Acquisition Of Collocations Research Articles

Empowering autonomy in language learning: the sustainable impact of data-driven learning on noun collocation acquisition

Empowering autonomy in language learning: the sustainable impact of data-driven learning on noun collocation acquisition

Acquisition of collocations under different glossing modalities and the mediating role of learners’ perceptual learning style

Abstract The current study investigated how different glossing modalities (textual and auditory) and learners’ perceptual learning style (visual and auditory) influenced collocation learning. A total of 212 college students in China were first assigned to either a visual or auditory group based on their performance on a perceptual learning style questionnaire. Each style group was subsequently subdivided into three groups who were exposed to a series of reading texts containing 15 unknown collocations under one of the glossing conditions: textual glosses, auditory glosses or no glosses (control). Results of the study indicated that both textual, and that auditory glosses led to gains in productive and receptive collocation knowledge and auditory glosses were more effective than textual glosses. In addition, this study provided empirical evidence that perceptual learning style has a moderating effect on collocational learning. The auditory learners in the auditory glossing condition showed the highest rate of collocational learning among all treatment subgroups.

Investigating optimal spacing schedules for incidental acquisition of L2 collocations

Abstract Research investigating lag effects in second language (L2) collocation learning is very limited. To date, no intervention study has examined the relationship between intersession intervals (ISIs) and retention intervals (RIs) in relation to incidental acquisition of collocations. To fill this gap, the current study collected data from two groups of students in Saudi Arabia (Experiment 1, n = 73; Experiment 2, n = 69), using a pretest-treatment-delayed posttest design. The participants learned 25 incongruent adjective-noun collocations incidentally during five reading sessions at either a 3.5-day ISI (Experiment 1) or a 7-day ISI (Experiment 2). Two control groups received no treatment. Learning rates were assessed at the form recall and meaning recall levels of sensitivity following an RI of 14 days in Experiment 1 and an RI of 28 days in Experiment 2. Results show that both spacing schedules were equally effective for the incidental acquisition of collocations.

The effect of corpus-assisted language teaching on academic collocation acquisition by Iranian advanced EFL learners

Purpose This study attempts to evaluate the effect of the corpus-based inductive teaching approach with multiple academic corpora (PICA, CAEC and Oxford Corpus of Academic English) and conventional deductive teaching approach (i.e., multiple-choice items, filling the gap, matching and underlining) on learning academic collocations by Iranian advanced EFL learners (students learning English as a foreign language).Design/methodology/approach This is a quasi-experimental, quantitative and qualitative study.Findings The result showed the experimental group outperformed significantly compared with the control group. The experimental group also shared their perception of the advantages and disadvantages of the corpus-assisted language teaching approach.Originality/value Despite growing progress in language pedagogy, methodologies and language curriculum design, there are still many teachers who experience poor performance in their students' vocabulary, whether in comprehension or production. In Iran, for example, even though mandatory English education begins at the age of 13, which is junior and senior high school, students still have serious problems in language production and comprehension when they reach university levels.

EFL Learners’ Collocation Acquisition and Learning in Corpus-Based Instruction: A Systematic Review

This systematic review critically examines 32 previous empirical studies on corpus-based collocation acquisition and learning in EFL contexts, aiming to identify the research contexts, corpus types, instructional methods, and how corpus-based training affects EFL students’ acquisition and learning of collocations. This review provides a comprehensive understanding of corpus-based collocation instruction and its effectiveness in enhancing learners’ collocation acquisition and learning. It makes use of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) approach to achieve these objectives. The findings reveal a progressive growth in research and publications on corpus-based collocation acquisition and learning, indicating its increasing significance in language education. This review highlights the wide applicability of corpus-based approaches across different language learning contexts, particularly among English language learners in foreign language settings. It also underscores the global significance of corpus-based collocation instruction, with attention and research conducted in various countries, notably, in Asian regions. This review discusses the positive effects of corpus-based tools and data-driven learning on collocation acquisition and learning, demonstrating the improvement in learners’ collocation knowledge, usage, and retention by comparing and summarizing research results. However, conflicting results regarding implicit and explicit instruction methods warrant further investigation. The collective findings of the reviewed studies contribute valuable insights into the effectiveness of different instructional methods and call for further research to optimize collocation instruction strategies with both theoretical and pedagogical implications.

The Role of Congruency in Collocation Acquisition: A Case Study of Vietnamese Students Learning English Adjective + Noun Collocations

Collocational competence is of critical importance to EFL learners’ language proficiency. Due to limited research on L1 influence on L2 learners’ development of receptive and productive knowledge of adjective + noun collocations, especially in the context of Vietnam, this study is an attempt to address these gaps by investigating whether Vietnamese learners could recognize and use congruent English adjective + noun collocations more accurately than incongruent ones. Data were collected from 72 English-major undergraduates in a Vietnamese university who completed three collocational tests: the Receptive Knowledge Test, the Productive Knowledge Test, and the paragraph-writing test. Results showed that, in contrast to language transfer theory, congruent collocations posed considerably more problems for the students in identifying the well-formed lexical combinations and using them accurately in writing. These findings highlight the importance of explicitly teaching congruent and incongruent collocations in EFL classrooms.

Developing and evaluating an online video-assisted collocation learning system for EFL students

ABSTRACT The degree of collocational knowledge influences learners’ competence in the production of L2 speech and text. However, collocation learning is complex because learners might co-produce words incorrectly according to L1 inference. This study aims at the design of an online video-assisted collocation learning system, VACLS, that integrated video captioning and concordancing to foster collocational knowledge acquisition. English collocations with three patterns, namely verb–noun, verb–adverb, and verb–preposition, were selected as target collocations in VACLS. While learning with VACLS, the learners are able to watch videos with full captions and then looked for additional knowledge and instances of the target collocations via an online concordancer incorporated in VACLS. Besides the development of VACLS, effectiveness of the system and learners’ perception were also evaluated. 20 university EFL students in Taiwan enrolled the experiment. After 3 weeks of learning with the aid of VACLS, the learning outcome for collocation retention was significant and the participants with less initial collocational knowledge exhibited greater improvement in collocation retention after learning VACLS. Besides, these learners highly agreed VACLS is helpful for English collocation acquisition. Thus the VACLS can be useful for English educators and EFL/ESL learners.

How Many Collocations do Heritage Speakers Know?

The current study examines a previously understudied dimension of heritage speakers’ lexical knowledge by focusing on verbal collocations. Two tests were designed in order to assess both receptive (recognition) and productive (recall) knowledge of sixty Spanish collocations. The collocations were divided into three types (congruent, partially congruent, and incongruent) based on a ratings survey that established their degree of correspondence with English. Participants’ language dominance and their use of Spanish in various daily activities were included as individual variables. The results indicate that the participants knew a vast majority of the collocations on the recognition test, but that their ability to recall the collocations was somewhat more limited. Congruency had a significant effect on participants’ performance, but this finding must be interpreted in light of the interaction between congruency and word frequency. Significant correlations were found between performance on both tests and language dominance, as well as a number of variables involving interaction in Spanish (text messaging) and exposure (listening to music, reading for fun). These data are discussed in relation to previous studies on the acquisition of collocations and heritage speakers’ knowledge of individual words.

캡션, 입력 강화 그리고 연어 습득

캡션, 입력 강화 그리고 연어 습득

The Effects of Explicit Instruction on the Acquisition of Collocations in an EFL Setting: Focusing on Delexical Verbs

The Effects of Explicit Instruction on the Acquisition of Collocations in an EFL Setting: Focusing on Delexical Verbs

The effects of L1 congruency, L2 proficiency, and the collocate-node relationship on the processing of L2 English collocations by L1-Chinese EFL learners

Abstract This study investigated the effects of first language (L1) congruency, second language (L2) proficiency, and the collocate-node relationship (i.e., verb-noun, adjective-noun, noun-noun) on collocation processing by logographic L1-Chinese learners of English. Comparisons were made of accuracy rates and response times to a collocation lexical decision task completed by L1-Chinese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) English Majors (n = 30), L1-Chinese EFL non-English Majors (n = 30), and L1-English Native Speakers (n = 26). Analysis of the data revealed that while congruent collocations were processed more accurately and faster than incongruent collocations by both L1-Chinese participant groups, the English Majors showed a processing advantage over their non-English Major peers. Further analysis revealed a processing advantage for noun-noun collocations, providing additional evidence in explaining the difficulties L1-Chinese have in acquiring verb-noun collocations. These results and other nuanced statistical findings are discussed in relation to pedagogical means of enhancing L2 collocation acquisition by L1-Chinese speakers.

A Semi-automatic Error Retrieval Method for Uncovering Collocation Errors from a Large Learner Corpus

Previous studies on ESL/EFL learners’ verb-noun (V-N) miscollocations have shed some light on common miscollocation types and possible causes. However, barriers to further understanding of learners’ difficulties still exist, such as the limited amount of learner data generated from small corpora and the labor-intensive process of manually retrieving collocational errors. To provide researchers with a more efficient retrieval method, this study proposed the use of the Sketch-Diff function in the Sketch Engine (SKE) platform to semi-automatically retrieve collocation errors in large learner corpora. To test the feasibility of this semi-automatic retrieval method, a 7.4-million-word EFL learner corpus was investigated with Sketch-Diff, and 4541 tokens of common miscollocations were identified. Analysis of these miscollocations revealed that most errors were verb-based and often caused by negative transfer from the learners’ L1, undergeneralization (e.g., ignorance of L2 syntactic rules), and approximation (e.g., the misuse of near-synonyms, hyper-/hyponyms, antonyms, and lexemes with similar sound/form). This study demonstrates that using Sketch-Diff to retrieve V-N miscollocations from a large learner corpus is both feasible and efficient. This method can be applied to other languages to further deepen our understanding of L2 learners’ difficulties in collocation acquisition.

Different Approaches to the Concept of Collocation in English: Why Learn Collocations?

Research background. A collocation is a combination of two or more words that are commonly used together in English. Collocation is an indispensable element of any English text and no piece of natural spoken or written language is totally free of collocation. There exist different approaches to the concept of collocations in English. However, there is no exhaustive and uniform definition or categorization of it. Second language learners do not have many guidelines to follow considering the admissibility of collocation, thus collocations seem to be an insurmountable obstacle to the attainment of native like fluency and is one of error generating areas in general English and especially in EAP (English for Academic Purposes) and ESP (English for Special Purposes).Research aims were to analyze and systemize different theoretical approaches to the concept of collocation in English with reference to the data of scientific research as well as give the answer why collocations should be learned and taught at all levels of language proficiency and within different registers.Research method used – theoretical analysis of classical and modern research articles on collocation in English.Research results. Various linguistic schools have had different approaches to the study of collocations. Acquisition of collocations can be the source of particular difficulties for L2 leaners in attaining native-level competence. Collocations should be taught from the very beginning at all levels of language proficiency .Discussion and conclusions. As a result of analysis and systemization of scientific data the following conclusions have been made:1. Collocation is a lexical co-occurrence of lexemes. In order a lexical combination could be called a collocation it should satisfy the criterion of frequency and grammatical structure;2. Lexis and grammar cannot be separated;3. Lexis is inseparable from semantics. 4. Knowledge of collocations can help develop language proficiency in such areas as English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP). Students’ motivation to learn collocations and make good use of them in their essays, research works and academic language should be increased.Keywords: collocational, co-occurrence, language acquisition, register.

Second Language Collocation Acquisition : Challenges for Learners and Pedagogical Insights from Empirical Research

Second Language Collocation Acquisition : Challenges for Learners and Pedagogical Insights from Empirical Research

Second Language Collocation Acquisition : Challenges for Learners and Pedagogical Insights from Empirical Research

Second Language Collocation Acquisition : Challenges for Learners and Pedagogical Insights from Empirical Research

INNOWACJE METODOLOGICZNE – ZASTOSOWANIE INNOWACYJNYCH TECHNIK ELICYTACJI W BADANIU KOMPETENCJI KOLOKACYJNEJ

Research on collocational competence, which is a component of lexical competence, is part of more general research on the acquisition of vocabulary. The methodology adopted in such research continues to evolve. The present article overviews some elicitation techniques for measuring the acquisition of collocations which have been used so far, focusing on their weaknesses. Another focus of the article is innovative and unconventional techniques of elicitation, which are not only an effective measure of the growth of students’ receptive and productive collocational competence, but also a means of raising their collocational awareness.

Thai Learners’ Acquisition of L2 Collocations: An Interlanguage Perspective

The emergence of second language (L2) collocation studies has grabbed the attention of a number of scholars. However, few empirical studies from an interlanguage perspective have addressed the issue of how learners acquire L2 collocations. The current study investigated what grammatical and lexical collocations posed difficulty to Thai EFL learners and whether learners of different proficiency levels exhibited the same order of acquisition. The study also attempted to explore whether task differences significantly affected the learners’ acquisition process. The participants were organized into a high proficiency group (N = 45) and a low proficiency group ( N = 45). Receptive and productive tasks were devised to gauge the learners’ collocation knowledge. In the receptive task, the learners were encouraged to identify errors. In the productive task, they were asked to write a correct collocate required for a certain context. The results illustrated that almost all target collocations were difficult for both advanced and basic groups. Only verb-preposition collocations did not pose any considerable difficulty to the advanced participants. In terms of acquisition order, there were palpable differences between the two groups. It was also discovered that the different tasks administered exerted a profound effect on the learners’ order of collocation acquisition. The key findings are discussed in light of first language (L1) transfer, transfer of prior knowledge of a particular congruent collocation, familiarity with receptive tasks, and effects of both receptive and productive tasks. The findings suggest that teachers can teach students a group of words rather than individual words by utilizing meaningful materials oriented toward specific difficult collocations or receptive-productive integration tasks. Teachers can also encourage their students to practice using frequency-based collocations and dictionaries in English classes.

Incidental acquisition of collocations in L2

AbstractAs collocations are very numerous, at least a part of them has to be learned incidentally when acquiring a second language. There is now an increasing body of evidence showing that incidental learning of collocations seems to be possible. The present study sets out to investigate whether collocations can be learned incidentally if encountered in their nonadjacent form (with words intervening between collocates). It also looks at the role of prior vocabulary knowledge in incidental acquisition of adjacent and nonadjacent collocations. The results show that nonadjacent collocations can be learned equally well as adjacent ones, at least to the recognition level of knowledge. Also, larger prior vocabulary knowledge seems to lead to better chances of learning both adjacent and nonadjacent collocations incidentally.

The effects of story-based and activity-based collocation instruction on elementary students' collocation acquisition

The effects of story-based and activity-based collocation instruction on elementary students' collocation acquisition

Effects of textual enhancement, glossing, and English proficiency on collocation acquisition

Effects of textual enhancement, glossing, and English proficiency on collocation acquisition