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A corpus study of Spanish as a Foreign Language learners’ collocation production: Current trends and future perspectives
... En definitiva, estos autores buscan diferenciarlas de otros tipos de unidades fraseológicas como, por ejemplo, las expresiones idiomáticas o expresiones institucionalizadas. A pesar de no haber un consenso en cuanto a los criterios de aplicación y limitación a la hora de decir qué es o qué no es una colocación en español (Alonso Ramos, 2010), los estudios de corpus que se centran en estos ítems y en su aprendizaje en el aula de una L2 han aumentado en los últimos años (p.ej., Aguinaga Echeverría, 2018; Orol Gómez y Alonso Ramos, 2013;Vincze et al., 2016). ...
Es habitual que el estudio de la gramática y del léxico se observen como dos ramas lingüísticas diferentes. No obstante, las investigaciones sobre los bloques léxicos y, en especial, las colocaciones muestran que la gramática y el léxico no deben verse como elementos completamente separados. Entender esta unión entre la gramática y el léxico es crucial para el profesorado y los creadores de materiales de español como L2, que pueden encontrar en la enseñanza de colocaciones un apoyo rentable para que el alumnado alcance una competencia lingüística y una fluidez elevadas. Al considerar las colocaciones como unidades complejas que, sin embargo, cognitivamente se tratan como palabras únicas, el conocimiento de estas secuencias puede automatizarse como palabras simples. En este artículo, por lo tanto, se realiza un estudio crítico-descriptivo sobre las principales perspectivas de la gramática de las construcciones, el aprendizaje de lenguas extranjeras y la adquisición de vocabulario, en particular de las colocaciones. También se presentan ejemplos prácticos extraídos del Enfoque Léxico, que toman los bloques léxicos como eje central del aprendizaje. Se concluye con posibles líneas de investigación dentro de este marco teórico-práctico de la enseñanza-aprendizaje de lenguas. Palabras clave: teorías de adquisición de lenguas extranjeras, adquisición de vocabulario, frecuencia de uso, estudios de corpus, lenguaje formulaico, colocaciones, Enfoque léxico.
Research has indicated that lexical richness is an important indicator of second language (L2) proficiency. However, most research has examined written, cross-sectional English L2 corpora and does not necessarily indicate how spoken lexical use develops over time or whether observed trends are stable across L2s. This study adds to previous research on the development of spoken vocabulary by investigating lexical features of L2 Spanish learners over a 21-month period, using the LANGSNAP corpus. Multiple lexical richness indices used in previous studies were examined including lexical diversity, word frequency, word concreteness, and bigram strength of association. Linear mixed-effects models were run to examine changes over time. The results suggest that although some features of lexical richness (e.g., word frequency) see meaningful change over time, others (e.g., bigram T score) may not be indicative of L2 oral development.
The current article offers an overview of scholarship on additional-language (e.g., second-language, heritage-language) users of Spanish that has been carried out using learner corpora in the last decade. I focus the review of Spanish learner corpus research on investigations that have examined grammar (e.g., fluency, grammatical gender), vocabulary (e.g., lexical diversity), and pragmatics (e.g., discourse markers), and I highlight the contributions that this body of work has made to the understanding of the use and development of additional-language Spanish. I also discuss the pedagogical applications that this line of inquiry may have. I conclude by identifying specific avenues for future work pertaining to research on additional-language learning and the development of new corpora.
This experimental study tests the usability of a collocation retrieval tool that combines corpus and dictionary features in order to help learners of Spanish as a Foreign Language to improve their production of collocations. More specifically, the study tests the extent to which such a tool is effective without prior training, and evaluates which of its features might be improved. Two experiments were conducted. The first experiment involved Japanese-L1 learners of Spanish. One subgroup completed a gap-fill test both with and without the collocation tool, while another subgroup used electronic bilingual dictionaries instead of the collocation tool. In a second experiment, we chose a more heterogeneous group of participants with less experience in using lexicographic tools. Results show that learners do not need previous training to benefit from the collocation tool, but also that they do not check corpus examples as often as they might.
The digital turn in lexicography has paved the way to new techniques for presenting information in dictionaries. This paper explores the potential of collocational networks (Phillips 1983, Williams 1998) as key lexicographical tools to represent information about lexical combinatorics. Collocational networks, which had initially been used as a means of identifying collocations in large corpora, must now be rethought in order to assist non-expert dictionary users in text production by allowing them to find the exact collocates they are looking for, as well as by offering the grammatical information needed to use collocations accurately. We advocate improving networks by incorporating information visualization techniques (Ware 2008, Pham 2012). Specifically, we suggest a number of measures which may be taken to both simplify access to the information provided by raw output from corpora —much of which may be noise for the dictionary user— and to enrich such collocational data by means of visually-explained relevant grammatical information.
RESUMEN
En la actualidad, la enseñanza y el aprendizaje de las colocaciones en el ámbito del español como lengua segunda o extranjera está recibiendo cada vez más atención. Las llamadas construcciones con verbos de apoyo constituyen una parte importante del conjunto de las colocaciones del español. El presente estudio se centra en la investigación del uso de este tipo de estructuras en las producciones escritas de aprendices francófonos de español de nivel intermedio (B2.1). Se atiende fundamentalmente a dos aspectos: (a) qué problemas se observan en la producción de este tipo de construcciones en la muestra estudiada; y (b) qué papel desempeña la lengua materna en el empleo de estas unidades por los aprendices y en la producción de errores. Los datos que se analizan provienen, por una parte, de textos producidos libremente y, por otra, de una tarea diseñada para poner en práctica el uso de las estructuras estudiadas.
Second language acquisition (SLA) research has traditionally relied on elicited experimental data, and it has disfavoured natural language use data. Learner corpus research has the potential to change this but, to date, the research has contributed little to the interpretation of L2 acquisition, and some of the corpora are flawed in design. We analyse the reasons why many SLA researchers are still reticent about using corpora, and how good corpus design and adequate tools to annotate and search corpora can help overcome some of the problems observed. We do so by describing how the ten standard principles used in corpus design (Sinclair 2005) were applied to the design of CEDEL2, a large learner corpus of L1 English – L2 Spanish (Lozano 2009a).
The present study explores the relationship between controlled productive knowledge of collocations and L2 proficiency, the role of frequency in controlled productive knowledge of collocations, and the quantifiability of controlled productive collocational knowledge growth alongside L2 proficiency and word frequency levels. A proficiency measure and a productive collocation test modelled on Laufer and Nation (1999) were presented to Belgian and Burundian English majors. The results show that scores on both tests distinguish between proficiency levels and, furthermore, highly correlate. This suggests that controlled productive knowledge of collocations develops as proficiency increases, supporting earlier studies (Boers, that had established a relationship between collocational knowledge and L2 proficiency. The results also show that the more frequent the collocations, the better they are known, which highlights the crucial role played by frequency in knowing words (Nation & Beglar, 2007). Furthermore, the number of collocations added can be quantified and we observe moderate gains at beginner and advanced levels, and impressive gains at intermediate levels. This supports and extends Laufer's (1998) and Zhong and Hirsh's (2009) findings and lays basic ground work for teaching collocations, the amount of which should increase with proficiency levels.
The present work is a pilot study of English lexical collocations in written productions by advanced Italian students of English. The aim is to describe errors made by learners in the production of word combinations. First a working definition of lexical collocation will be given in order to identify those word combinations that will be taken into consideration. Then, after introducing the data used and the methodology for its classification, collocational errors will be analysed from a quantitative and qualita-tive point of view by considering factors such as L1 influence, structural properties and degree of fixedness of wrong collocations. It will emerge that the L1 has a relevant role in the generation of wrong lexical collocations and that certain types of collocations are more error prone than others. Final-ly the implications of these observations are discussed with reference to the need for adequate treat-ment of collocations in lexicographic works.
Over the last twenty years, phraseology has become a major field of pure and applied research in Western European and North American linguistics. This book is made up of authoritative contributions from leading specialists who examine the increasingly crucial role played by ready-made word-combinations in language acquisition and adult language use. After a wide-ranging introduction by the editor, the book introduces the main theoretical approaches, analyses the corpus data and phrase typology, and finally considers the application of phraseology to associated disciplines including lexicography, language learning, stylistics, and computational analysis. This book is the first comprehensive and up-to-date account of the subject to be published in English. Series Information Series ISBN: 0-19-961811-9 Series Editors: Richard W. Bailey, Noel Osselton, and Gabriele Stein; Oxford Studies in Lexicography and Lexicology provides a forum for the publication of substantial scholarly works on all issues of interest to lexicographers, lexicologists, and dictionary users. It is concerned with the theory and history of lexicography, lexicological theory, and related topics such as terminology, and computer applications in lexicography. It focuses attention too on the purposes for which dictionaries are compiled, on their uses, and on their reception and role in society today and in the past.
The chi-squared test is used to find the vocabulary most typical of seven different ICAME corpora, each representing the English used in a particular country. In a closely related study, Leech and Fallon (1992, Computer corpora - what do they tell us about culture? ICAME Journal, 16: 29-50) found differences in the vocabulary used in the Brown Corpus of American English and that the Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen Corpus of British English. They were mainly interested in those vocabulary differences which they assumed to be due to cultural differences between the United States and Britain, but we are equally interested in vocabulary differences which reveal linguistic preferences in the various countries in which English is spoken. Whether vocabulary differences are cultural or linguistic in nature, they can be used for the automatic classification according to variety of English of texts of unknown provenance. The extent to which the vocabulary differences between the corpora represent vocabulary differences between the varieties of English as a whole depends on the extent to which the corpora represent the full range of topics typical of their associated cultures, and thus there is a need for corpora designed to represent the topics and vocabulary of cultures or dialects, rather than stratified across a set range of topics and genres. This will require methods to determine the range of topics addressed in each culture, then methods to sample adequately from each topical domain.
This article presents a series of studies focusing on L2 production and processing of adjective-noun collocations (e.g., social services). In Study 1, 810 adjective-noun collocations were extracted from 31 essays written by Russian learners of English. About half of these collocations appeared frequently in the British National Corpus (BNC); one-quarter failed to appear in the BNC at all, while another quarter had a very low BNC frequency. Based on frequency data and mutual information (MI) scores, it was discovered that around 45% of all learner collocations were, in fact, appropriate collocations, that is, frequent and strongly associated English word combinations. When the study data were compared to data from native speakers, very little difference was found between native speakers (NS) and non-native speakers (NNS) in the use of appropriate collocations. Unfortunately, the high percentage of appropriate collocations does not mean that NNSs necessarily develop fully native-like knowledge of collocation. In Study 2, NNSs demonstrated poorer intuition than NS respondents regarding the frequency of collocations. Likewise, Study 3 showed that NNSs were slower than NSs in processing collocations. Overall, the studies reported here suggest that L2 learners are capable of producing a large number of appropriate collocations but that the underlying intuitions and the fluency with collocations of even advanced learners do not seem to match those of native speakers.
Les As. examinent le probleme de la collocation dans les classes d'EFL. Les resultats de deux questionnaires proposes a des etudiants et a des professeurs d'anglais montrent que les deux groupes ont de serieuses lacunes dans les collocations se traduisant par des strategies de simplification lexicale. Les As. expliquent alors que les aspects collocationnels des items lexicaux sont aussi importants que leur apprentissage individuel, et que l'etendue variable, lexicale et syntaxique, des collocations est opposee a celle des expressions
Over the last twenty years, phraseology has become a major field of pure and applied research in Western European and North American linguistics. This book is made up of authoritative contributions from leading specialists who examine the increasingly crucial role played by ready-made word-combinations in language acquisition and adult language use. After a wide-ranging introduction by the editor, the book introduces the main theoretical approaches, analyses the corpus data and phrase typology, and finally considers the application of phraseology to associated disciplines including lexicography, language learning, stylistics, and computational analysis. This book is the first comprehensive and up-to-date account of the subject to be published in English. Series Information Series ISBN: 0-19-961811-9 Series Editors: Richard W. Bailey, Noel Osselton, and Gabriele Stein; Oxford Studies in Lexicography and Lexicology provides a forum for the publication of substantial scholarly works on all issues of interest to lexicographers, lexicologists, and dictionary users. It is concerned with the theory and history of lexicography, lexicological theory, and related topics such as terminology, and computer applications in lexicography. It focuses attention too on the purposes for which dictionaries are compiled, on their uses, and on their reception and role in society today and in the past.
A considerable proportion of our everyday language is 'formulaic'. It is predictable in form, idiomatic, and seems to be stored in fixed, or semi-fixed, chunks. This book explores the nature and purposes of formulaic language, and looks for patterns across the research findings from the fields of discourse analysis, first language acquisition, language pathology and applied linguistics. It gradually builds up a unified description and explanation of formulaic language as a linguistic solution to a larger, non-linguistic, problem, the promotion of self. The book culminates in a new model of lexical storage, which accommodates the curiosities of non-native and aphasic speech. Parallel analytic and holistic processing strategies are the proposed mechanism which reconciles, on the one hand, our capacity for understanding and producing novel constructions using grammatical knowledge and small lexical units, and on the other, our use of prefabricated material which, though less flexible, also requires less processing.
Collocations are both pervasive in language and difficult for language learners, even at an advanced level. In this book, these difficulties are for the first time comprehensively investigated. On the basis of a learner corpus, idiosyncratic collocation use by learners is uncovered, the building material of learner collocations examined, and the factors that contribute to the difficulty of certain groups of collocations identified. An extensive discussion of the implications of the results for the foreign language classroom is also presented, and the contentious issue of the relation of corpus linguistic research and language teaching is thus extended to learner corpus analysis.
This volume represents one of the first full-length studies carried out on material from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE), supplemented by data from younger learners and native speakers. It addresses three main goals:
a) the implementation of a developmental corpus methodology.
The study explores four corpora of argumentative writing, two sampled from advanced learners of different ages and two from corresponding native speakers of English. This way, the respective linguistic maturation in native and non-native writing can be traced with more explanatory power than could be yielded by a mere learner / native speaker contrast.
b) a functional account of adjective intensification in present-day written English.
Intensification is a singularly dynamic and innovative lexico-grammatical class. Despite their obvious limitations, small, text-type controlled corpora, such as the ones used here, make it feasible to examine this whole functional paradigm and identify the conceptual mechanisms of its continual innovation and semantic change.
c) the exploration of native vs. non-native usage and the notion of idiomaticity.
The main differences between native English usage and that of advanced learners rest not so much on grammatical structure, but on the rather elusive quality of 'idiomaticity'. In the limited domain of intensification, this notion is explored both qualitatively and arithmetically, with the aim of learning more about what it takes to use English idiomatically.
Reviews:
”In sum, the study impresses by its wealth of descriptive detail and analytical insight … Since the study is not only well argued but also well written, it can be recommended without reservation. A rewarding read.” in: Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 2004, 1
“The book has no fewer than eleven appendixes …which means that all his findings are verifiable … [Lorenz] provides sound explanations … argues his points convincingly … the book is well written, with a dose of humour, which makes it a pleasure to read … meticulously edited …In short, this is an excellent book. It is a solid account of a solid research project well carried out.” in: English Studies, Vol. 83, No. 1, February 2002
“…highly recommended to readers interested in functional grammar, corpus linguistics, and TEFL [Teaching English as a Foreign Language].” – Georg Marko, in: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 26:2 (2001), pp 224-29
“The study is particularly interesting with regard to pedagogy and corpus methodology, but it has also descriptive implications, which should be of great heuristic value. … the topic under investigation is not only original and well researched, the findings are also well presented … reader-friendly and clear. The book is a good read. I sincerely recommend it” in: Applied Linguistics 21:4 (Dec 2000), pp. 581-85
Another review, by Manfred Krug, appeared in English Language and Linguistics 5:1 (May 2001), pp. 188-93
Bilingualism Across the Lifespan examines the dynamics of bilingual language processing over time from the perspectives of neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. This multidisciplinary approach is fundamental to an understanding of how the bilingual's two (or more) language systems interact with each other and with other higher cognitive systems, neurological substrates, and social systems - a central theme of this volume. Contributors examine the nature of bilingualism during various phases of the lifecycle - childhood, adulthood, and old age - and in various health/pathology conditions. Topics range from code separation in the young bilingual child, across various types of language pathologies in adult bilinguals, to language choice problems in dementia. The volume thus offers a broad overview of current theoretical and empirical approaches to the study of bilingualism. It will interest and stimulate researchers and graduate students in the fields of linguistics, neuropsychology, and developmental psychology, as well as in foreign language teaching, speech pathology, educational psychology, and special education.
Much of the L2 experimental research on the assessment of collocation knowledge (e.g. Marton, 1977; Channell, 1981; Fayez-Hussein, 1990; Bahns and Eldaw, 1993; Farghal and Obiedat, 1995; Herbst, 1996; Schmitt, 1998; Gitsaki, 1999; Bonk, 2000) has relied heavily on a single elicitation method that involves presenting test takers with a node-word prompt (e.g. attention), and asking them to select or supply one or more collocates (e.g. call, draw, pay) of that node word. Although responses elicited by test items of this kind may well give an impression of the depth of test takers’ knowledge of the node word, they offer little or no direct insight into the nature of test takers’ knowledge of the whole collocation (e.g. pay attention). This shortcoming is a logical consequence of the common practice of adopting what can be referred to as the word-property view of collocation. Collocation as a word property (Nation, 2001) is said to interact with several other word properties (Richards, 1976), such as orthography, grammatical behavior, meaning, association, frequency, and style. Together, these properties are said to characterize the form, meaning, and use of a word. The word-property approach to collocations has led researchers and teachers alike to view collocation knowledge as a subcomponent of word knowledge rather than as independent knowledge.
This article studies the use of support verb constructions (SVCs) in the written production of learners of Spanish. SVCs are lexical combinations whose content is similar to verbal predicates but is distributed between a verb and a noun, the noun being the carrier of the core lexical meaning of the predicate. Although there is considerable agreement on the importance of these constructions in the learning process, their use in the production of learners of Spanish has so far attracted little attention. This study examines the difficulties posed to learners by this construction by means of a qualitative analysis of the errors registered in 3 samples consisting of essays by learners with 3 different mother tongues (English, Swedish, and Japanese). It focuses on 3 types of error, 2 of which—the support verb choice and the determiner choice—seem to be especially problematic due to the unpredictability of the units involved. The third type—using an SVC instead of a more idiomatic 1-word verb—is regularly found only in the samples of the Japanese speakers, which suggests the influence of a particular mother tongue in its production.
According to Benson, Benson and Ilson, the compilers of the BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English (1986:ix), ‘In English as in any other language there are many fixed, identifiable, non-idiomatic phrases and constructions. Such groups of words are called recurrent combinations, fixed combinations or collocations.’ These authors give the example of murder and its collocates. On hearing the noun we immediately recall from memory the verb to commit and the phrase to commit a murder. It is only later that other verbs like to investigate, to describe or to witness appear. To commit a murder is a far more fixed collocation than those with the other three verbs. Relative fixedness is a characteristic of collocations. Another characteristic is their non-idiomaticity. Although idioms are another category of fixed sequences, their meaning is often non-combinatory, i.e. it cannot be decoded from the meanings of their constituents; on the contrary, the meaning of collocations is always transparent.
It is now generally accepted that advanced learners of English need to have command of a wide range of complex lexical units,
which are for a native speaker processed as prefabncated chunks, fixed, or semi-fixed expressions However, although there
has been an increasing amount written about the role of phraseology in second language acquisition, there remains a lack of
detailed descnption of learners' phraseological performance as the basis for understanding how phraseological competence develops
This paper addresses certain current issues in the description of collocations in English, and, in discussing the major approaches
to the linguistic description of prefabricated language, the need for detailed categorization is emphasized, particularly
for those interested in the development of this component of proficiency in a second language Data is presented from native
speaker language use, illustrating what can be revealed by one such descriptive model Finally, the findings of a number of
studies of native and non-native academic writing in English are discussed
Routledge, 2010. 423 pages. ISBN 10: 0-8058-6185-8. When Larson-Hall wrote this book, she had in mind, those second language researchers who feel a little uncomfortable when dealing with statistics. With this introduction to statistics through the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) she found a suitable way to help researchers first to interpret the statistics tests and then to learn how to generate descriptive statistics, choose a statistical test, and conduct and interpret the basic tests that a researcher may need. In A Guide to Doing Statistics in Second Language Research Using SPSS, Larson-Hall mainly draws her data sets from real Second Language Acquisition studies, and these are featured in a companion website (http://www.routledge.com/textbooks/9780805861853) so that readers can use raw data to complete the exercises contained in the book. Thanks to these sets the author allows the reader to access and to work on other researchers' data. Although at the beginning she considered working with the statistical program "R" and with the SPSS, she decided to make things easier and to focus on the SPSS as the R program, although freeware, is more difficult to cope with. Thus, the main issues of this book are illustrated with no few SPSS windows, tables, figures and the proposal of a series of exercises and activities whose answers are found in the abovementioned website. The book is meant to be read in a chronological order. Part I presents fundamental concepts in statistics and Part II provides information about statistical tests that are commonly used in second language research.
This paper provides an insight into ongoing research focusing on the exploitation of data from learner corpus in order to enhance the performance of an automatic tool aimed at the correction of collocation errors of L2 Spanish speakers. The procedure adopted for collocation annotation is described together with the main difficulties involved in the annotation task, such as the problem of distinguishing collocations from other kinds of idiomatic expressions and from free combinations, the problem of correction judgment, and the problem of assigning concrete error types. It is shown that the fine-grained typology used in the course of error annotation sheds lights on certain collocation error types that are generally not taken into account by automatic error correction tools, such as errors concerning the base of the collocation, target language non-words, and grammatical collocation errors.
Collocations in the sense of idiosyncratic lexical co-occurrences are one of the main barriers and challenges for any second language (L2) learner. In Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), a number of works deal with the automatic recognition of collocation errors and compilation of candidate lists for their correction. However, this is not sufficient. Firstly, to obtain a clear picture of the difficulties experienced by learners in order to be able to offer targeted aid to learners, a fine-grained linguistic analysis of collocation errors and their annotation in learner corpora is necessary. Secondly, programs must be developed that make concrete correction suggestions, besides providing correction candidate lists, and supply a learner with illustration and didactic material that is oriented towards the types of collocations with which this learner has difficulties. In our work, we attempt to push the state-of-the-art one step further in both of these strands of research, focusing on Spanish as L2. Within the first strand, we carry out a detailed collocation-oriented annotation of a fragment of the corpus of learners of Spanish CEDEL2. Within the second strand, we experiment with a number of strategies for choosing the most likely correction of a collocation error.
German advanced EFL students' productive knowledge of English collocations consisting of a verb and a noun were investigated in a translation task and a cloze task. In the translation task, it was found that, although collocates made up less than a quarter of the total number of lexical words, more than half of the unacceptably translated lexical words were collocates. Thus, for advanced students collocations present a major problem in the production of correct English. Furthermore, since subjects did not express the collocational phrases significantly better in the translation task, where it was possible to paraphrase, than in the cloze task, we concluded that one cannot easily paraphrase one's way around collocations in order to avoid the problem which they present. Finally, it was found that some collocations in the translation task were successfully paraphrased by many students while others were rarely successfully paraphrased. It was concluded that EFL teaching should concentrate on those collocations which cannot readily be paraphrased.
Although it is widely acknowledged that collocations are both indispensable and problematic for language learners and that they therefore should play an important part in second language teaching, especially at an advanced level, learners' difficulties with collocations have not been investigated in much detail so far. This paper reports on an exploratory study that analyses the use of verb-noun collocations such as take a break or shake one's head by advanced German-speaking learners of English in free written production. First, an attempt is made to define 'collocations' as precisely as possible, and the methodology that has been developed for analysing learner collocations in free production is described. Then, the types of mistakes that the learners make when producing collocations are identified and the influence of the degree of restriction of a combination and of the learners' L1 on the production of collocations is investigated. While the degree of restriction emerges to have some, but comparatively little, impact on the difficulty of combinations for the learners, the learners' L1 turns out to have a degree of influence that goes far beyond what earlier (small-scale) studies have predicted. Finally, the implications of these results for teaching are discussed, most importantly the role of L1-L2 differences.
This article investigates EFL learner use of high frequency verbs, and in particular use of the verb MAKE, a major representative of this group. The main questions addressed are: do learners tend to over-or underuse these verbs? Are high-frequency verbs error-prone or safe? What part does transfer play in misuse of these verbs? To answer these questions, authentic learner data has been compared with native speaker data using computerized corpora and linguistic software tools to speed up the initial stage of the linguistic analysis. The article focuses on what proves to be the two most distinctive uses of MAKE, viz. the delexical and causative uses. Results show that EFL learners, even at an advanced proficiency level, have great difficulty with a high frequency verb such as MAKE. They also demonstrate that some of these problems are shared by the two groups of learners under consideration (Swedish-and French-speaking learners) while others seem to be L1-related. In the conclusion, the pedagogical implications of the study are discussed and suggestions made for using concordance-based exercises as a way of raising learners' awareness of the complexity of high-frequency verbs.
The present study investigates the use of English verb-noun collocations in the writing of native speakers of Hebrew at three proficiency levels. For this purpose, we compiled a learner corpus that consists of about 300,000 words of argumentative and descriptive essays. For comparison purposes, we selected LOCNESS, a corpus of young adult native speakers of English. We retrieved the 220 most frequently occurring nouns in the LOCNESS corpus and in the learner corpus, created concordances for them, and extracted verb-noun collocations. Subsequently, we performed two types of comparisons: learners were compared with native speakers on the frequency of collocation use and learners were compared with other learners of different second-language proficiencies on the frequency and correctness of collocations. The data revealed that learners at all three proficiency levels produced far fewer collocations than native speakers, that the number of collocations increased only at the advanced level, and that errors, particularly interlingual ones, continued to persist even at advanced levels of proficiency. We discuss the results in light of the nature of collocations and communicative learning and suggest some pedagogical implications.
A number of researchers are currently attempting to create listings of important collocations for students of EAP. However, so far these attempts have (1) failed to include positionally-variable collocations, and (2) not taken sufficient account of variation across disciplines. The present paper describes the creation of one listing of positionally-variable academic collocations and evaluates the extent to which it is likely to be useful to students from across a wide range of disciplines. A number of key findings emerge. First, cross-disciplinary collocations differ in type from the collocations on which most researchers have traditionally focused in that they tend not to be combinations of two lexical words, but rather pairings of one lexical and one grammatical word. Second, most of the words which are found in academic collocations are not found on Coxhead’s influential Academic Word List. This, it is argued, reflects a serious methodological weakness in Coxhead’s listing. Third, the vocabulary needs of students in the arts and humanities are characteristically different from those of students in other disciplines. Researchers and teachers therefore need to deal with these learners separately. The paper finishes by making a number of recommendations for future developments in this area.
Conclusiones y Futuras investigaciones en inglés Tesis Univ. Granada. Departamento de Filologías Inglesa y Alemana. Leída el 4 de mayo de 2009
This thesis explores the implications of high frequency collocation for adult second language learners. It addresses three main questions. First, it asks to what extent high frequency of occurrence in a corpus indicates that collocations are independently represented in the minds of native speakers. A word association study indicates that high frequency of occurrence is a fairly reliable predictor of mental representation, though this methodology does not allow us to determine the precise strength of the relationship. A series of lexical decision studies also show a relationship between frequency and representation, but effects are limited to those collocations which are sufficiently salient to also register as associates. This suggests that psycholinguistic 'priming' models may not be the best way of understanding collocation. Second, the thesis examines the idea that adult second language learners usually fail to retain the collocations to which they are exposed. This is tested through a lab-based training study and a learner-corpus study. Results suggest that adult learners are capable of learning collocations from input, but that 1) the relatively low levels of input to which most learners are exposed mean that they nevertheless tend not to attain native-like profiles of collocation use, and 2) input which provides repeated exposure to collocations can dramatically improve learning. Third, the thesis asks whether a useful pedagogical listing of frequent 'academic collocations' can be compiled. Results suggest that an academic collocation list is viable, but that important caveats need to be made concerning the nature of the collocations included and the range of disciplines for which such a listing will be useful. Moreover, listings of two-word collocations should be seen only as a starting point for more comprehensive phraseological listings. Suggestions will be made for ways in which we might go beyond such two-word listings.
制度:新 ; 文部省報告番号:甲2157号 ; 学位の種類:博士(学術) ; 授与年月日:2006/1/24 ; 早大学位記番号:新4160
The present paper addresses a number of issues related to achieving ‘representativeness’ in linguistic corpus design, including: discussion of what it means to `represent’ a language, definition of the target population, stratified versus proportional sampling of a language, sampling within texts, and issues relating to the required sample size (number of texts) of a corpus. The paper distinguishes among various ways that linguistic features can be distributed within and across texts; it analyzes the distributions of several particular features, and it discusses the implications of these distributions for corpus design.
The paper argues that theoretical research should be prior in corpus design, to identify the situational parameters that distinguish among texts in a speech community, and to identify the types of linguistic features that will be analyzed in the corpus. These theoretical considerations should be complemented by empirical investigations of linguistic variation in a pilot corpus of texts, as a basis for specific sampling decisions. The actual construction of a corpus would then proceed in cycles: the original design based on theoretical and pilot-study analyses, followed by collection of texts, followed by further empirical investigations of linguistic variation and revision of the design.
Testing ESL learners’ knowledge of collocations
- Bonk
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Proficiency Construct across a Variety of Tests, Thom Hudson & James
Dean Brown (eds), 113-142. Honolulu: Second Language Teaching &
Curriculum Center, University of Hawaii at Mānoa.
Materiales didácticos para la enseñanzaaprendizaje de las colocaciones: análisis y propuestas
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Ferrando Aramo, Verónica. 2009. Materiales didácticos para la enseñanzaaprendizaje de las colocaciones: análisis y propuestas. Master's thesis,
Universidad Rovira i Virgili.
Testing English Collocations: Developing Receptive Tests for Use with Advanced Swedish Learners
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Gyllstad, Henrik. 2007. Testing English Collocations: Developing Receptive
Tests for Use with Advanced Swedish Learners. PhD dissertation, Lund
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Un dictionnaire des collocations est-il possible? Travaux de Linguistique et de Littérature
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Hausmann, Franz Josef. 1979. Un dictionnaire des collocations est-il possible?
Travaux de Linguistique et de Littérature 17(1): 187-95.
Las colocaciones y su enseñanza en la clase de ELE
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Higueras García, Marta. 2006. Las colocaciones y su enseñanza en la clase de
ELE. Madrid: Arco Libros.
- Peter Howarth
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Howarth, Peter Andrew. 1996. Phraseology in Enlgish Academic Writing.
Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
A Chi-square showed that …" Or did it really?
- Bård Jensen
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Jensen, Bård Uri. 2013. "A Chi-square showed that …" Or did it really?
Presentation delivered at the Learner Corpus Research Conference
(LRC2013), Bergen/Os, Norway, 27-29, 2013. Slides retrieved from:
https://lcr2013.b.uib.no/files/2013/09/Jensen-LCR2013-Handout.pptx
Selected Aspects of Lexicon, Phraseology and Style in the Writing of Polish Advanced Learners of English: A Contrastive, Corpus-Based Approach
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Style in the Writing of Polish Advanced Learners of English: A
Contrastive, Corpus-Based Approach. PhD dissertation, Adam
Mickiewicz Univeristy, Poznań.
Exploration of two aspects of vocabulary knowledge: Paradigmatic and collocational
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Mochizuki, Masamichi. 2002. Exploration of two aspects of vocabulary
knowledge: Paradigmatic and collocational. Annual Review of English
Language Education in Japan 13: 121-29.
Análisis de errores colocacionales en un corpus de aprendientes de ELE
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Pérez Serrano, Mercedes. 2014. Análisis de errores colocacionales en un corpus
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