P. Durrant & N. Schmitt (2010). Adult learners’ retention of collocations from exposure. Second Language Research. 26(2). (original) (raw)
Related papers
Individual differences in the acquisition of restricted collocations
2018
The acquisition of verb-noun collocations (e.g. make a mistake) causes great difficulties to (adult) L2 learners for several reasons (Boers, Demecheleer, Coxhead and Webb, 2014). Thus, investigating the use of collocation in English language learning is important as such study may inform us on the use of restricted collocations in English language teaching and learning including in the Malaysian context. Apart from the difficulties in the acquisition of collocations, Dornyei and Skehan (2003), and Sawyer and Ranta (2001), have found that individual difference factors have significant impacts on language learning in general. Apart from that, Schmitt, Dornyei, Adolphs & Durow (2004) argue that these individual differences might also influence the acquisition of formulaic language. The results of this study provide support for the above finding. Individual differences are indeed a factor. A new testing approach is proposed; the semantic plausibility metric, which is used as a tool for ...
Teaching and learning collocation in adult second and foreign language learning
Language Teaching
Perhaps the greatest challenge to creating a research timeline on teaching and learning collocation is deciding how wide to cast the net in the search for relevant publications. For one thing, the term ‘collocation’ does not have the same meaning for all (applied) linguists and practitioners (Barfield & Gyllstad 2009) (see timeline). For another, items that are labelled as collocations in one study may be called something else in another study (Wray 2000: 465).
2017
The aim of this article is to present and summarize the main research findings in the area of learning and teaching second language (L2) collocations. Being a large part of naturally occurring language, collocations and other types of multi-word units (e.g., idioms, phrasal verbs, lexical bundles) have been identified as an important aspect of L2 proficiency that needs to be promoted through language instruction. However, while in recent years the field of applied linguistics has witnessed an impressive rise in the number of studies exploring the process of learning and using L2 collocations, there is still little consensus as to what are the most effective ways of enhancing this kind of knowledge. The aim of this paper is to review the literature in this area, highlight the main findings pertaining to teaching English as a second (ESL) and foreign (EFL) learners, and point to future research directions.
Incidental Learning of Collocation
Language Learning, 2013
ABSTRACT This study investigated the effects of repetition on the learning of collocation. Taiwanese university students learning English as a foreign language simultaneously read and listened to one of four versions of a modified graded reader that included different numbers of encounters (1, 5, 10, and 15 encounters) with a set of 18 target collocations. A surprise vocabulary test that was made up of four tests measuring receptive and productive knowledge of the form of the target collocations and receptive and productive knowledge of the form and meaning of these collocations was administered after the treatments. The results showed that (a) collocations can be learned incidentally through reading while listening to a graded reader and (b) the number of encounters has a positive effect on learning. If learners encounter collocations 15 times within a graded reader, sizeable learning gains may occur.
The study investigated L2 learners' acquisition of verb‐noun and adjective‐noun collocations following two kinds of instruction: input flood only and input flood plus input enhancement (in the form of underlining). L1 Polish learners of English as a foreign language were exposed to infrequent collocations embedded in stories that were read during three consecutive weeks. Their collocational competence was subsequently assessed in a battery of delayed tests tapping into productive and receptive levels of collocational mastery. Input flood plus input enhancement resulted in the acquisition of collocations but only at the level of form recall and form recognition. The findings are discussed with reference to the complexity of acquiring and measuring L2 collocational knowledge. The article concludes with implications for instructed second language acquisition.
Language Learning, 2017
This article focuses on the use of collocations in language learning research (LLR). Collocations, as units of formulaic language, are becoming prominent in our understanding of language learning and use; however, while the number of corpus‐based LLR studies of collocations is growing, there is still a need for a deeper understanding of factors that play a role in establishing that two words in a corpus can be considered to be collocates. In this article we critically review both the application of measures used to identify collocability between words and the nature of the relationship between two collocates. Particular attention is paid to the comparison of collocability across different corpora representing different genres, registers, or modalities. Several issues involved in the interpretation of collocational patterns in the production of first language and second language users are also considered. Reflecting on the current practices in the field, further directions for colloc...
Journal of Teaching Language Skills, 2021
It is widely acknowledged that collocations play a crucial role in second or foreign language learning by enabling learners to know more about language chunks and lexical strings. Although many studies have examined L2 learners' collocational competence, comparatively less research has been carried out to probe into the effective instruction and exercises for enhancing the acquisition, retention, and production of lexical (e.g. make a mistake) vs. grammatical (on purpose) collocations. Therefore, the present study attempted to explore the effect of L2 definitions, fill-in-the-blanks, and sentence writing exercises on the acquisition, retention, and production of lexical vs. grammatical collocations. The data were collected from 66 EFL participants who were studying English at a private language institute. First, an Oxford Placement Test (OPT) was given to homogenize the learners. Then, the participants were divided into three groups, each receiving one of the three different types of exercises including definitions, fill-in-the-blanks, and sentence writing exercises. Data analysis using multivariate ANOVA (MANOVA) indicated that
The development of ESL collocational knowledge
1996
This study examines the development of collocational knowledge in learners of ESL. A number of previous studies have underscored the importance of collocations for L2 acquisition, and the problems that learners face with learning and using collocations. However, there have been few attempts to systematically study how the development of collocational knowledge relates to the overall development of language proficiency with a particular intention in identifying possible stages in the development of L2 collocational knowledge. This study adopts a structure-based framework for the study of collocations based on previous studies (Zhang 1993; Biscup 1992) and the BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English, and attempts to describe how collocational knowledge develops across different language proficiency levels with respect to 37 collocation types. Data were collected from 275 Greek learners of ESL at three proficiency levels (post-beginners, intermediate, and post-intermediate) using three tasks: essay writing, translation test, and blankfilling. The essay writing provided evidence of accurate free production of collocations, while the translation and blank-filling tests measured accuracy in the subjects' knowledge of collocations in cued production tasks. The data were examined with respect to the between-and within-group differences in accuracy on all three dependent measures. Statistical measures were employed to determine the significance of the observed between-group and within-group differences, and implicational scaling analyses was used to reveal accuracy orders in the acquisition of collocations. Results show that there are patterns of iii development of collocational knowledge across and within the different proficiency groups for both the free and the cued production data. Collocational knowledge was shown to increase steadily as the level of proficiency increased, and there were group-specific accuracy orders showing that grammatical collocations are easier to acquire than lexical collocations. The development of collocational knowledge was found to be influenced by the syntactic complexity of the collocation types, and also by exposure and maturation. Finally, three stages for the development of collocational knowledge are proposed. In the first stage learners acquire collocations as unanalysed lexical items, and hence the learners are more accurate with lexical collocations than complex grammatical ones. At the second stage the learners' grammatical knowledge develops enabling learners to use complex grammatical collocations with greater accuracy than in stage one. At the third stage of collocational development, learners are able to use both grammatical and lexical collocations with greater accuracy than in the other two stages, and they are on their way to a more advanced level of collocational knowledge. Pedagogical implications and directions for future research are provided in light of the research findings.
The Importance of Collocations in Acquiring English as a Foreign Language
2019
Second language learners very frequently rely on their native tongue, assuming that there is always a one-to-one equivalence between L1 and L2 lexical items. This results in major errors since even equivalent lexical items do not always convey the same sense in two languages mainly because of the cultural differences which are mirrored in the vocabulary of every language. Overlooking collocations and other word combinations also brings about many collocational errors which can be more disruptive than grammatical errors in communication. For most collocations there are no motivations and the same conceptual meaning can be realized by different words. This inexplicability of collocation calls for more attention on the part of both teachers and learners of English. The aim of this paper is to research the notice given to collocations in the curriculum of EFL in the primary and secondary schools in Macedonia. More specifically, this study is devoted to the elaboration of the concept of ...