Part A INTRODUCTION PAGE English Lexical Collocation and Pedagogical Implications for Business English University of Languages and International studies Vietnam National University of Hanoi Post Graduate Department A STUDY ON ENGLISH LEXICAL COLLOCATION AND PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS FOR BUSINESS ENGLISH SEMANTICS Final Assignment Student Phạm Thị Nguyệt Cohort K18 Instructor Dr Ha Cam Tam Deadline 28062010 Hanoi, June 2010 TABLE OF CONTENTS Part A INTRODUCTION 3 31 Rationale 32 Aims of the stud.
University of Languages and International studies Vietnam National University of Hanoi Post Graduate Department A STUDY ON ENGLISH LEXICAL COLLOCATION AND PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS FOR BUSINESS ENGLISH SEMANTICS Final Assignment Student: Phạm Thị Nguyệt Cohort: K18 Instructor: Dr Ha Cam Tam Deadline: 28/06/2010 Hanoi, June 2010 English Lexical Collocation and Pedagogical Implications for Business English TABLE OF CONTENTS Part A: INTRODUCTION Rationale Aims of the study 3 Scope of the study 4 Design of the study .4 Part B: DEVELOPMENT Theoretical Background and Review of Related Literature 1.1 Definitions of Collocation .4 1.2 Related studies of Collocation .6 1.3 Related Terms of Collocation 1.4 Classification of Collocation 1.5 The significance of English Lexical Collocation Implications in learning and teaching Business English 2.1 The significance of Lexical Collocation in Business English 2.2 Pedagogical implications .10 2.3.1 For non-native teachers 11 2.3.2 For learners 11 Part C: CONCLUSION 12 Limitations of the study 12 Recommendations for further study 12 REFERENCES 14 APPENDIX 17 Pham Thi Nguyet- K18C English Lexical Collocation and Pedagogical Implications for Business English Part A: INTRODUCTION Rationale Vocabulary and grammar are two basic elements of a language, but traditionally most EFL teachers often emphasize learning grammar more than vocabulary in their teaching With the approaching new millennium, pioneer scholars and researchers have started to direct people’s attention to EFL vocabulary acquisition and began to emphasize the instruction of vocabulary in classroom practices (Channel, 1981; McCarthy, 1984; Nation, 1990) Collocations, as a central aspect of vocabulary, have started to gain increasing attention in the past two decades Business English is an individualized learning program which “represents a radial new approach to the provision of in-service business English course (Wilberg & Lewis, 1990:8) This program depends on the lexical approach emphasizing the collocation and word grammar In the business world, there are a huge number of collocations which express specific ideas very succinctly, for example, 'customer service’, ‘quality control' If learners are not familiar with these collocations, they will be forced to explain the concept, which is likely to lead to errors and puts a strain on the listeners Therefore, learning and teaching business collocations can be particularly problematic for learners and nonnative teachers Aims of the study The purposes of this study are to focus on giving brief understanding of Collocation, the significance of Collocation and its implications for Business English The current study has attempted to explore the relation between English collocations and business English, more specifically, the role lexical collocations play in learning and teaching business English Pham Thi Nguyet- K18C English Lexical Collocation and Pedagogical Implications for Business English Collocation is not really a new semantics area It is the fact that there are many studies on this from 1990s However, I explore this topic with the hope that I could gain more knowledge about collocation; obtain more examples involved in lexical collocations for my better teaching Scope of the study Due to the limited time and knowledge, this study just has brief understanding of collocations in general and lexical collocations in particular More importantly, some implications for teaching and learning business English are explored basing on previous studies and drawn from the author’s own teaching experience Design of the study There are three main parts of this study Part A: Introduction deals with rationale, aims, scope and design of the study Part B: Development can be broken into Theoretical background and Implications in learning and teaching business English In order to have an overview of collocation, different definitions, relates studies, related terms, classifications and significance are briefly stated Pedagogical implications of collocation for both non-native teachers and learners are clearly stated Part C: Conclusion involves some limitations and recommendations for further studies Part B: DEVELOPMENT Theoretical Background and Review of Related Literature 1.1 Definitions of Collocation In the actual fact, words are rarely used alone They live with each other and depend much on each other Word meaning is also governed by the meanings of other words which tend to occur in its environment, for example, capital in loan capital and capital in Hanoi capital It is clearly that capital in these examples acquires different meanings when combining with different words We, therefore, should look at the relations between words when describing meanings of words Pham Thi Nguyet- K18C English Lexical Collocation and Pedagogical Implications for Business English Below are some definitions of Collocation by linguists 1990 Aghbar A collocation, in its simplest definition, consists of two words which are linked together in the memory of native speakers and occur together with some frequency in both written and oral discourse 1990:158 McCarthy The likelihood of co-occurrence between words 1990:32 Nation Collocations are words that often occur together and the collocations of a word are the company it keeps 1991:302 Malmkjaer Collocation and set, as terms in a lexical descriptions, are analogous to structure and system in grammatical theory The difference is that collocation is a relation of probable cooccurrence of items, and sets are open-ended 1997:8 Lewis, M Collocation is the readily observable phenomenon whereby certain words co- occur in 1998:85 2002 natural text with greater than random frequency” Dudley Evans & Collocation describes the company that a word St John keeps Oxford Collocation is the way words combine in a Collocations language to produce natural- sounding speech Dictionary and writing In its broadest sense, collocation is the way in which words co- occur in natural texts in statically significant ways, as Lewis (2000.132) stated In other words, collocation is about the way words naturally co- occurs It means although many word combinations Pham Thi Nguyet- K18C English Lexical Collocation and Pedagogical Implications for Business English are possible, we tend to use common and regular combinations of words collocation Moreover, collocation is not determined by logic or frequency, but it is arbitrary, decided only by linguistic convention Some collocations are fully fixed, such as the photocopying, or low-key competition while others more or less fixed and can be completed in a relatively small numbers of ways, for example, enter/ abandon/ dominate/ corner/ drive another market 1.2 Related studies of Collocation: It has been 27 years since the appearance of Lewis’ (1993) book, The Lexical Approach, directing language teachers’ attention to the systematic re-examination of the importance of collocations in EFL/ESL education Along with Lewis, scholars of second language vocabulary acquisition (Bahns & Eldaw, 1993; Howarth, 1998), EFL/ESL materials and curriculum design (Coady & Huckin, 1997; McCarthy, 2004a, 2004b; Richards & Rogers, 2001), pedagogy (Ellis, 1996, 2001; Nation, 2001), and lexicography (Benson, Benson & Ilson, 1986, 1997), have also advanced arguments advocating the necessity of studying English collocations First brought up by Palmer (1933) and later introduced to the field of theoretical linguistics by Firth (1957), the most commonly shared definition of collocations is: the tendency of one word to co-occur with one or more other words in a particular domain (Aghbar, 1990; Al-Bahrain, 1998; Gitsaki, 1999; Nation, 2001; Nesselhauf, 2003) In his monograph Second Interim Report on English Collocations, the father of collocation studies, linguist Palmer (1933) simply states, “Each [collocation] … must or should be learnt, or is best or most conveniently learnt as an integral whole or independent entity, rather than by the process of piecing together their component parts” (Palmer, 1933, p 4) The notion, collocation, however, is far from thoroughly described or understood as to whether it should be approached from a semantic, syntactic, or idiomatic, perspective (Hsu, 2005) Pham Thi Nguyet- K18C English Lexical Collocation and Pedagogical Implications for Business English 1.3 Related Terms of Collocation Lexical chunk 'Lexical chunk' is an umbrella term which includes all the other terms We define a lexical chunk as any pair or group of words which are commonly found together, or in close proximity A collocate A collocate of a particular word is another word which often occurs with that word If two or more words collocate, they often occur together Ex: company is an allocate of run A marked collocation Collocation range A marked collocation is an unusual combination of words that challenges hearers or readers’ expectations Collocation range is a list of the other words with which a word may occur (Larson, 1984:145) In other words, collocation range refers to a set of possible collocates It is the collocation range that restricts the meaningful usage of each word since it varies from word to word No two words have exactly the same collocation possibilities even the equivalent words between languages Some words have a limited one For instance, the English adjective bandy has a very limited collocation range It may allocate with legs, and it is unlikely to occur with any other words On the contrary, the noun “appointment” has a large list of collocates such as have, make, arrange, fix Collocation meaning Collocation meaning refers to the associations that a word acquires in its collocation For example, pretty girl/ flower/ garden/ color/ village A word can gain different collocation meaning in different context e.g white man/ wine/ noise/ Pham Thi Nguyet- K18C English Lexical Collocation and Pedagogical Implications for Business English coffee 1.4 Classification of Collocation Collocations can be divided into lexical collocations and grammatical collocations In this much narrower terminology, lexical collocations combine two equal lexical components ( open class words) while grammatical collocations combine a lexical word, typical a noun, a verb or an adjective, with a grammatical word ( one open class word and one closed class word) In other words, lexical collocations can be understood as a pair of content words commonly found together Examples of grammatical collocations: Noun+ Preposition: relationship with Noun + to infinitive/that clause: a pleasure to, an agreement that Preposition + Noun: in advance Adjective + preposition: responsible for Adjective + to infinitive/ that clause: ready to/ aware that Verb + preposition: start up Six subtypes of lexical collocations were suggested by the BBI Dictionary of English Word Combinations (Benson et al., 1997) and the seventh ‘noun + noun’ subtype were recognized by Hausmann (1999) and Kimmes (2004) Altogether, seven subtypes of lexical collocations were investigated in this study Type L1 verb + noun L2 adjective + noun Examples impose taxes, business, launch a new product, lay off staff, go into partnership, cease trading a rough design, tough competition, intended recipient, limited company, annual turnover Pham Thi Nguyet- K18C English Lexical Collocation and Pedagogical Implications for Business English L3 noun + verb naming an action Shares are issued L4 Noun of noun L5 adverb + adjective balance of trade L6 verb + adverb appreciate sincerely, argue heatedly, complain bitterly, affect deeply L7 noun + noun company uniform, market research, household goods, consumer durables, sales figures poorly paid, closely related, highly skilled 1.5 The significance of English Lexical Collocation Lexical Collocations are more problematic for non-native teachers and learners, also more difficult to find in dictionaries No reasonable explanation would be readily available for native speakers using such natural-sounding word combinations as reach an agreement There are often no rules about how to put words together in such ways They can be a potential source of mother tongue interference for non-native speakers of English as the collocation patterning is just typical in its nature Lexical collocations run through the whole of the English language It is obvious that they better serve to reflect the world’s states of affairs than grammatical collocations based on the fact that lexical collocations are basically made up of open class words which are lexical content words in direct connection with external reality Given the fact that up to 80% of the words in both spoken and written discourse are chosen according to the lexical co- selection principle rather than to purely grammatical factors (Sinclair, 2000: 197), this study just focuses on analyzing lexical collocations Implications in learning and teaching Business English Pham Thi Nguyet- K18C English Lexical Collocation and Pedagogical Implications for Business English 2.1 The significance of Lexical Collocation in Business English According to Hammer (1991:157), knowing how to use a word includes knowing what words can occur with it Another linguist, Nation (1990:31-32) believes that knowing a word involves knowing its collocations as well as its grammatical patterns and other features of the word Hill and Lewis (1997:i) argue that knowing strong and frequent combinations is essential for accurate, natural English For short, it can be said that collocation is a fundamental aspect of vocabulary It is an important organizing principle in English vocabulary in particular For example, to understand the word “bankrupt”, we should know the word “go” which always goes with “bankrupt” In order to learn Business English, the teachers and learners have to know the key role of vocabulary proficiency It is fact that one of the most difficulties the learners of business English usually encounter is memorizing collocations and using them properly It means that they should have a high awareness of the significance of collocations in business English English for business obtains a group of important keywords, therefore, learners has the task of finding and recording important word partnerships Those keywords are the core business vocabulary with higher frequency Students while learning business English have to choose their own keywords and find out the lexical collocations For instance, some keywords such as market, personnel, sales, product, debt, and projects, are occurred with high frequency The learners also have to divide background words provided basically into verb-noun, adjective-noun, and verb-adjective-noun groups and then make sentences with them The learning of word partnerships can give learners a quick way to master the proficiency required Usually business students have a large vocabulary, but they don’t know how to combine the words together When they need to express in English, they can come up with many words in mind, while they are difficult to make meaningful phrases or sentences that are well organized For example, when they have the word “campaign”, they often confuse to choose a word preceding “campaign”, whether it is Pham 10 Thi Nguyet- K18C English Lexical Collocation and Pedagogical Implications for Business English “advertising”, or “advertisement” The same case happens with the choice between the word ‘market”, or “marketing” before the word “research” So it is important to build up the word partnerships It is obvious that vocabulary of business English is needed for production purposes Thus storage and retrieval are significant The technique of learning vocabulary involves cognitive processing rather than mechanical learning of lists Collocation is one of the effective ways to gather vocabulary and facilitate cognitive processing (Dudley-Evans & St John, 1998) 2.2 Pedagogical implications Business English is English for specific purposes based on a lexical approach and individual learner’s needs It is an effective way to increase learners’ vocabulary, which is the fundamental and crucial element for language learning Teacher is the consultant and the language audit to help students find their needs and to stimulate and motivate them to use the language as much as possible This study is carried out with the hope that it can contribute some pedagogical implications for both non-native teachers ands learners 2.3.1 For non-native teachers Actually, it is the requirement for non-native teachers of possessing as many collocations as possible to teach business English Moreover, they have the task of raising awareness for learners of the significance of collocations in learning business English Teachers can at least try to provide EFL learners sources of lexis, such as corpus, concordance, and dictionaries of collocations, ensuring these learners to have direct exposure to chunks of English language and learn to extract and use patterns of lexical collocations effortlessly One of the main obstacles to teach lexical collocations systematically, however, is their number, which amounts to tens of thousands For noun + verb and verb + noun collocations, there is, for a considerable portion of them, direct translational equivalence Such lexical collocations 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 Pham 11 Thi Nguyet- K18C English Lexical Collocation and Pedagogical Implications for Business English mother tongues Along with these, non-native teachers should apply appropriate methods of teaching collocations Among them, they can design some typical exercises on collocations for learners Below are some kinds of exercises I myself- a teachers of business English- find most suitable, efficient for learners 2.3.2 For learners Based on the current study, the first implication we can make is to suggest learners to learn and use a wide variety of lexical collocations as they seem to help more than merely putting as many collocations as possible Learners are also required to use their own keywords and collect background words by using a dictionary or talking to their teachers In this way, they can provide the carrier content to meet their personal needs Collocation is not determined by logic or frequency but is arbitrary, decided by linguistic convention To put it in another way, collocations are not words which learners can put together, they co-occur naturally For that reason, the learners should spend time on learning, doing more exercises, and obtaining good memory techniques, also collecting more collocations in order that they can speak naturally The learners can see some typical exercises to develop vocabulary proficiency in using business collocations in Appendix part The next pedagogical implication concerns the subtype of lexical collocations for learners Among seven subtypes mentioned before, EFL teachers should especially concentrate on the practice of the subtypes which learners have not still mastered well or score low in the tests Part C: CONCLUSION Limitations of the study The first limitation of this study is related to the scope of collocations investigated This study only examined lexical collocations and did not include grammatical collocations Pham 12 Thi Nguyet- K18C English Lexical Collocation and Pedagogical Implications for Business English Another limitation of this study is related to the lack of time and convenience to collect more examples of business collocations with the subtypes “adverb + adjective, verb + adverb, adjective + noun” Last but not least, due to the limited time and knowledge, I could not afford to conduct a deeper research on lexical collocations in business English, although I am teaching business English for my students in my university, which I could take many advantages All these above limitations will give an access for further study Recommendations for further study The study concerning the distribution of lexical collocations in the process of learning and teaching business English may lead to the possible understanding of collocation learning ability A better understanding will be useful to both researchers and teachers in the improvement of materials selection, syllabuses, and teaching methods Several recommendations can be made First, future studies could consider exploring the use of grammatical collocations in business English Second, because the current study just looked at the subjects’ use of collocations in relation to learning business English, future studies could investigate the relationship between the use and even knowledge of lexical collocations and English for other specific purposes such as Banking, Tourism, or Hospitability Third, further studies could go deeply into the relations between the use of collocations and other language skills including speaking, listening, reading, and writing Last, it could be a new direction to continue investigating whether there are some patterns of development in the EFL learners’ use and knowledge of lexical collocations particularly related to the seven subtypes The above are some potential directions this current study can recommend for future studies on collocations Pham 13 Thi Nguyet- K18C English Lexical Collocation and Pedagogical Implications for Business English REFERENCES Aghbar, A.A (1990, October) Fixed expressions in written texts: Implications for assessing writing sophistication Paper presented at a meeting of the English Association of Pennsylvania State System Universities (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No 352 808 Bahns, J., & Eldaw, M (1993) Should we teach EFL students collocations? System, 21(1), 101–114 Benson, M., Benson, E., & Ilson, R (1986) The BBI combinatory dictionary of English Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company Benson, M., Benson, E., & Ilson, R (1997) The BBI dictionary of English word combinations Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company Coady, J., and Huckin, T (Eds.) (1997) Second language vocabulary acquisition Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Pham 14 Thi Nguyet- K18C English Lexical Collocation and Pedagogical Implications for Business English Channell, J (1981) Applying semantic theory to vocabulary teaching English Language Teaching Journal, 35, 115–122 Dudley-Evans, T & St John, M J (1998) Development in English for specific purposes: A multi-disciplinary approach Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Ellis, N.C (1996) Sequencing in SLA: Phonological memory, chunking and points of order Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 18, 91–426 Ellis, N.C (2001) Memory for language In P Robinson (Ed.), Cognition and second language instruction (pp 33–68) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 10 Firth, J, R (1951) “ Mode of meaning”, in Firth, J, R (ed.) (1957) Papers in Linguistics, Oxford University Press 11 Hausmann, F.J (1999) Collocations in monolingual and bilingual English dictionaries In I Vladimir & D Kalogjera (Eds.), Languages in contact and contrast: Essays in contact linguistics (pp 225–236) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter 12 Howarth, P (1998) Phraseology and second language proficiency Applied Linguistics, 19(1), 24–44 13 Kimmes, A-M (2004) An investigation of the usage and collocability of English verbs of thinking based on the online edition of the New York Times Unpublished masters thesis, Southern Connecticut State University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA 14 Lewis, M (1993) The lexical approach: The state of ELT and a way forward London: Language Teaching Publications 15 Lewis, M (1997) Implementing the lexical approach: Putting theories into practice London: Language Teaching Publication 16 Lewis, M (2000) Teaching collocation: Further developments in the lexical approach London: Language Teaching Publications 17 Malmkjaer, K (ed.) (1991) The Linguistics Encyclopedia, Routledge Pham 15 Thi Nguyet- K18C English Lexical Collocation and Pedagogical Implications for Business English 18 McCarthy, M J (1984) A new look at vocabulary in EFL Applied Linguistics, 5(1), 12-22 19 McCarthy, M (2004a, August) Collocation in vocabulary teaching and learning Lecture given at the meeting of JACET summer seminar program, Gunma, Japan 20 McCarthy, M (2004b) Touchstone: From corpus to course book Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 21 Nation, I S P (1990) Teaching and learning vocabulary New York: Newbury House 22 Nation, I S P (2001) Learning vocabulary in another language Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 23 Palmer, H.E (1933) Second interim report on English collocations Tokyo: Kaitakusha 24 Richards, J.C., & Rogers, T.S (2001) Approaches and methods in language teaching (2nd ed.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 25 Wilberg, P & Lewis, M (1990) Business English: An individualized learning programme London: Language Teaching Publications Some websites: http://myspecialenglish.com/vi/writing/collocation-pelmanism http://www.businessenglishpod.com/?s=collocations http://www.eslflow.com/collocationsandphrasalvebs.html http://www.businessenglishpod.com/?s=collocations http://www.mendeley.com/research-papers/linguistics/ http://www.esp-world.info/Articles_1/tasks.html http://www.asian-efl-journal.com/pta_August_05_ma.php http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewtopic.php?p=34905 http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/articles/lexical-approach-1-what-does-lexicalapproach-look 10 http://giaoan.violet.vn/present/show?entry_id=3258140 Pham 16 Thi Nguyet- K18C English Lexical Collocation and Pedagogical Implications for Business English 11 http://myspecialenglish.com/vi/writing/collocation-pelmanism APPENDIX Type 1: Matching Exercise 1: Match the verbs and nouns concerning various important business activities Interview Give a b a raise a problem Attend c job applicants Organize d a meeting Book e a room Provide f a service Pham 17 Thi Nguyet- K18C English Lexical Collocation and Pedagogical Implications for Business English Deal with g a conference Manage h merchandise Develop i advice 10 Manufacture j a product line 11 Ask for k a new employee 12 Hire Exercise 2: Match a noun and a noun to make a business collocation Interest human consumer job staff market quality brand company 10 sales 11 take-over A B C D E F G H I J K awareness control bid policy figures resources turnover rate share confidence satisfaction Type 2: Filling in the blanks Complete the following sentences with as many different words as you can In the late 1990s, Internet use was doubling every 10 days Market …………….was incredible Sexual ………… is when an employee behaves sexually towards another in a way that they find unwelcome and unacceptable In large organizations, there is a human resources department (HRD) that deals with pay, recruitment, etc Another name for this department is the…………….department Debts that have to be paid within one year are current liabilities, and those payable in more than a year are ………liabilities, for example bank loans Pham 18 Thi Nguyet- K18C English Lexical Collocation and Pedagogical Implications for Business English Type 3: Choosing the suitable collocates A Which words normally collocate with the noun competition below? big fierce hard stiff intense challenging stiff tough rough 10 risky Pham 19 Thi Nguyet- K18C ... Lexical Collocation and Pedagogical Implications for Business English coffee 1.4 Classification of Collocation Collocations can be divided into lexical collocations and grammatical collocations... K18C English Lexical Collocation and Pedagogical Implications for Business English Part A: INTRODUCTION Rationale Vocabulary and grammar are two basic elements of a language, but traditionally... Pham Thi Nguyet- K18C English Lexical Collocation and Pedagogical Implications for Business English Collocation is not really a new semantics area It is the fact that there are many studies on