Teaching Of Collocations Research Articles

Developing and evaluating a web-based collocation retrieval tool for EFL students and teachers

The development of adequate collocational knowledge is important for foreign language learners; nonetheless, learners often have difficulties in producing proper collocations in the target language. Among the various ways of learning collocations, the DDL (data-driven learning) approach encourages independent learning of collocations and allows learners to directly use corpora and tools to search for proper collocations. Concordancers have been one of the key tools in the DDL approach. However, based on the findings of empirical studies, many existing web concordancers have not been very helpful in retrieving collocations. To help EFL students and teachers quickly locate proper collocates, this article introduces a web-based collocation retrieval tool, WebCollocate, which is based on a large part of speech-tagged Gutenberg corpus. To determine if the new tool can facilitate the searching of collocations, this tool and the Hong Kong Polytechnic web concordancer were used by two groups of college EFL students to find proper collocates in a translation task. The results showed that the students who used the WebCollocate tool found more proper English collocates. In addition, a group of 35 pre-service English teachers were also invited to evaluate the effectiveness of this collocation tool. These EFL teachers indicated that they could easily find proper English collocates with the help of WebCollocate. However, they also suggested that the search options and the presentation of search outcomes of this tool can be further improved. It seems that a more dedicated collocation retrieval tool can facilitate collocation teaching and learning, but the functions of this tool can be further enhanced. The findings of this study can be useful for language teachers, researchers, and developers of corpus-based tools.

KETIDAKLAZIMAN KOLOKASI PEMBELAJAR BIPA DAN IMPLIKASINYA TERHADAP PEMBELAJARAN BAHASA

Abstract: Unacceptable Collocations by Learners of Indonesian as a ForeignLanguage and the Implication in Language Learning. Foreign language learners’ability to collocate words that are natural and acceptable in the target language isimportant in foreign language learning; however, it is notoriously difficult forforeign language learners and sometimes makes them frustrated. This studyattempts to describe the negative transfer of English collocations into Indonesiancollocations made by learners of Indonesian as a foreign language in their writingassignments. This study employed a qualitative descriptive method. The data werecollected from 36 writing assignments by 12 learners whose mother tongue isEnglish. They were trainee teachers with experience in teaching Indonesian inAustralia. The finding shows that there are 176 unnatural Indonesian collocations,some of which are negative transfers of learners’ mother tongue. This suggests thatdirect teaching of collocations should be given special emphasis in teachingIndonesian as a foreign language.Keywords: collocation, lexical collocation, grammatical collocation, languagelearning

The Effect of Explicit Collocation Teaching on Collocation Perception and Collocation Acquisition.

The Effect of Explicit Collocation Teaching on Collocation Perception and Collocation Acquisition.

Amplifier Collocations in the British National Corpus: Implications for English Language Teaching

considers some possible implications for English language teaching. The mutual information measure is used to show the strength of the bond between 24 selected amplifiers such as extremely or greatly and other words (typically adjectives or participles such as rare or appreciated, which result in collocations such as extremely rare or greatly appreciated). Each amplifier is shown to collocate most strongly with particular words having particular grammatical and semantic characteristics. Research in cognitive science has shown the extent to which words and collocations become established as units of learning depending on the frequency with which they are experienced. In the light of the corpus-based evidence on the nature of collocations presented in this study, the teaching of collocations might be expected to have a more explicit and prominent place in the language teaching curriculum. In class, teachers can draw attention to collocations not only through direct teaching but also by maximizing opportunities to acquire them through an emphasis on autonomous implicit learning activities such as reading.

Lexical collocations: a contrastive view

For some time now there has been, in the field of EFL teaching, a growing awareness of the importance of lexical collocations for vocabulary learning. One of the main obstacles to teaching lexical collocations systematically, however, is their number, which amounts to tens of thousands. In this article, it is argued that this enormous teaching and learning load can be reduced by a contrastive approach to the concept of lexical collocation. An exemplary German-English contrastive analysis of noun + verb and verb + noun collocations shows that there is, for a considerable portion of them, direct translational equivalence. Such lexical collocations do not have to be taught. The teaching of lexical collocations in EFL should concentrate, instead, on items for which there is no direct translational equivalence in English and in the learners' respective mother tongues.