores the pivotal role of collocational competence in achieving advanced L2 proficiency. Verb–noun collocations have been identified as particularly challenging for L2 learners, largely due to their semantic opacity and combinatorial constraints. However, despite this importance and challenge, relatively little is known about how Turkish learners of English acquire and use verb–noun collocations across different proficiency levels. This study aims to investigate the production of verb-noun collocations by Turkish learners of English across three Common European Framework of Reference for Languages proficiency bands (A1-A2; B1-B2; C1-C2), focusing on their distribution, appropriateness, frequency in the British National Corpus. Also, collocational error types and patterns that persist across proficiency levels have also been examined. The analysis draws on data from the Cambridge Learner Corpus. Salient collocations were identified through frequency-based metrics (t-score and Mutual Information) and cross-referenced with the British National Corpus to assess native-likeness. In addition, collocational errors were manually annotated and classified by type. Findings suggest that Turkish learners of English as a foreign language often struggle with verb-noun collocations and produce incorrect collocations even at advanced level. The frequency of collocations decreases as the proficiency level increases, reflecting Turkish learners’ repetitive use of a limited set of verb–noun combinations at lower proficiency levels. In addition, learners mostly make verb-related (replacement, tense, form) and determiner errors that persist from A1 to C2 level. These results highlight the need for pedagogical interventions that explicitly target collocational development and underscore the value of learner corpus data in informing such approaches.

This thesis reflects the shift in the study of collocations towards lexico-grammatical patterns through a series of three corpus-based studies on academic writing. The first study adopts a phraseological approach to explore the use of adjective-noun and verb-noun lexical collocations in the academic writing of Arab learners as compared to native speakers. The comparison between two corpora, the TEEP-ArSL and the LOCNESS-A-Level, reveals that verb-noun (VN) collocations are particularly difficult for Arab learners given that more than a quarter of the VN collocations they produced are misused. Studies 2 and 3 adopt a novel approach to the description and analysis of academic writing in the discipline of applied linguistics. These two studies focus on VN collocations by embedding them in their verb complementation clause structures, specifically noun phrase complementation. In Study 2, expert writers’ use of verb complementation clause structures and VN collocations therein are examined and compared in two corpora of published research articles in the field of applied linguistics in English and Arabic, the academic English Corpus (AEC) and the academic Arabic corpus (AAC). Study 3 investigates novice writers’ use of the same clause structures and VN collocations in two corpora of novice native and non-native students’ university exam writing - the novice native corpus (NNC) and the novice Saudi corpus (NSC). The analysis of the data in Studies 2 and 3 draws on Quirkian clause structures (Quirk, Greenbaum, & Leech, 1985) for the syntactic representation, and on Frame Semantics (Fillmore, 1982) for the identification of the semantic roles of the elements involved in the clause structures. The two studies explore the use of single-word and multi-word verbs in 15 clause structures, including the copular, transitive, complex copular, and ditransitive. The association between the verb and the clause structure is established using the measure of faithfulness (Romer, O’Donnell, & Ellis, 2015). The comparison of expert academic writing in Study 2 serves as baseline data for the comparison of novice academic writing in Study 3. The results of Study 2 show that prepositional verbs are frequently used in academic English and Arabic, despite the fact that they are seldom addressed in Arabic grammar books. The results also highlight phrasal verbs as one of the prominent characteristics of current English academic writing in the field of ii Study 3 explores advanced learners’ use of the 15 selected clause structures and the choices of verbs therein and whether there is a tendency to overuse, underuse or misuse these clause structures and VN collocations. It makes use of the results of study 2 to trace the influence of the first language, Arabic, on the use of verb complementation clause structures by advanced Saudi learners of English. The results of study 3 show that advanced Saudi learners use significantly more tokens in the copular, the transitive, and the prepositional type 1 clause structures than native speakers. However, the difference between the use of types is not significant which reveals an area of weakness in the writing of advanced Saudi learners related to the heavy reliance on a limited set of high frequency verbs, e.g. have, use, and say. Although native speakers used the phrasal verb clause structure more often than Saudi learners, both groups of novice writers used far fewer phrasal verbs than expert English writers; possible explanations for this underuse are investigated. The thesis concludes with a variety of pedagogical implications that could be of great benefit for language teachers and textbook and dictionary designers.

This paper aims to investigate the difficulties Libyan undergraduate university English major students have in the use of verb-noun and adjective-noun collocations by looking at their performance in free production. Furthermore, twelve verbs and twelve adjectives identified in this research were investigated in depth as part of their combinations. To achieve this aim, a 250-word academic writing task was used to collect data from fourth-year university students at Tripoli University. The data were analysed using AntConc 3.2.1w (Anthony, 2007). After extracting the learners’ collocations, four methods were used to determine the acceptability of learners’ collocations in terms of conforming to native-like use. They were: (1) the Oxford Collocations Dictionary (2009), (2) the online British National Corpus (3) consultations with two native speakers [1] , and (4) the acceptability-of-collocations survey, which was used to triangulate the above three methods. Overall, the results from the academic writing data revealed that (1) verb-noun collocations were more difficult for the participants than adjective-noun collocations; and (2) the participants’ use of the twelve adjectives in adjective-noun collocations showed significantly more accuracy ratings compared to their use of the twelve verbs in verb-noun collocations. [1] According to Crystal (1997), the term native-speaker is used in the linguistic field to refer to “someone for whom a particular LANGUAGE is a ‘native language’ (also called ‘first language’, ‘mother-tongue’)”. The implication is the acquisition of this language has taken place since childhood. Therefore, it can be safely asserted that a native speaker possesses the most reliable intuition and for that reason has the best judgement of how the language is used, making him/her the most trusted kind of informant.

Using collocation is a key part of second language ability (Granger, Sylviane. 2018. Formulaic sequences in learner corpora: Collocations and lexical bundles. In Anna Siyanova-Chanturia & Ana Pellicer-Sanchez (eds.),Understanding formulaic language: A second language acquisition perspective, 228–247. New York: Routledge; Nattinger, James R. & Jeamette S. DeCarrico. 1992.Lexical phrases and language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Nesselhauf, Nadja. 2004.Collocations in a learner corpus. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: J. Benjamins Pub. Co.; Pawley, Andrew & Frances H. Syder. 1983. Two puzzles for linguistics: Nativelike selection and nativelike fluency. In Jack Richards & Richard W. Schmidt (eds.),Language and communication, 191–228. London: Longman). Researchers often hypothesize that the influence of the first language is an important factor in the production and understanding of unconventional collocations (Huang, Li-Shi. 2001. Knowledge of English collocations: An analysis of Taiwanese EFL learners.Paper presented at the Texas Foreign Languguage Education Conference, Texas; Laufer, Bhatia & Tina Waldman. 2011. Verb-noun collocations in second language writing: A corpus analysis of learners’ English.Language Learning61(2). 647–672.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9922.2010.00621.x; Phoocharoensil, Supakorn. 2013. Cross-linguistic influence: Its impact on L2 English collocation production.English Language Teaching6(1). 1–10) but we are only now starting to understand this. The present study provides a robust investigation of cross-linguistic influences by exploring how Vietnamese influenced Vietnamese learners’ use of English language verb-noun and adjective noun collocations in 104 350-word argumentative essays, using a framework derived from Jarvis, Scott. 2012. The detection-based approach: An overview. In S. Jarvis & S. A. Crossley (eds.),Approaching language transfer through text classification: Explorations in the detection-based approach, 1st ed., Vol. 64, 1–33. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, drawing on homogeneity among speakers of Vietnamese; heterogeneity between users of Vietnamese and other language; and formal and conceptual congruity between collocations learners produce in English and equivalent terms in Vietnamese. The study found that less than 10% of the collocations learners produced were unconventional and of these, 40% of collocations were influenced by the first language (L1); errors associated with incorrect use of prepositions in verb-noun collocations (e.g. the addition, omission or misuse of prepositions) are strongly L1-motivated. Learners make errors with not only incongruent collocations (collocations with no direct L1 equivalents) but also with congruent collocations (collocations with direct L1 translation).

Contents: Preface. A.B.M. Tsui, J.W. Tollefson, Language Policy and the Construction of National Cultural Identity. Part I: Globalization and Its Impact on Language Policy, Culture, and Identity. K. Hashimoto, Japan's Language Policy and the Lost Decade. Y. Sungwon, Globalization and Language Policy in South Korea. M.K. David, S. Govindasamy, The Construction of National Identity and Globalization in Multilingual Malaysia. P.G-L. Chew, Remaking Singapore: Language, Culture, and Identity in a Globalized World. T. Clayton, Transition, Culture, and Language in Cambodia. Part II: Language Policy and the (Re)Construction of National Cultural Identity. A.B.M. Tsui, Language Policy and the Social Construction of Identity: The Case of Hong Kong. M. Saxena, Multilingual and Multicultural Identities in Brunei Darussalam. R.A. Benton, Mauri or Mirage? The Status of the Maori Language in Aotearoa New Zealand in the Third Millennium. Part III: Language Policy and Language Politics: The Role of English. R.K. Agnihotri, Identity and Multilinguality: The Case of India. S.K. Sonntag, Change and Permanence in Language Politics in Nepal. T. Rahman, The Role of English in Pakistan With Special Reference to Tolerance and Militancy. T. Hossain, J.W. Tollefson, Language Policy in Education in Bangladesh. J.W. Tollefson, A.B.M. Tsui, Issues in Language Policy, Culture, and Identity.

This study investigates whether congruency (+/– literal translation equivalent), collocate–node relationship (adjective–noun, verb–noun, phrasal-verb–noun collocations), and word length influence the learning burden of EFL learners’ learning collocations at the initial stage of form–meaning mapping. Eighteen collocations were selected on the basis of a pretest. They were divided into 9 congruent and 9 incongruent collocations and into 6 verb–noun collocations, 6 phrasal-verb–noun collocations and 6 adjective–noun collocations. Forty-one EFL learners (first language: Dutch) were asked to read a word list containing the 18 target collocations, their translation and a sample sentence and to complete four online exercises, in which the 18 collocations were presented twice. Learning gains were measured at three levels of sensitivity: form recall test 1, form recall test 2 (+ clue), form recognition test. Although mixed findings were revealed, all factors seemed to affect the learning difficultly of the collocations. Incongruent collocations appeared to be more difficult to recall than congruent ones. Adjective–noun collocations were better recalled and recognized than (phrasal) verb–noun collocations. Depending on the posttest, participants’ vocabulary size and word length of the individual constituents making up the collocation also affected the learning process.

This article argues that English should be considered as a national language in Pakistan in order to make it accessible to ordinary people and remove the negative assumptions attached to it. Using language planning and policy perspective, it suggests that instead of seeing traditional language as a problem, language policy should adopt language as a resource, which should not only be limited to a local or indigenous language(s), but should also be extended to other modern languages, such as English in Pakistan. Such a shift will reduce some of the problems of language planning and policy; it will not only reduce the burden on ordinary students to acquire (a) different second language(s), but will also make knowledge accessible to them through the use of their mother tongue and English. It will also help in reducing social stratification, as currently society is divided into elite and lower classes, with the class structure being perpetuated with the help of varying school systems and differential use of and access to Urdu and English. This study can lead to new debates about the use of English in non-English-speaking societies.

Similarly to many postcolonial countries in the world, Pakistani English has had a long history. According to Kachru's Three Circles model, Pakistan is an Outer Circle English‐using country. In this context, the English language has not only affected the local languages, but has also been impacted by local languages and cultures including the Islamic religion. Thus English has developed as a localized variety that can be termed as Pakistani English, in similar fashion to Indian English. This entry summarizes salient features of Pakistani English, and describes the role of English in Pakistani society. The entry also throws light on language policy in relation to the English language.

This study investigates the effect of corpus-based activities on learning verb–noun collocations in Saudi EFL classes. The differences between those who were instructed through the corpus-based method and those who were taught using the traditional method were analysed using pre- and post-collocation tests provided to 62 female university students. Fifteen verb–noun collocations were used. The results of the study show a significant positive change in the learning level of the experimental group that was given corpus-based activities. There were significant differences between the experimental and the control group; the latter group was only exposed to coursebooks and dictionaries. These findings will help facilitate the verb–noun collocations learning process for learners of English as a foreign language. They will also benefit language teachers and curriculum designers in focusing on modifying teaching methods. Keywords: Corpus-based materials, verb–noun collocations, corpus linguistics, EFL classes, Saudi.

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.

06–360Blackledge, Adrian (U Birmingham, UK), The magical frontier between the dominant and the dominated: Sociolinguistics and social justice in a multilingual world. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (Multilingual Matters) 27.1 (2006), 22–41.06–361Boughton, Zoë (U Exeter, UK; z.c.boughton@exeter.ac.uk), Accent levelling and accent localisation in northern French: Comparing Nancy and Rennes. Journal of French Language Studies (Cambridge University Press) 15.3 (2005), 235–256.06–362Brown, N. Anthony (Brigham Young U, Utah, USA; tony_brown@byu.edu), Language and identity in Belarus.Language Policy (Springer) 4.3 (2005), 311–332.06–363Cameron, Deborah (U Oxford, UK) Language, gender, and sexuality: Current issues and new directions. Applied Linguistics (Oxford University Press) 26.4 (2005), 482–502.06–364Deutch, Yocheved (Bar-Ilan U, Israel; yochd@netvision.net.il), Language law in Israel. Language Policy (Springer) 4.3 (2005), 261–285.06–365Edwards, John (St Francis Xavier U, Nova Scotia, Canada), Players and power in minority-group settings. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (Multilingual Matters) 27.1 (2006), 4–21.06–366Edwards, Viv & Lynda Pritchard Newcombe (U Reading, UK), When school is not enough: New initiatives in intergenerational language transmission in Wales. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Multilingual Matters) 8.4 (2005), 298–312.06–367García, Patricia (Stanford U Graduate School of Education, USA), Parental language attitudes and practices to socialise children in a diglossic society. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Multilingual Matters) 8.4 (2005), 328–344.06–368Garner, Mark (U Aberdeen, UK), Christine Raschka & Peter Sercombe, Sociolinguistic minorities, research, and social relationships.Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (Multilingual Matters) 27.1 (2006), 61–78.06–369Goto, Yuko (U Pennsylvania, USA; ybutler@gse.upenn.edu) & Masakazu Iino, Current Japanese reforms in English language education: The 2003 ‘Action Plan’. Language Policy (Springer) 4.1 (2005), 25–45.06–370Hankoni Kamwendo, Gregory (U Botswana, Botswana; kamwendog@mopipi.ub.bw), Language planning from below: An example from northern Malawi. Language Policy (Springer) 4.2 (2005), 143–165.06–371Kaur Gill, Saran (U Kebangsaan, Malaysia, Malaysia; saran@pkrisc.cc.ukm.my), Language policy in Malaysia: Reversing direction. Language Policy (Springer) 4.3 (2005), 241–260.06–372Lantolf, James P. (Pennsylvania State U, USA; jpl7@psu.edu), Sociocultural theory and L2: State of the art. Studies in Second Language Acquisition (Cambridge University Press) 28.1 (2006), 67–109.06–373Määttä, Simo K. (U California, Berkeley, USA; asunto@uclink.berkeley.edu), The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, French language laws, and national identity. Language Policy (Springer) 4.2 (2005), 167–186.06–374Mills, Jean (U Birmingham, UK), Connecting communities: Identity, language and diaspora. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Multilingual Matters) 8.4 (2005), 253–274.06–375Pavlenko, Aneta (Temple U, USA), ‘Ask each pupil about her methods of cleaning’: Ideologies of language and gender in Americanisation instruction (1900–1924). International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Multilingual Matters) 8.4 (2005), 275–297.06–376Richland, Justin B. (U California, Irvine, USA), The multiple calculi of meaning.Discourse & Society (Sage) 17.1 (2006), 65–97.06–377Silver, Rita Elaine (Nanyang Technological U, Singapore; resilver@nie.edu.sg), The discourse of linguistic capital: Language and economic policy planning in Singapore. Language Policy (Springer) 4.1 (2005), 47–66.06–378Tannenbaum, Michal & Marina Berkovich (Tel Aviv U, Israel; mtannen@post.tau.ac.il), Family relations and language maintenance: Implications for language educational policies. Language Policy (Springer) 4.3 (2005), 287–309.06–379Vaish, Viniti (Nanyang Technical U, Singapore; vvaish@nie.edu.sg), A peripherist view of English as a language of decolonization in post-colonial India. Language Policy (Springer) 4.2 (2005), 187–206.06–380Zuengler, Jane & Elizabeth R. Miller (U Winconsin-Madison, USA), Cognitive and sociocultural perspectives: Two parallel SLA worlds?TESOL Quarterly (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) 40.1 (2006), 35–58.

This chapter begins with an overview of some of the empires the world has known, what the cultural effect was of their expansion and how they changed the shape of the societies they conquered. Language use and language policy is then explored in relation to empire. Case studies of the British empire and its colonial expansion in South Asia are examined with a particular focus on the relationship between colonialism and capitalism through reviews of the East India Company which wanted to secure territory in India in which it could trade without fear of business competition or attack. The chapter explores how colonial institutions were responsible for decisions about language policy which impact language in education in South Asia today. From a discussion of empire before the age of modern colonialism, through the rise of European colonialism, the chapter examines how colonial language policy, particularly in the Punjab, help create the conditions for the hegemony of national and international languages that exists today. This discussion is then linked to a focus on nation-building in the Indian sub-continent. Ideologies about language and nation and varieties such as post-colonial English are explored to help readers understand how individuals and communities cross the boundaries of political or administrative units when they migrate and in doing so force us to question issues of cultural diversity, national belonging and identity. The argument of this chapter is that the notion of borders which separate the territories of nation-states and the notion that in the contemporary era more flexible flows of people and ideas cross these borders are closely intertwined. The chapter develops the means for understanding the relationship between language and colonial expansion. This relationship is illustrated by in-depth case studies of colonial language policy in pre-partition Punjab before an assessment of the role of language in nation-building. The discussion here embraces the ideology of ‘one language, one nation’ by exploring the links between colonial language policy and language in education policy in post-partition Pakistan. Post-colonial Englishes are also explored within the context of decolonization and contemporary language use.

Many contemporary textbooks for English as a foreign language (EFL) and books for vocabulary study contain exercises with a focus on collocations, with verb–noun collocations (e.g. make a mistake) being particularly popular as targets for collocation learning. Common exercise formats used in textbooks and other pedagogic materials require learners to establish appropriate matches between sets of verbs and nouns. However, matching exercises almost inevitably carry a risk of erroneous connections, and despite corrective feedback these might leave undesirable traces in the learner’s memory. We report four small-scale trials (total n = 135) in which the learning gains obtained from verb–noun matching exercises are compared with the learning gains obtained from a format in which the target collocations are presented to the learners as intact wholes. Pre-test to post-test gains turned out small in all of the conditions, owing in part to the learners’ substitution of initially correct choices by distracters from the exercises. The latter, negative side-effect was attested more often in the matching exercises than in the exercises where the learners worked with collocations as intact wholes.

This study investigates the influence of using five web-based practice units on English verb-noun collocations with the design of a web-based Chinese-English bilingual concordancer (keyword retrieval program) on collocation learning. Thirty-two college EFL students participated by taking a pre-test and two post-tests, and responding to a background questionnaire and an evaluation questionnaire. Results indicated that learners made significant collocation improvement immediately after the online practice but regressed later. Yet, the final performance was still better than students' entry level. Different verb-noun collocation types and learners with different prior collocation knowledge were found to be not equally receptive to the practice effects. Both the online instructional units and the concordancer were acceptable to most participants.

Children, childhoods and bilingualism: Exploring experiences, perspectives and policies