Collocation Competence Research Articles

Методика формирования коллокационной компетенции дошкольников

The study aims to determine the potential of reading authentic children’s literature in collocation competence formation among preschoolers. The paper sheds light on the essence of the ‘collocation competence’ notion as applied to preschool children, reveals the potential of reading children’s non-adapted fiction in order to form collocation competence, suggests the course of work with collocations on the topic of ‘Food’ in a preschool classroom using storytelling technology. The study is novel in that it is the first to propose a methodology for collocation competence formation among preschoolers, to identify the potential of reading children’s unadapted literature in English to replenish the collocation stock of preschoolers. The results of the study amount to elaborating the methodology for collocation competence formation among preschool foreign language learners using storytelling technology.

Contextualizing EFL Learners’ Proficiency in Using English Collocations

Proficiency in using a foreign language cannot be separated from mastery of collocation in the target language. Although several previous studies have explored collocations in various forms of oral communication; however, few studies have investigated the context of collocation use and proficiency in collocation use by EFL learners. This study aims to describe the English collocation competence and collocational mistakes of Indonesian (EFL) students. A total number of 50 students from an English education department in Medan, Indonesia, served as the subjects. The research instrument was a 50-item Simple Completion Test that the researchers created themselves. It assessed students' understanding of four different lexical collocations: pure idioms, figurative idioms, free combinations, and restricted collocations. The findings showed that pure idioms were the most difficult for these students, while free combinations posed the fewest number of a challenge. Student performance on restricted collocations and figurative idioms were roughly equal. The student's inconsistent responses often showed a lack of proficiency with English collocations. It is concluded that poor first language transfer is to blame for the collocational errors made by EFL learners. The greatest way to get more proficient at using collocation while avoiding errors that have been identified thus far is to utilize it as frequently as feasible in English.

Психолого-педагогические условия формирования коллокационной компетенции студентов на основе корпусных технологий

Importance. The development of linguistic students’ collocational competence is one of the main goals of foreign language teaching at a university. Corpora is one of the modern digital technologies that can be used to achieve this goal. However, there are a number of problems in the methods of collocational competence development based on corpora, the consideration of which will affect the effectiveness of the implementation of these teaching methods. The purpose of the study is to determine the psychological and pedagogical conditions for the effective collocational competence development based on corpora. Research methods. On the basis of a theoretical analysis of the scientific and methodic literature and systematization of the conceptual approaches of researchers, psychological and pedagogical conditions were identified, with the help of a comparative analysis and synthesis of empirical data, the effectiveness of taking into account psychological and pedagogical conditions for the collocational competence development based on corpora was theoretically substantiated. Results and Discussion. Psychological and pedagogical conditions for collocational competence development based on corpora are identified and substantiated, which must be taken into account when developing a methods for teaching collocations. These conditions include: a) motivation of students to develop collocation competence based on corpora; b) the development of information and communication technologies competence of a foreign language teacher; c) students’ foreign language proficiency at level B1; d) adherence to the identified stages of project activities. Conclusions. The collocational competence development based on corpora should be carried out while following the entire complex of identified psychological and pedagogical conditions. The results obtained can be used to improve the effectiveness of collocation teaching methods based on corpora.

The Correlation Between Students’ Speaking Self-Efficacy and Collocation Competence in Speaking at SMPN 1 Parengan

Speaking, among the four basic language skills – speaking, listening, writing, reading-, is of an exclusive importance in daily life and it is a vital complementary tool in communication skills. Unfortunately, it is not that easy to master English speaking skill and use it to communicate, especially for students who learn English as foreign language (EFL), where they rarely find the situation to use English. Meanwhile, self-efficacy is one of the factors that affect the success of EFL students speaking skill. On the other hand, collocation is a succession of two or more words that must be learned as an integral whole and not pieced together from its component parts which is also an important factor in mastering speaking. This research was carried out to know whether there is a correlation between students’ speaking self-efficacy and collocation competence in speaking. The researcher chose ninth grade students of SMPN 1 PARENGAN to conduct this study. The researcher used the students 9A, 9B, and 9C as the sample which involved 103 students. The data was obtained from a speaking self-efficacy questionnaire and a speaking test. The result of the data correlation coefficient is 0,760 with 0.00 Significant (ρ = 0.00). So, null hypothesis (Ho) can be rejected. It means there is a positive and high correlation between students’ speaking self-efficacy and collocation competence in speaking. It can be concluded that the higher the speaking self-efficacy, the higher the collocation competence in speaking.

Application of the technologies of corpus linguistics in the study of collocations

The subject of this research is the polysemous borrowed noun “credit” in the Russian language and noun “credit” in the Anglo-American language. The goal lies in determination of the national-specific and universal collocations with the component “credit” in the Russian discourse and their translated equivalents in the Anglo-American discourse of the XIX and XXI centuries. Analysis is conducted on the collocations of "credit" formed in accordance with the pattern adjective + noun revealed by statistical methods that calculate the frequency of joint use in the dictionaries and linguistic corpora of the Russian and Anglo-American texts. The use of contrastive analysis allowed establishing the linear and vector correspondences between the lexeme "credit" and national-specific lacunae. The article provides the examples of the national-specific collocations with the component “credit” in the Russian and Anglo-American discourse. The research employs the Russian National Corpus, Corpus of Historical American English and the Corpus of Contemporary American English in the diachronic aspect within the time span of 1800 – 1900 and 2015 – 2019. The relevance of this work lies in the fact that the knowledge of collocations and formation of collocation competence are the essential requirements in modern communicative approach towards learning a foreign language.

Potencjał kolokacyjny leksemów telefon i komputer w świadomości językowej dzieci pięcioletnich

In the communication process, it is necessary to use specific collocations that language users begin to include in their lexical resources at an early stage of language acquisition. The aim of this study is to investigate the productive collocation competence (i.e. the ability to use collocations that are fixed connections of at least two words with integrated meaning) in preschoolers. The research group consisted of forty five‑year-olds whose mother tongue was Polish, and whose task was to provide fourteen verbal collocations with the lexemes telefon ‘telephone’ and komputer ‘computer/laptop’ based on the situation described to them.

An Analysis of Lexical Collocation Errors in Students’ Writing

Mastering lexical collocation uses in learning English as a foreign language is absolutely essential to develop students’ communicative skills and linguistic abilities. Most students, however, have problems with putting words together in a characteristic of “natural” English native speaker-like manner during writing. Students tend to use strange lexical collocation expressions therefore students’ language production does not sound natural and carries imprecise meaning. With regard to this underlying issue, the main emphasis of the current study was lying on the investigation of the types and the causes of lexical collocation error committed by EFL students in their argumentative writing. Through a qualitative research approach applying a descriptive-analytic method, sixteen university students were chosen purposively. The data were collected from two principal sources i.e., students’ writing samples and semi-structured interviews. In terms of data analysis technique, this study employed an error analysis technique developed by Ellis (1994) to analyze the obtained lexical collocation errors and applied a content analysis technique provided by Kumar (2011) to analyze the interview results. The study revealed 54 erroneousness of lexical collocation production consisting of verb + noun/pronoun (PP), adjective + noun, adverb + adjective, noun + noun, and verb + adverb combination. These errors were caused by a lack of collocation competence, native language influence, the use of synonym, overgeneralization, and approximation.

The Learning Effect of Corpora on Strong and Weak Collocations: Implications for Corpus-Based Assessment of Collocation Competence

Although corpora and corpus linguistics have been applied for quite long in foreign and second language settings, there is still limited understanding about how EFL learners use corpus tools along with dictionaries to enhance their collocation knowledge. This study aims to gain insight into the effectiveness of corpus-based pedagogy in comparison with the conventional vocabulary teaching methods, particularly using dictionaries. The study was conducted with two non-English major advanced groups of L2 learners at a public university. The experimental group studied 16 pre-selected formal academic words and their strong and weak collocations with corpus (COCA, the corpus of contemporary American English), while the comparison group studied the same collocations using advanced learner’s dictionaries. The instruments for collecting data included the Oxford placement test, pretest, posttest, and exercises devised for particular teaching points of collocations. Results of Repeated Measures ANOVA tests showed no significant difference between the two experimental groups. However, the corpus-based approach showed more impact on the reception of strong collocations acquired by the corpus group at a slightly better performance rate, as evidenced by the group’s mean scores (Corpus =45.91, Dictionary= 44.06). Interestingly, the acquisition of weak collocations was better for the dictionary use group (Corpus=54.08, Dictionary= 57.18). The paper thus offers some implications for teaching and assessing collocation knowledge and makes suggestions that EFL practitioners should create variations in instructional methodologies through gaining awareness of the increasing availability of innovative technologies. Further research on collocations’ assessment has also been suggested.

The study of collocations with game component in the Russian and English-American discourse

The subject of this research is the polysemous noun “game” in the Russian language and the nouns “play”, “game”, “acting”,” performance” in the English language that correspond to different spheres of activity, denoted by the word “game”. The goal of this article consists in determination of most frequent universal collocations with game component in the Russian discourse and their translation equivalents with play, game, acting, and performance component in the English-American discourse. The collocations with game component formed by the scheme adjective + noun and noun + noun, acquired from the dictionaries, as well as Russian and English-American text corpora, served as the material for this research. The article employs the following methods: definitional analysis, contrastive analysis, and etymological analysis. The application of contrastive analysis allowed determining the linear and vector correspondences between the schemes of the indicated lexemes play, game, acting, and performance, as well as revealing the ethno-cultural lacunae. Examination of collocations with game component was conducted on the basis of the Russian National Corpus, Corpus of Historically American English, and Corpus of Contemporary American English; various dictionaries in the timespan (1810-1900) and (2000-2018). It was established that majority of the ten most frequent collocations according to the aforementioned schemes from the Russian National Corpus are present in the Corpus of Historically American English and Corpus of Contemporary American English in the same contexts, but different frequency. The article provides the examples of ethnocultural collocations with game components in the Russian and English-American discourse. It is demonstrated that collocation with the parametric adjectival “big game” has both universal and ethno-cultural characteristics in the English-American language. The relevance of the work is substantiated by recent interest in the development of collocation competence in learning a foreign language.

A Study on the Collocations in English Class in Korea Polytechnics Focusing on Textbook and Classroom Activities

A lot of interest is in vocabulary teaching and learning, and most research focuses on individual words. Learners have been encouraged to learn individual words and make sentences by inserting them into extended grammatical structures. Although learners successfully learn grammar and a lot of individual words, they often produce awkward grammatical sentences. This is because of their lack of collocation competence. Learners have relatively few chances to encounter typical word sequences repeatedly. Thus, they are more likely to translate from their unacceptable general vocabulary knowledge. A collocation is a relationship between two words or groups of words that often go together and form a common expression. Some combinations sound natural to native English speakers, but other combinations may be unnatural and sound wrong to native speakers. Learning collocation is a crucial part of learning the vocabulary of a language and of acquiring fluency. This paper aims to suggest a few activities accessible to Korea Polytechnics’ English class to help Korea Polytechnics’ students improve their collocation competence instead of just memorizing as many words as possible.

Collocations of high frequency words in nursing research articles and The Academic Collocation List: Similarities and differences

Abstract The main objective of this corpus-based study is to research the most frequent two-word collocations in the corpus of nursing scientific articles and compare this newly assembled list of nursing collocations with the Academic Collocation List (ACL). The nursing scientific articles corpus (NSAC) used in this study comprises 1,119,441 words from 262 articles of 10 high-quality journals from the Medical Library Association list which nursing students can freely access. The focus is on noun-noun and noun-adjective collocations. The selected articles were converted into txt files using the ABBYY Fine Reader. WordSmith Tools 7.0 and TermeX were used for noun and collocation extraction. The newly assembled Nursing Collocation List (NCL) and the ACL were compared using Microsoft Excel 2016. A total of 488 collocations were identified in the NSAC and the NCL contains 234 (47.9%) noun + noun and 254 (52.1%) adjective + noun collocation combinations. The most frequent two-word collocation is health care and it appeared 618 times in the NSAC. The ACL (2,469) and the NCL (488) share 123 two-word collocations. Although there are some correspondences between collocations in the two corpora, key nursing collocations with notably higher frequencies are identified in the NSAC (365). Despite the fact that the ACL is the most extensive collocation list across different academic fields and it certainly plays an important role in teaching English as a foreign language, this study suggests that it does not provide key nursing collocations for improvement of nursing collocation competence.

An Analysis of Lexical Collocation Errors in Students’ Writing

Mastering lexical collocation uses in learning English as a foreign language is absolutely essential to develop students’ communicative skills and linguistic abilities. Most students, however, have problems with putting words together in a characteristic of “natural” English native speaker-like manner during writing. Students tend to use strange lexical collocation expressions therefore students’ language production does not sound natural and carries imprecise meaning. With regard to this underlying issue, the main emphasis of the current study was lying on the investigation of the types and the causes of lexical collocation error committed by EFL students in their argumentative writing. Through a qualitative research approach applying a descriptive-analytic method, sixteen university students were chosen purposively. The data were collected from two principal sources i.e., students’ writing samples and semi-structured interviews. In terms of data analysis technique, this study employedan error analysis technique developed by Ellis (1994) to analyze the obtained lexical collocation errors and applied a content analysis technique provided by Kumar (2011) to analyze the interview results. The study revealed 54 erroneousness of lexical collocation production consisting of verb + noun/pronoun (PP), adjective + noun, adverb + adjective, noun + noun, and verb + adverb combination. These errors were caused by a lack of collocation competence, native language influence, the use of synonym, overgeneralization, and approximation.

The relationship between collocation competence and writing skills of EFL learners

This paper aims to highlight the importance of collocations in learning English as a foreign language. Learning collocations is deemed crucial for it enables EFL learners to position words in suitable context and use them appropriately. A word may not be correctly utilised or understood unless one is familiar with the immediate context in which the word is used. Furthermore, collocations are regarded as an important factor in communicative competence and in determining learners’ level of proficiency (James, 1998; Nation, 2001). The current study aimed to explore the effects of students’ knowledge of collocation on their writing production. The participants were 20 Djiboutian postgraduate students undergoing their studies in one of the higher learning institutions in Malaysia. Using a multiple-choice test consisting of 60 items and a writing test, this study sought to investigate the correlation between lexical collocation knowledge and writing skills of the Djiboutian students. The results from the study revealed a positive correlation between the collocational knowledge and writing production. It was also found that Djiboutian EFL learners did have difficulties in English lexical collocations. These findings corroborated the need for EFL students to learn lexical collocations in order to develop their writing skills. The outcomes of this study provide useful lessons to foreign language learners, teachers, curriculum designers and material developers in the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language.

Психолого-педагогические условия формирования коллокационной компетенции студентов на основе комплексного задания «Диктоглосс»

The main goal of foreign language teaching is the development of foreign language communicative competence that implies the development of speech skills. Due to the prevalence of the competency-based approach in the methods, as well as based on the lexical approach, special attention is paid to the collocational competence development. Since the vocabulary acquisition is founded on the acquisition of the compatibility of words and phrases, and collocations are certain words in the language that tend to be used together, we should talk about the inclusion of collocational competence into the communicative competence. Informatization of education influences the methods of foreign language teaching. For the successful implementation of educational process in the modern world, the development of linguocomputer competence is necessary for both students and the teacher. Analysis of the methodic literature showed that the issue of the psychological and pedagogical conditions for the collocational competence development of students is not well covered in domestic and foreign methodic literature, and requires a more detailed study. In the presented study: 1) we conduct an analysis of the domestic and foreign scientists works on the psychological and pedagogical conditions for the competencies development; 2) we prove the importance of collocation competence development of students; 3) we study the issue of linguocomputer competence development of both students and teachers; 4) we identify the key place of the complex task “dictogloss” as a mean of collocational competence development, as well as a mean of linguocomputer competence formation and development.

Этапы формирования коллокационной компетенции студентов на основе лингвистического корпуса

We consider the concept of the linguistic corpus. We conduct a brief excursion of the previous researchers’ works on the use of the linguistic corpus in foreign language teaching. Due to the structural and planned nature of the project activity, the project method is chosen as a mean of collocation competence development based on the linguistic corpus. The definition of the project method is given and its features are indicated. Based on the methodic literature, the stages of the project activities implementation are considered. We conduct an analysis of researches, which present the stages and steps of teaching algorithms of various aspects of a foreign language. We develop an algorithm of algorithm of collocation competence development based on linguistic corpus, which includes three stages (preparation; procedure and conclusion) and ten steps (familiarization; explanation; information security; search; sorting; research; discussion; communicative; self-reflection and evaluation). Problem language tasks for the collocation competence development are compiled.

Domesticating the Text: Collocation Patterns and Their Significance in the Translated Text

This paper is an attempt to examine, through examples, the significance of collocation patterns for the translated text. To prove this, a corpus is collected from two translated articles in National Geographic magazine, Arabic version and their English counterparts. The given examples show that a great abundance of collocations patterns surfaced in the Arabic target texts (TT). The results obtained are used to argue that these patterns have cohesive, coherent, and aesthetic functions in the target text. To produce a translation that can read as much fluently and naturally as possible, professional translators work painstakingly to domesticate the source text as the magazine, in its Arabic version, is targeting different readership and culture. To accomplish their task, translators draw on their language competence especially 'collocation competence' as a domesticating strategy.

Domesticating the Text: Collocation Patterns and their Significance in the Translated Text

This paper is an attempt to examine, through examples, the significance of collocation patterns for the translated text. To prove this, a corpus is collected from two translated articles in National Geographic magazine, Arabic version and their English counterparts. The given examples show that a great abundance of collocations patterns surfaced in the Arabic target texts (TT). The results obtained are used to argue that these patterns have cohesive, coherent, and aesthetic functions in the target text. To produce a translation that can read as much fluently and naturally as possible, professional translators work painstakingly to domesticate the source text as the magazine, in its Arabic version, is targeting different readership and culture. To accomplish their task, translators draw on their language competence especially 'collocation competence' as a domesticating strategy.

Collocation in learning vocabulary: the Problems and pedagogical suggestions

This was a descriptive qualitative research which was administered to 20 students of STMIK Jayanusa Padang. The data from the observation shown that the lack of collocation competence of the students noticeable when non-native speakers of English need productive language knowledge. they only experienced the limited number of lexical collocations they know or under the influence of their first language “create” unnatural and farfetched collocations. In order to solve this problem, this investigation aimed to expose the students' collocation problems in vocabulary teaching by using collocation tests and questionnaire. The data found were used to offer some pedagogical suggestions that can be applied in class as a starting point, especially to advanced students. Then it is hoped that students will have properly developed and balanced in learning collocations which will help them speak and write English in a more natural way.

English

In recent years, interest in flipped classrooms has gained popularity among numerous ELT scholars . This research, therefore, explored the effect of flipping a classroom on Thai learners ’ English collocation knowledge, and compared this instructional design with traditional instruction . The study also examined the students ’ attitudes towards the flipped model . The experimental research design comprised an experimental and a control group . The experimental group ( N = 35 ) was exposed to the flipped instruction, in which learning contents were provided outside of class time through electronic means and class time was used for activities . In the control group, the students ( N = 35 ) were taught by the traditional method, where lectures were mainly delivered during class and supplementary exercises were given outside of class time . Two types of collocations : lexical and grammatical were studied . Receptive and productive tests were developed to measure the impact of the two instructional methods on the students ’ collocation competence . A questionnaire and an oral interview were also distributed to determine the experimental students ’ perceptions towards the flipped model . The findings revealed that flipped instruction helped enhance the students ’ collocation knowledge . Interestingly, in terms of the effects the results yielded no significant differences between the flipped and traditional approaches . Most flipped learners generally had a favourable perception of the flipped classroom . Taken together, the study offers insightful implications to the line of research on flipped classrooms in ELT contexts . Keywords : English collocations; experimental ELT research; EFL learners; flipped classrooms; interactive activities

Corpus-aided Business English Collocation Pedagogy: An Empirical Study in Chinese EFL Learners

This study reports an empirical study of an explicit instruction of corpus-aided Business English collocations and verifies its effectiveness in improving learners’ collocation awareness and learner autonomy, as a result of which is significant improvement of learners’ collocation competence. An eight-week instruction in keywords’ collocations, with the help of AntConc and self-constructed Business English Pedagogical Corpus combined with COCA general corpus and Wikipedia corpus, was imparted to 23 undergraduate learners majoring in Business English in Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. They took the collocation competence pre-test and post-test before and after the teaching experiment which was phased into two themes and submitted learning reflective journals at the end of each theme instruction and answered a questionnaire at the final end. The data from the tests, reflective journals and questionnaire collaboratively suggest that given appropriate guidance EFL Business English learners can take a more active role in raising their collocation awareness and developing learner autonomy and thus improve their collocation competence significantly. The results from the test analysis also indicate that the corpus-aided Business English collocation pedagogy is proved to be more effective for intermediate and advanced level learners rather than lower level ones. The findings have pedagogical implications for EFL Business English instructors and learners.