USING CORPORA TO TEACH COLLOCATIONS IN A UNIVERSITY CONTEXT
Main Article Content
Abstract
English as Foreign Language students tend to learn vocabulary in word isolation, not in chunks or collocations which produces meager results in students’ collocational competence and lexical resources. In addition, a corpus-assisted method is used in this project because of its significant effectiveness in bringing real-world language use or authentic materials in teaching and learning collocations. Therefore, this article investigates the potential role of using corpora and concordances in teaching and learning collocations with a view to improving university students’ collocational competence in academic writing. To do this, an experiment was conducted among 30 third-year students in the English Faculty of Hanoi National University (pseudonym) who had little or no previous knowledge of collocations as well as corpora. Students were in both the experimental group in a six-week English unit which a corpus-assisted method was applied for the experimental group and a traditional (or rule-based) method was used for the control group to find out the differences and improvement among groups of students. They were required to take part in different tests in different time periods including before, immediately after and two weeks after the course. The results of these tests were analyzed carefully in terms of learners’ collocational use in academic writing, specifically premodifier-noun collocations. Results indicated that while both groups experienced improvements in their academic writing skill, the students of the experimental group displayed a holistic improvement regarding the use of collocations with fewer collocational errors and more academic collocation patterns. It is, hence, concluded that the application of corpora exerts a tremendous influence on developing learners’ collocational competence as well as language proficiency
Keywords
Corpus (Corpora), corpus-based (corpus-assisted), collocations, lexical approach
Article Details
References
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Hunston, S. (2010). Corpora in applied linguistics (7. print). In The Cambridge Applied Linguistics Series (7. print). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lewis, Michael, & Conzett, J. (Eds.). (2002). Teaching collocation: further developments in the lexical approach. Boston: Thomson, Heinle.
Lewis, Michael, & Gough, C. (1997). Implementing the lexical approach: putting theory into practice (Nachdr.). Andover: Heinle Cengage Learning.
Lewis, Micheal. (2006). Teaching collocation: Further developments in the lexical approach. Cambridge University Press.
Lüdeling, A., & Kytö, M. (Eds.). (2009). Corpus linguistics: an international handbook. Berlin; New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Li, S. (2017). Using corpora to develop learners’ collocational competence. Language Learning and Technology, 21(3).
McEnery, T., & Wilson, A. (2011). Corpus linguistics: an introduction (2. ed., repr). In Edinburgh Textbooks in Empirical Linguistics (2nd ed., repr). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Nation, P. (2000a). Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Nation, P. (2000b). Teaching vocabulary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nation, P. (2007). The Four Strands. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching, 1(1), 2-13. https://doi.org/10.2167/illt039.0
Nesselhauf, N. (2004). Collocations in a learner corpus. In Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 14. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: J. Benjamins Pub. Co.
O’Keeffe, A., McCarthy, M., & Carter, R. (2007). From corpus to classroom: language use and language teaching. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Reppen, R. (2010). Using corpora in the language classroom. In Cambridge Language Education. New York: Cambridge University Press.