Teaching Of Collocations Research Articles

Colocaciones léxicas: estudio comparativo de libros de texto de inglés y de español como L2

Resumen: Este estudio se centra en el tratamiento que recibe la colocación léxica en libros de texto de inglés y español como L2. Para ello, se analizaron 24 libros pertenecientes a tres niveles junto con 208 cuestionarios distribuidos a profesores de ambas lenguas. Los resultados indican (a) la casi total ausencia de criterios explícitos de selección del léxico; (b) un desconocimiento acerca del concepto colocación léxica por parte del profesorado; (c) un tratamiento tradicional en la presentación y práctica de colocaciones léxicas y (d) una inexistencia de enseñanza explícita de colocaciones léxicas en los libros de español, ignorando así los resultados de investigaciones en la Lingüística aplicada. Abstract: This study focuses on the treatment given to lexical collocations in English and Spanish L2 textbooks. To this end, 24 textbooks from three profi ciency levels together with 208 questionnaires distributed among English and Spanish L2 teachers were analyzed. The results indicate (a) the scarcity of explicit vocabulary selection criteria; (b) a lack of knowledge about the concept of lexical collocation by the English and Spanish teachers; (c) a traditional treatment to the presentation and practice of lexical collocations; and (d) the absence of explicit teaching of lexical collocations in Spanish textbooks, ignoring the research from Applied Linguistics.

The Impact of the Explicit Teaching of Three Particle Collocations on Reading Comprehension

Research on collocations has been predominant for decades and decisive in debating the theoretical and pedagogical perspectives of collocations. Various approaches have been offered for best practices in teaching collocations. Despite this, we are yet to see an agreed-upon approach to teaching collocations. This study attempted to investigate the effect of explicit teaching of collocations. A further aim of the study was to see if test format affected the results. The results revealed that the explicit teaching of collocations had significantly improved the learners’ knowledge of collocations. In addition, test format did have a noticeable effect on the results. Finally, a significant variation was observed among the learners as to their ability to learn collocations.Keywords: Collocation, Vocabulary, Second language acquisition, Explicit teaching

Treatment and Teaching of Collocations

Treatment and Teaching of Collocations

İngilizceyi Yabancı Dil Olarak Öğrenen Türk Öğrencilerin ve Türk İngilizce Öğretmenlerinin Eşdizimlilik Algısı

This study explored perceptions of Turkish EFL teachers and learners on teaching and learning of collocations. Participants were 32 high school teachers and 326 students from five different state schools. The participants completed a questionnaire, and semi-structured interviews with 6 teachers were conducted to further explore the issues related to their perceptions and practices of teaching collocations. Results indicated that teachers consider it crucial to develop learners’ collocational knowledge starting from beginner levels. According to them, the main sources of collocational errors are learners’ unawareness of collocation as a concept and first language interference. Teachers reported that they specifically allocate teaching time for most frequently used collocations. Regarding learners, their responses indicated that most of them believe collocations play an important role in language learning. However, they think that teachers do not always dedicate enough time for collocations during teaching. Learners also believed that their collocational errors mostly stem from Turkish interference, and that the most effective strategy to study collocations is through collocational grids. The results of the study are discussed with reference to previous research conducted in different EFL settings, and in terms of practical applications for foreign language teaching in Turkey.

THE EFFECT OF CORPUS-BASED COLLOCATION INSTRUCTION ON IRANIAN EFL LEARNERS' NON-CONGRUENT COLLOCATION LEARNING

Ponte Academic JournalOct 2016, Volume 72, Issue 10 THE EFFECT OF CORPUS-BASED COLLOCATION INSTRUCTION ON IRANIAN EFL LEARNERS' NON-CONGRUENT COLLOCATION LEARNINGAuthor(s): Dr. Nafiseh Salehi ,Hosna RasooyarJ. Ponte - Oct 2016 - Volume 72 - Issue 10 doi: 10.21506/j.ponte.2016.10.4 Abstract:Collocations in English are huge in size, taking up almost 70% of what is spoken and written in real and authentic English. Therefore, collocation teaching would be to the benefit of EFL learners to a great extent. The present study focused on uncovering the effect of corpus-based instruction on EFL learners' non-congruent collocation learning. Since the meaning of the whole non-congruent collocations cannot be inferred through one to one translation from mother tongue or the literal meaning of the individual words, the researchers decided to concentrate on this kind of collocations. To this end, two groups of learners were used as the participants of the study. One group experienced learning collocations through corpus-based instruction and the other group experienced collocation learning through conventional method of instruction. Students� attitudes towards corpus-based instruction were also investigated through interviews. The results showed that corpus-based instruction had the same effect as the traditional instruction on learning non-congruent collocations. However, students had positive attitudes towards corpus-based instruction and preferred it over traditional teaching. They also reported that corpus-based instruction made them more motivated to learn non-congruent collocations. Keywords: Collocations, Non-congruent Collocations, Corpus-based Instruction, Vocabulary Download full text:Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution Username Password

Reinforcing Students’ Collocational Competence in EFL Classrooms

Relevant research studies show an outstanding effect of the collocational competence on reinforcing the language proficiency of students learning a foreign or second language (Ellis, 2001). Students’ awareness of word combinations enables them to produce language with native-like accuracy and increases their ability to use different levels of formulaic language, idioms, and fixed expressions. The argument of Firth (1957) that “a word is known by the company it keeps” implies that knowing how words are combined facilitates using them efficiently. This entails dedicating more time and effort to increase students’ awareness and acquisition of collocations. However, as argued by Chan and Liou (2005), explicit teaching of collocations is not given the deserved attention in language classes possibly because of the difficulty of teaching them in a way that facilitates their storage and retrieval. It is also due to the shortage of user-friendly materials that could be utilised for teaching collocates. In addition, it could be rendered to native language interference and the nature of interlanguage. This study explores how apt undergraduate Arab students are in using collocation in written works. It also analyses the very common errors they make in written activities. This study concludes that students’ ill-formed expressions are a shared responsibility between them and language teachers. It proposes a tri-polar model for enhancing students’ use of collocation. They are elicitation, fixation, and creation. This study eventually provides pedagogical implications that facilitate addressing collocation in language classes.

The Effect of Teaching Collocations on the Students’ Perceptions toward Language Learning

<p><em>Knowledge of collocation is fundamental for both receptive and productive use of the language. Collocation is often</em><em> </em><em>regarded as insurmountable obstacle to the attainment of native-like fluency. In other words, collocation skill has often been used to differentiate native and non-native speakers. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of teaching collocation on the students’ attitudes toward language learning in the classroom. To enhance both oral reading and speaking fluency, the researcher uses</em><em> </em><em>the repeated reading method to check the participants’ productive performance. In addition, the participants are introduced and taught to use the online language database during the learning process.</em><em> </em><em>The results indicate that the participants hold positive attitudes toward the explicit teaching of collocations.</em><em> </em><em>The analyzed data reveal that the participants’ language performance has been siginificantly affected by the instruction of collocations. The participants also express that they feel more confident and motivated to acquire accurate and native-like competence. </em></p>

The Effect of a Program Based on the Lexical Approach on Developing English Majors' Use of Collocations

As nonnative preservice teachers of English face many difficulties when using collocations, the present study seeks to identify the areas of collocation difficulty where learners have the biggest trouble. A training program based on the practices of the lexical approach (Lewis, 2008) was thus developed to solve this problem. Senior English majors at two Egyptian Universities represented the sample of the study. Instruments included a test on lexical collocations, and a training program based on the practices of the lexical approach (a framework, a teacher's guide and students' worksheets). Results showed that explicit teaching of collocations through various corpus-based activities helped learners get an intuition unto the right collocates, and drastically raised their scores in the posttest.

Teachability of collocations: The role of word frequency counts

This study aims to gain insights into which collocations to teach at which proficiency levels by answering the following questions: (i) Of the Verb+Noun and Adjective+Noun types of collocations, which one is more difficult (and should therefore come at a later stage of learning)? (ii) What is the size of collocations of the types Verb+Noun and Adjective+Noun mastered across proficiency levels? In addition, the study suggests an approach to collocation teaching that should be trialled in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching context. Two collocation tests (modelled after Laufer and Nation 1999)1 with words selected from Nation's (2006)2 word list and Coxhead's (2000)3 Academic Word List were administered to two groups of English majors, at different stages of learning, from the University of Antwerp and the University of Burundi. Results showed that Adjective+Noun combinations are more difficult than Verb+Noun combinations. However, in both collocations types, only upper-intermediate and low-advanced students mastered the 2 000-word band. We therefore suggest teaching collocations from the 2 000-word band to beginner/low-intermediate students and only exceed the 2 000-word band from the upper-intermediate learning stage onwards, a suggestion in line with Nation's (2006) discussion on how to teach vocabulary.

Developing and evaluating a Chinese collocation retrieval tool for CFL students and teachers

The development of collocational knowledge is important for foreign language learners; unfortunately, learners often have difficulties producing proper collocations in the target language. Among the various ways of collocation learning, the DDL (data-driven learning) approach encourages the independent learning of collocations and allows learners to directly use corpora and tools to search for proper collocations. There are several useful collocation tools (JustTheWord, COCA, Tango, Gutenberg Collocation Tool) available for English as a second language (ESL) learners. There are, however, very few Chinese collocation tools available for learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL), despite the increasing numbers of CFL learners within the past several years. To help CFL students and teachers efficiently search for proper collocates, this paper introduces a new web-based collocation retrieval tool, ICE (Intelligent Collocation Engine), which is based on a large part-of-speech-tagged Chinese news corpus. To determine if the new tool can facilitate the searching of collocations, this tool was tested by a group of CFL students to find proper collocates in a translation task. The results showed that the students who used the ICE tool could successfully found many proper Chinese collocates for a given noun. In addition, 12 in-service CFL teachers were also invited to evaluate the effectiveness of this collocation tool. These teachers indicated that they could find proper Chinese collocates easily with the help of ICE. The teachers also commented that they might use the collocation retrieval tool to prepare their teaching materials. Both findings of the experiment as well as the survey suggest that the new collocation retrieval tool can facilitate Chinese collocation teaching and learning, but the content and 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 learning tools.

A Corpus-based Analysis of Collocational Errors in the Iranian EFL Learners' Oral Production

Collocations are one of the areas generally considered problematic for EFL learners. Iranian learners of English like other EFL learners face various problems in producing oral collocations. An analysis of learners' spoken interlanguage both indicates the scope of the problem and the necessity to spend more time and energy by learners on mastering collocations. The present study specifically focuses on the use of different types of collocations in oral productions of 30 intermediate Iranian EFL learners with the aim of identifying, categorizing and accounting for the inappropriate collocations produced. The corpus analysis revealed that preposition-based collocations in general and verb-preposition collocations in particular are the most problematic types of collocation for Iranian learners of English. The results also indicated that negative transfer from L1 was responsible for a high proportion (56.7%) of collocational errors, while intra-lingual transfer accounted for only 30% of the incorrect collocations. Further findings of the study as well as implications for the teaching and learning of collocations are discussed in the paper.

Collocation Teaching Effect on Reading Comprehension in Advanced EFL Setting

The current study tried to address whether explicit collocation teaching has a positive effect on reading comprehension compared to explicit single-item vocabulary instruction. Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKL) and vocabulary pretest were used to determine prior knowledge of 3rd year ELT department students in Pamukkale University. Of the two treatment groups one received explicit collocation teaching and the other received single -item vocabulary instruction followed by a reading passage (Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease score: 28). Five of the six reading comprehension questions aimed to elicit the target collocations in the answers. The two-tailed t-test significance values were higher than 0.05 for all the questions (q1: 1,000; q2: 0,64; q3: 0,39; q4: 0,106; q5: 0,768), and yet indicated differences between participant means were likely due to chance and not likely due to the difference in treatment types (single-item vocabulary instruction and collocation instruction). The inconclusive findings could be due to only one treatment session.

English collocations extracted from a corpus of university learners and its contribution to a language teaching pedagogy

Taking into consideration the relevance of foreign language teaching and the learning of collocations (ALTENBERG; EEG-OLOFSSON, 1990; FONTENELLE, 1994; MEUNIER; GRANGER, 2008), this paper aims at showing results of an investigation on whether the teaching of collocations should be implicit or explicit to the Brazilian university students. Furthermore, the research has the purpose of presenting some collocational aspects from a corpus of the written language learners made up of intermediate, upper intermediate and advanced university students’ argumentative essays at a public university in Brazil. With the help of WordSmith Tools (SCOTT, 2007), it was possible to raise students’ most frequent collocational choices and patterns, the most/least used type of collocations, the influence of the mother tongue on their choices, among other aspects. With the purpose of motivating and involving students in classroom research, it was also introduced The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), created by Mark Davies. By doing so, students could compare their collocational choices with the patterns found in the online corpus, extract more collocational patterns and, consequently, be aware of the potential of corpora for the foreign learning process, specifically for raising language awareness, with focus on prefabricated chunks.

The Relationship between Experiential Learning Styles and the Immediate and Delayed Retention of English Collocations among EFL Learners

This study was carried out to find out if there was any significant difference in learning English collocations by learning with different dominant experiential learning styles. Seventy-five participants took part in the study in which they were taught a series of English collocations. The entry knowledge of the participants with regard to collocations items of the treatment as well as the difficulty level of the items were controlled. Upon the completion of the treatment, participants’ retention of the items was measured in an immediate and a delayed recognition type tests. The results showed a statistically significant difference among the four experiential learning style groups. The findings offer a number of implications with regard to the teaching and learning of English collocations.

The Effect of Teaching Vocabulary through Semantic Mapping on EFL Learners’ Awareness of the Affective Dimensions of Deep Vocabulary Knowledge

This study focused on the effect of teaching vocabulary through semantic mapping on the awareness of two affective dimensions, evaluation and potency dimensions of deep vocabulary knowledge as well as the general vocabulary knowledge of EFL students. Sixty intermediate EFL female adult learners participated in this study; they were chosen among 90 students through Prelemenary English test and a general vocabulary knowledge test. They were thus randomly divided into two group, experimental and control, each consisting of 30 students. As for the treatment, modifiers describing peoples’ characteristics were taught in the text and through semantic mapping, whereas these words were taught by usual vocabulary instruction in control group. At the end, students took a vocabulary achievement test and a test of awareness of evaluation and potency dimensions of deep vocabulary knowledge. A t-test was run to analyze the data from the vocabulary achievement test. Results showed that teaching collocations has great influence on the students` general vocabulary knowledge. To see if the independent variable had significant effects on awareness of evaluation and potency dimensions of deep vocabulary knowledge, a MANOVA was run revealing that teaching vocabularies through semantic mapping significantly improved learners` awareness of the two dimensions.

NEGATIVE TRANSFER OF INDONESIAN COLLOCATIONS INTO ENGLISH AND IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

One of the most challenging problems for EFL students is to be able to express themselves not just grammatically but also acceptably and naturally in English in appropriate contexts. The ability to produce acceptable and natural expressions in English is closely related to the EFL students’ competence in collocation—which words go together in normal usage. The present study provides an empirical analysis on negative transfer made by Indonesian EFL students in lexical collocation and recommends practical ways to help students improve their competence in collocation. Data for the study was collected from essays written by 40 EFL university students majoring in English in Indonesia whose native language is Indonesian. The students were asked to write a two- to three-page essay on an assigned topic. Of 445 lexical collocation errors found in the English writing, 321 (72%) were negative transfers of Indonesian lexical collocations into English. The findings suggest the necessity of direct teaching of collocations, the use of The Collins WordbanksOnline, and the need to design bilingual collocation dictionaries.<br />Keywords: Negative Transfer, Lexical Collocation, Indonesian Collocation, Acceptable Collocation<br /><br />

Collocation a neglected aspect in teaching and learning EFL

During the past three decades, the need for emphasis on collocations has received increasingly attention in the field of EFL teaching learning processes. Several researchers pointed out the benefits of learning collocations such as increasing learners’ language competence, enhancing learners’ communicative competence, and being toward native-like. So the aim of present study is to focus on investigating collocational error types made by the participants, in EFL learning, The issues for teachers during teaching collocations, the frequency of collocational errors, and the sources of collocational errors. The participants’ perceptions of difficulty in collocations were also examined. Moreover, it attempts to find answers for these questions. What are instruction effects on learners’ collocational competence? Which collocations need to be learned?) How should we teach collocations in the classroom? Hence, collocational knowledge is essential for EFL learners and collocation instruction in EFL courses is required for every teacher or student who is dealing with English.

The effect of teaching collocations on English language proficiency

This study investigated the effect of teaching collocations on English language proficiency. Sixty students participated in a pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design study. For four months, the control group was taught the new words in isolation with traditional techniques such as translation and definition. In the experimental group, vocabulary was taught by providing students with collocations of a particular word through using concordancers and corpus-based activities. After the experiment both groups participated in a language proficiency test. The statistical analyses showed that the experimental group outperformed the control group in the posttest, implying that teaching collocations can improve students language proficiency.

An Empirical Study on Concordance-based English Collocation Teaching

An Empirical Study on Concordance-based English Collocation Teaching

Foreword

Here is the first issue of the new journal, Acta Linguistica Asiatica, published by the Department of Asian and African Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. Its appearance is approximately timed to commemorate the 15 years since the establishment of the Department on October 1st, 1995. In step with the developments in media and new modes of dissemination of the results of scholarly research, it is introduced as an on-line electronic publication.In the past 15 years, Asian Studies which were initially represented by Chinese and Japanese Studies, seem to have established a firm foothold in Slovenia. In addition to the existing Chinese Studies and Japanese Studies, the University of Ljubljana introduced in December 2010 new academic areas of Turkish Studies, Iranian Studies, Indian Studies and Korean Studies, thus giving green light to the establishment of systematic research of Asian issues within a wider framework.In the meantime, the body of researchers specializing in Asian languages has also grown, including teachers, visiting professors, researchers and graduate students who cover a wide spectrum of research fields.Also, the recent reform of higher education along the Bologna guidelines, although criticized, has happily brought into existence the interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in Humanities and Social Sciences and within its fold, the joint Doctoral program in Linguistics.The Journal Acta Linguistica Asiatica is thus emerging in a period of lively ferment, where unifying the field of discourse within language studies and at the same time opening it more widely to research in humanities and social sciences will undoubtedly have a long term impact on Asian language research at the University of Ljubljana.Serving as a focal point of research on Asian languages in Slovenia, Acta Linguistica Asiatica will at the same time strive to promote cooperation in the field of Asian language research internationally in Europe, Asia and beyond. Acta Linguistica Asiatica will, following Roman Jakobson’s saying, “Linguista sum, linguistici nihil a me alienum puto”, cover all the subject areas and theoretical approaches pertaining to theoretical and applied research on Asian languages. An international editorial board takes care of the research quality of the journal.The contents of the first issue reflect this orientation and openness. Three papers deal with various aspects of the role played by language in the process of modernization during and after Meiji Japan, i.e., The Relation Between the View on the Language and Educational Ideology in the Early Meiji Period in Japan Through the Discourse of Regionalism by Ichimiya Yufuko, Towards Theoretical Approach to the Understanding of Language Ideologies in Post-Meiji Japan by Luka Culiberg, and Images of Pre-WW II: National Language Policies as Reflected in the Field of “National Language Studies” Itself by Andrej Bekeš.Another focus of interest is philological, represented by two papers. One is Morphology and Syntax in Holes and Scratches: The Latest Stage of Kugyol Research, an interesting research on kugyol, a system devised to facilitate reading Chinese Buddhist texts in Korean, by Lee Yong. The other,The Typology of Āmreḍita Compounds in the Ṛgveda by Tamara Ditrich, investigates āmreḍita compounds in the Ṛgveda, a type of coordinative nominal constructions, closely related to dvandva compounds.Finally, this issue is concluded with the article Collocational Relations in Japanese Language Textbooks and Computer-assisted Language Learning Resources, by Irena Srdanović and deals with the teaching of collocations in modern Japanese, based on corpora. Andrej Bekeš University of Ljubljana and University of Tsukuba April 23, 2011