A survey into the teaching of lexical collocations in academic writing at faculty of english linguistics literature USSH

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY – HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES FACULTY OF ENGLISH LINGUISTICS AND LITERATURE A SURVEY INTO THE TEACHING OF LEXICAL COLLOCATI

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY – HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

FACULTY OF ENGLISH LINGUISTICS AND LITERATURE

A SURVEY INTO THE TEACHING OF LEXICAL COLLOCATIONS IN ACADEMIC WRITING AT FACULTY OF ENGLISH LINGUISTICS AND

NGUYEN THI KIEU THU, Ph.D

HO CHI MINH CITY, AUGUST 2014

STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP

I hereby certify my authorship of the thesis submitted today entitled:

A SURVEY INTO THE TEACHING OF LEXICAL COLLOCATIONS IN ACADEMIC WRITING AT FACULTY OF ENGLISH LINGUISTICS AND

LITERATURE, UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND

HUMANITIES – HO CHI MINH CITY

in terms of the statement of Requirements for the Thesis in Master‟s Program

issued by the Higher Degree Committee The thesis has not been submitted for the award of any degree or diploma in any other situation

Ho Chi Minh City, August 2014

ng Th Vân Di

RETENTION AND USE OF THE THESIS

I hereby state that I, ng Th Vân Di, being the candidate for the degree of Master in TESOL, accept the requirements of the University relating to the retention and use of Master‟s Theses deposited in the Library

In terms of these conditions, I agree that the original of my thesis deposited in the Library should be accessible for the purpose of study and research, in accordance with the normal conditions established by the library for the care, loan or reproduction of the thesis

Ho Chi Minh City, August 2014

ng Th Vân Di

I owe a great debt of gratitude to those who have helped me complete this thesis

First and foremost, I would like to express my gratefulness to my teacher and supervisor, Dr Nguy n Th Ki u Thu, for all her kindness, encouragement, and valuable guidance In this thesis process, her support and endless advice guided and led me through times of difficulty

I am greatly indebted to the Board of Administrators of the Faculty of English Linguistics and Literature, whose facilitation and assistance greatly contributed to the implementation of this thesis

My sincere thanks also go to my colleagues at the Faculty, especially Ms Lâm

Nh B o Trân, Ms Bùi Hu nh Th y Th ng, Ms H Th Thúy Ki u, Ms

Nguy n Th H ng and many others for their constant care, support, and willingness

to help and share experience

This study would not have been completed without the affectionate consideration from my close friends, Ms Lê Hoàng Anh, Ms Lê Th Minh Hi u, Ms Tr n Th Bích Ng c, Ms L u Nguy n Hà Vy, and Ms Nguy n Phan Qu nh Th Their

care, support, encouragement, and understanding were sources of motivation for

my effort to complete the thesis

Last but not least, my passionate love and heartfelt are extended to my late father,

my loving and caring mother, and my brother who nurtured my love for English and teaching, strengthened my motivation, and gave me encouragement, especially

in times of trouble

TABLE OF CONTENTS

STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP i

RETENTION AND USE OF THE THESIS ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS iv

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS vii

LIST OF TABLES viii

LIST OF FIGURES x

ABSTRACT xi

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1

1.1 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY 1

1.1.1 The Academic Writing Course 1

1.1.2 The Lexical Approach 2

1.1.3 Collocation 3

1.2 AIM OF THE STUDY 5

1.3 THE RESEARCH QUESTIONS 6

1.4 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY 7

1.5 TERMINOLOGY 7

1.6 SCOPE OF THE STUDY 8

1.7 ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY 8

CHAPTER 2 REVIEW OF LITERATURE 10

2.1 THEORETICAL ISSUES ON COLLOCATIONS 10

2.1.1 Definition of Collocation 10

2.1.2 Categorization of Collocations 15

2.1.2.1 Grammatical Collocations 16

2.1.2.2 Lexical Collocations 16

2.2 COLLOCATIONS IN EFL 18

2.2.1 The significance of Collocations in EFL 18

2.2.2 Collocations and Vocabulary Teaching 20

2.2.3 Collocations and Writing 21

2.2.4 The Teaching of Collocations 24

2.2.4.1 How to Teach Collocations 25

2.2.4.2 What Collocations to Teach 30

2.2.4.3 Assessment of Collocational Competence 31

2.2.5 Types of Collocational Errors 32

2.2.6 Causes of Making Collocational Errors 33

2.3 ERROR ANALYSIS 36

2.4 THE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK 38

2.5 SUMMARY 41

CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY 42

3.1 CONTEXT OF THE STUDY 42

3.2 RESEARCH QUESTIONS 43

3.3 RESEARCH DESIGN 44

3.3.1 Participants 44

3.3.1.1 Student Participants 44

3.3.1.2 Teacher Participants 46

3.3.2 Research Materials 48

3.3.2.1 Coursebooks 48

3.3.2.2 AW Final Writing Papers 49

3.3.2.4 COCA 50

3.3.3 Research Instruments 53

3.3.3.1 Coursebook Analysis 53

3.3.3.2 Error Analysis 54

3.3.3.3 Questionnaire 55

3.3.3.4 Interviews 60

3.4 DATA COLLECTION PROCEDURE 64

3.4.1 Lexical Collocational Error Identification 64

3.4.2 Questionnaire Administration 68

3.4.3 Coursebook Analysis 68

3.4.4 Interview Conducting 69

3.5 DATA ANALYSIS PROCEDURE 70

3.5.1 Lexical Collocational Error Analysis 70

3.5.2 Questionnaire 71

3.5.3 Coursebook Analysis 71

3.5.4 Interview 71

3.6 SUMMARY 71

CHAPTER 4 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 72

4.1 DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION 72

4.1.1 The Teaching Practices of Lexical Collocations 72

4.1.1.1 Coursebooks 72

4.1.1.2 Instructions of Lexical Collocations 73

4.1.1.3 Assessment 78

4.1.2 The Learning of Lexical Collocations 80

4.1.2.1 Students‟ Perception of Collocations 80

4.1.2.2 Types of Lexical Collocational Errors 85

4.1.2.3 Causes of Lexical Collocational Errors 88

4.1.3 Summary 93

4.2 MAJOR FINDINGS 94

4.3 SUMMARY 98

CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS 99

5.1 CONCLUSION 99

5.2 RECOMMENDATIONS 100

5.2.1 Recommendations to Teachers 101

5.2.2 Recommendations to Students 105

5.2.3 Recommendations to EF Administrators 106

5.2.4 Recommendations for Future Research 106

REFERENCES 108

APPENDIX 1: SYLLABUS FOR ACADEMIC WRITING 117

APPENDIX 2: FINAL TEST PAPER IN ACADEMIC WRITING 123

APPENDIX 3: QUESTIONNAIRE 125

APPENDIX 4: INTERVIEW WITH AW STUDENTS 127

APPENDIX 5: INTERVIEW WITH AW TEACHERS 127

APPENDIX 6: SAMPLE AW FINAL TEST PAPERS 128

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AW Academic Writing

BNC the British National Corpus

CA Contrastive Analysis

CLT Communicative Language Teaching

COCA the Corpus of Contemporary American English

EA Error Analysis

EF the Faculty of English Linguistics and Literature

EFL English as a Foreign Language

EGP English for General Purposes

ELT English Language Teaching

ESL English as a Second Language

ESP English for Specific Purposes

LA the Lexical Approach

MI Mutual Information

OCD Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English

USSH the University of Social Sciences and Humanities – Ho Chi Minh City

LIST OF TABLES

Table 2.1: Eight Types of Grammatical Collocations 16

Table 2.2: Seven Categories of Lexical Collocations 17

Table 2.3: The Revised Six Categories of Lexical Collocations 17

Table 2.4: Sources of Collocational Errors 35

Table 3.1: Sampling of AW Teachers 47

Table 3.2: The Coding of Five AW Teachers 47

Table 3.3: A comparison between COCA and other Corpora (by Davies (2008)) 50 Table 3.4: A comparison of collocates between COCA and BNC (Oxford University Press, 1998) 51

Table 3.5: The Procedure of EA (adopted from Gass and Selinker (2008)) 55

Table 3.6: The Function of Questionnaire Items 59

Table 3.7: The Function of Questions in the Interview 62

Table 3.8: Synthesis of Research Instruments and their Functions 63

Table 3.9: The Identification of Headwords in Lexical Collocations 65

Table 3.10: A Record of Coursebook Content 68

Table 4.1: Students‟ Statement of the Classroom Instruction of Lexical Collocations in AW 74

Table 4.2: Teaching Strategies of Lexical Collocations 76

Table 4.3: AW Teachers‟ Criteria of Good Pieces of Writing 79

Table 4.4: AW Students‟ Understanding of the Term „Collocation‟ 81

Table 4.5: AW Students‟ Receptive Knowledge of Lexical Collocations 82

Table 4.6: Sources of AW Students‟ Collocational Knowledge 83

Table 4.7: AW Students‟ Opinions about the Role of Collocations 83

Table 4.8: Lexical Combinations Produced by AW Students 85

Table 4.9: AW Students‟ Errors in Lexical Collocations 86

Table 4.10: Summary of Sources of Lexical Collocational Errors Made by AW Students 92 Table 4.11: Summary of the Results 93

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 2.1: Synthesis of Issues Related to the Teaching of Lexical Collocations in

Academic Writing 40

Figure 3.1: The COCA Search Interface 66

Figure 3.2: Sample COCA Search Result 67

Figure 3.3: The Summarization of the Data Collection Procedure 70

ABSTRACT

Collocation nowadays has been acknowledged as a requisite in EFL and has gained considerable attention from both researchers and teachers However, little research has been conducted on the teaching of lexical collocations in a writing course to English majors, especially in the context of EFL in Vietnam In addition, errors in collocations have always been found in learners‟ written production of

language The current study, therefore, aimed at investigating the current teaching

of lexical collocations in Academic Writing at EF, USSH in terms of two aspects: (1) classroom teaching practices (coursebook contents, classroom instructions, and course assessment criteria) and (2) the learning situation among AW students (perception of collocations, types of errors, and causes of errors) Four instruments

– error analysis, coursebook analysis, questionnaire, and interview – were devised

in order to acquire data to understand the teaching of lexical collocations

Findings of the study indicated that the teaching practices of lexical collocations in

AW were limited, together with a lack of focus on lexical collocations in coursebook contents and assessment criteria Furthermore, the current situation of learning lexical collocations in AW was not positive through students‟ unclear

perception of the issue, and a number of errors categorized into six types – in

which verb-noun combinations were the key contributor It was also revealed that the negative influence of their first language and approximation were the major causes of these errors Recommendations were thus formulated to integrate the teaching and learning of lexical collocations into AW and other language skills courses at EF, to provide training to teachers, and to implement future studies on the issue

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

This chapter provides the introduction to the study The chapter includes (1) background to the study, (2) aim of the study, (3) research questions, (4) significance of the study, (5) terminology, (6) scope of the study, and (7) the overall structure of the study

1.1 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY

1.1.1 The Academic Writing Course

Since the credit-based system was adopted in Faculty of English Linguistics and Literature (EF), University of Social Sciences and Humanities (USSH) in 2006, there have been changes implemented to the curriculum of the Faculty New courses with new requirements were designed so as to meet the increasing demands in the teaching and learning of English as a Foreign Language (EFL)

One of the new courses is Academic Writing (AW) The course is required for all English majors, which is taken after the students have successfully passed fundamental language skills courses in the very first semesters AW takes up four credits, which is equivalent to 60 periods or twelve 5-period class meetings Seen

as an intermediate course prior to students‟ selection of their own specialization,

the course aims at enhancing students‟ writing skills for academic purposes

Staged at an advanced level, the course prepares the students for upcoming courses with more demanding requirements, particularly those which require a high amount of academic writing

Focusing on English writing for academic purposes, the course entails various skills and genres The students learn how to write topic sentences and thesis statements, outline and organize their paragraphs and essays, connect the ideas and parts of the piece of writing, and write different kinds of paragraphs and essays The two coursebooks Reason to write – Strategies for success in academic writing

by Cohen and Miller (2003), and Writing academic English by Oshima and Hogue (1991) clearly highlight writing skills and mechanics

The students‟ performance is evaluated based on their written production during

and at the end of the course One midterm test (of which results account for 30

percent of the students‟ total scores) and one final test (70 percent) are obligatory,

together with writing assignments throughout the course The midterm and final test papers usually comprise two parts: one on theories involved with academic writing, and the other with paragraph or mostly essay writing (for further details of the course, see Appendix 1) In other words, the students, throughout the course, are required to write a number of compositions which show both their writing and language skills

1.1.2 The Lexical Approach

There have been quite a number of approaches to language teaching, each of which has its own focus and requisite The most popular approaches in English Language Teaching (ELT) nowadays could be counted as the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and Task-Based Learning In addition, an alternate approach to language teaching has been developed: the Lexical Approach

The Lexical Approach (LA) was first described by Michael Lewis in 1993 It is a new approach in ELT built from the belief that the most important aspect of language learning and teaching should be vocabulary, not grammar or structures, like what some previous methods (such as the grammar-translation method) hold

To put it differently, the approach highlights grammaticalized lexis rather than lexicalized grammar The core of LA is collocation, which is usually apprehended

as the regular co-occurrence of words in a language This is believed to play an important part in language learning and communication There used to be quite a number of objections to LA during the time it was first introduced However, the approach has found its way to EFL classrooms over time and has proved itself effective in language teaching and learning (Lewis, 2000a)

In spite of the increasing popularity of LA, the communicative language teaching (CLT) is still having a predominant role, which focuses on learners‟ interactions in

order to achieve communicative proficiency and fluency Despite such a fact, the

two approaches have at least one thing in common: the heart of the two approaches

is communication and learners‟ competence to communicate fluently, because LA

also “places communication of meaning at the heart of language and language learning” (ibid., p 15)

Even though the two approaches are more or less alike in their focus, it appears that CLT does not lay its emphasis on prefabricated chunks There is a belief, in

LA, that lexical words and phrases are “main carriers of meanings”, and that

learning words and phrases also brings together all the elements that used to be separately treated – grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation (ibid.) Such a

combination will greatly assist learners in turning the language to which they are exposed to what they can apply in communication

In the context of Vietnam in general and EF in particular, the approach is still new and thus hardly followed by teachers of English More specifically, English prefabricated chunks are rarely taught by teachers, partially for most of the classroom time is spent on the practice of English language skills – reading,

writing, listening, and speaking Also, it could be said that teachers are not fully aware of the importance of lexis in language learning, which is one of the motives that drove the researcher to carry out this study

1.1.3 Collocation

Since the description of LA in the 1990s, researchers‟ and teachers‟ viewpoints on

vocabulary teaching and learning have been changed: the focus of learning and teaching once on grammatical structures was shifted to vocabulary However, the focus is not merely turned on individual words, but on the combinations of words

in language use That is to say, an important part of language learning is the ability

of proper use of lexical phrases, or chunks One type of these lexical chunks is collocation, for example word combinations like bitter criticism, or rekindle friendship, etc., which is regarded as the core of LA

Collocation, in effect, has become one of the major concerns in the field of foreign language teaching and learning To be more specific, collocation is a common phenomenon in the English language and its significance in EFL has also been recognized Brown (1974), Bahns and Eldaw (1994), Lewis (1993), Farghal and Obiedat (1995), and Howarth (1998) were apparently the first researchers to have investigated the increasing requisite of collocation in English teaching and learning All of these researchers agreed upon the role of collocation as promoting

learners‟ language competence, especially in vocabulary, and their communicative

competence Also, collocation is regarded as a criterion to distinguish native speakers from non-native ones (Schmitt, 2000; Nation, 2001; Brashi, 2006; Nesselhauf, 2005; Bazzaz & Samad, 2011) These studies arrived at the conclusion that the knowledge of collocation is absolutely necessary to EFL learners and that the teaching of collocation should be promoted in EFL courses

However, it is a proven fact that EFL learners have often made a huge number of errors in collocation in their production of written and spoken English due to the lack of collocational knowledge (Bahns and Eldaw, 1994; Farghal and Obiedat, 1995; Brashi, 2006; Hsu, 2007; Huang, 2001; Li, 2005; Parastuti, 2005; Sun & Shang, 2010; Darvishi, 2011) Some errors like *1expensive price or to *learn knowledge are usually identified in EFL learners‟ written and spoken production It

is to say that attention has not been directed to collocation, and that it has not been properly and effectively integrated into EFL teaching As a matter of fact, the aforementioned researchers have suggested that teachers should improve their

learners‟ knowledge of collocations2, firstly by raising their awareness of collocations through the identification and correction of collocational errors, introduction of some collocations, etc

1

The use of an asterisk (*) henceforth is an indication of a collocational error

2 The single form of the word “collocation” refers to the general phenomenon in which

words collocate with each other, while the plural form indicates individual cases of collocation

It is an observable fact that the students at EF, especially those who regularly have

to submit their written exercises and assignments, frequently commit errors in collocation The production of collocations in writing seems to be more difficult and challenging, for precision in word use is a must in written contexts (Tran, T H., 2012), where one has more time to think about and polish their language use Also, according to Nesselhauf (2003), students of high levels of English competence, in particular, are more likely to make errors in (lexical) collocations, for they tend to apply a larger and usually more complex amount of vocabulary to their language production It seems that the students can quite well manage very common combinations like do exercise, make a cake, etc but they often experience difficulty in most other collocations, such as *meet a problem, *wide knowledge, (instead of have/face a problem, vast knowledge respectively) and the

like These errors result in not only the students‟ level of proficiency but also their

mastery of the language

Even though many researchers have conducted studies investigating the use of collocations among EFL learners, little research has been undertaken into the teaching of (lexical) collocations in a writing course to English majors In other words, instructors‟ classroom teaching practices as well as students‟ learning of the

issue have not been explored Even in the context of EFL in Vietnam, only two studies on collocations have been found: one experimental study on the effects of collocation instruction on students‟ writing scores, the other on the teaching of

ESL conversations through collocations This was identified as the research gap, alongside the current situation, that drove the researcher to conduct the present study to examine the teaching of lexical collocations in AW at EF, USSH

1.2 AIM OF THE STUDY

The fact remains that there are many errors in collocations, especially those in

lexical collocations, found among EF students‟ English writings This addresses a

question as to why they have made such errors in their writing products In order to have a comprehensive and detailed look into the phenomenon and its possible

causes, the current study was conducted The study was carried out in AW because this is among the courses that require students to frequently produce written work and involve students with a degree of high competence in English Together with the aforesaid research gap identified in the field, there is a need that the study should be conducted, given the theoretical underpinnings as well as the contemporary pedagogical practice To put it differently, the aim of the study was

to explore the teaching of lexical collocations in the course of AW taken by English sophomores at EF, USSH This aim could only be fulfilled by investigating the teaching practices and learning situation of lexical collocations in the course

1.3 THE RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Despite its increasingly significant role in these decades, collocation has hardly been integrated into language teaching, especially in writing courses There is scarcely any extensive research into collocations, especially lexical collocations at

EF, USSH Also, as above mentioned, there can only be found few studies conducted on the teaching of collocations in writing courses for English majors

Endorsed by the accumulated teaching experiences in previous writing courses, the researcher believed that the teaching of lexical collocations in AW would be not only practical but necessary and beneficial to students as well It helps build the massive amounts of language input among learners, from which they can turn into intake to achieve fluency in communication (Lewis, 2000a)

The two aforementioned issues led the researcher to generate the following research questions in order to accomplish the earlier stated aim:

(1) What are the current teaching practices of lexical collocations in AW? (2) What is the current situation of the learning of lexical collocations in AW?

1.4 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

With such an aim fulfilled by answering such a research question, the study gained significance in some following aspects

Firstly, the study, to some extent, had theoretical values The study provided a thorough review of literature on theoretical issues as well as pedagogical justifications of collocations and collocations teaching in language skills classrooms Also, the research uncovered the fact about the practical teaching of lexical collocations in AW at EF, USSH Furthermore, its findings revealed the

AW students‟ knowledge of collocation and the lexical collocational errors they

made in AW final test papers

Secondly, the study made some contributions to the teaching of AW The findings, specifically, presented some recommendations for both the teaching and learning

of lexical collocations in AW so as to help students avoid committing errors in lexical collocations Also, grounded on the pivotal role of collocation itself, the teaching of collocation should be promoted in other language skills courses

1.5 TERMINOLOGY

The key terms used in the present study will be discussed in this part for the sake

of clarity throughout the study The study was conducted with a central focus on lexical collocations, one of the cores of LA According to Richards and Schmidt

(2002), LA is “an approach to language teaching that is based on the view that the

basic building blocks of teaching and learning are words and lexical phrases, rather

than grammar, functions or other units of organization” (p 304), or simply a

“lexis-based approach to language teaching”, as Richards and Rodgers (2001) named it (p 138) Collocation, then, is referred to as “a combination of words in a

language, that happens very often and more frequently than would happen by

chance” by Oxford Advanced Learners‟ Dictionary (a further and more detailed

explanation of the term will be presented in the next chapter, the review of related literature)

In addition to those major terms, there were also scattered a number of other technical terms used in the study as follows:

- Delexicalized words: words that still carry some definite meaning even out

of context (Lewis, 2000a)

- Corpus: a collection of (both spoken and written) texts (Lewis, 2000a)

- Concordancer: “software that searches for words of phrases in a corpus and

displays the selected item or items in a list together with their surrounding

context” (Richards & Schmidt, 2002, p 104)

1.6 SCOPE OF THE STUDY

The study was confined to exploring the practical teaching of lexical collocations

in AW, which ran in the second semester of academic year 2012-2013 at EF, USSH It focused on exploring the teaching practices of lexical collocations in the course of AW and qualitatively analyzing the lexical collocational errors made by the students The sampling strategy, as well as the specific research site, resulted in the weak generalizability of the study Due to the nature of the research and sampling strategy, and based on the findings of the study, generalizations and recommendations were made to the teaching and learning in AW and other language skill courses at EF, USSH The study findings would be seen as qualitative descriptions of the existing situation, and therefore would provide theoretical and practical background and tentative suggestions for further research

1.7 ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY

This study report comprises five separate chapters

Chapter 1 provides the introduction with background information of the study Chapter 2 presents a review of relevant and previous literature on collocations and

collocations in EFL A detailed review of theoretical issues on collocations, in terms of definition and categorization, is provided Then the background of the important role of collocations, collocations in relation with vocabulary and writing,

the teaching of collocations, and errors analysis is then reviewed Also, a conceptual framework is established to provide the background for the research design and the collection and analysis of data

Chapter 3 describes the methodology implemented in the study Included in this

chapter are the further expansion of the research questions, a discussion of the sample and sampling, research materials and instruments, and the procedures of data collection and analysis

Chapter 4 reports the analysis and discussion of the collected data, and

summarizes the major findings of the study The mass of data captured from all the research instruments was coded and analyzed so as to ascertain facts about the current teaching of lexical collocations in AW at EF, USSH The major findings of the study were reported to form the foundation on which some recommendations were put forward

Chapter 5 reaches the conclusion and offers pedagogical implications with regard

to the teaching of lexical collocations in AW and other language skills courses as well as recommendations for future research

CHAPTER 2 REVIEW OF LITERATURE

This chapter reviews theoretical issues and related previous studies on collocations The chapter first examines theoretical issues on collocations in terms

of definition and categorization Furthermore, the chapter also reviews related empirical studies in recent decades on the issue in different perspectives: the importance of collocations in EFL, collocations and writing, the teaching of collocations, types of collocational errors and the causes for such errors among EFL learners

2.1 THEORETICAL ISSUES ON COLLOCATIONS

As Nesselhauf (2005) stated, there have been two approaches to defining collocation: the frequency-based and phraseology-based approaches While the former focuses on the co-occurrence of words with frequency, the latter highlights

“the relation between lexical and syntactic patterning in collocations” (Hodne,

2009, p 5) The typical followers of the former include Firth (1957), Halliday and Hasan (1976), Palmer (1981), Sinclair (1991), and Lewis (2000a) The latter approach was supported especially by Cowie (1994) Also, a combination of the two approaches can also be found in the Deuter et al.‟s (2002) and McIntosh, Francis and Poole‟s (2009) definition of collocation in the Oxford Collocations

Dictionary for Students of English (OCD) These authors gave their own definition

of collocation as follows

The term „collocation‟ was first coined by Firth (1957): “collocations of a given

word are statements of the habitual or customary places of that word” (p 181) He clearly stated that “you shall know a word by the company it keeps” (p 179) His

popular example to illuminate the point is that of ass in different occurrences

He is an ass

You silly ass!

Don’t be an ass (ibid p 124)

with a restricted set of adjectives including silly, obstinate, stupid, awful, and egregious With his approach of addressing the issue, Firth attached great importance to collocations and considered this a level of meaning among his “five dimensions of meaning (phonetic, lexical, morphological, syntactic and semantic)”

(Léon, 2007) In the Firthian sense, moreover, collocations are understood to be

statements about “the predictability of word combinations” (Evert, 2009, p 2)

Although the definition is exploratory by its nature, it is not adopted in the present study, for it is difficult, both theoretically and empirically, to determine whether the combination of words is habitual or customary

In their work Cohesion in English, Halliday and Hasan (1976) promoted another way to investigate collocations They consider collocations, a means of textual

cohesion, as “the co-occurrence of lexical items that are in some way or

other typically associated with one another, because they tend to occur in

similar environments” (p 287): candle … flame … flicker, sky … sunshine …

cloud … rain This definition of collocation clearly overlaps with lexical or

semantic field, which refers to “the organization of related words and expressions into a system which shows their relationship to one another” (Richards & Schmidt,

2002, pp 305-306) Even though words that belong to the same semantic field may occur together in a specific context, it does not necessarily mean that the appearance of one word might result in the occurrence of another Therefore, this definition is neither workable in the present study

Working on previous studies, Palmer (1981) advanced the three types of collocational restrictions:

First, some are based wholly on the meaning of the item as in the unlikely

*green cow Secondly, some are based on a range – a word may be used

with a whole set of words that have some semantic features in common …

*The rhododendron passed away … Thirdly, some restrictions are

collocational in the strictest sense, involving neither meaning nor range, as addled with eggs and brains (p 79)

He then gave an example kick the bucket so as to underlie the difference between

an idiom and collocation: “For here we not only have the collocation of kick and

the bucket, but also the fact that the meaning of the resultant combination is opaque – it is not related to the meaning of the individual words” (pp 79-80)

Sinclair (1991) also examined the issue of collocations and similarly differentiated collocations from idioms He formulated two models of interpretation of meanings arising from language texts: the open-choice principle and the idiom principle In the open-choice principle, texts are considered a series of slots in which any word

can occur or fill when “the only restraint is grammaticalness” (p 109) On the other hand, the idiom principle claims that “the choice of the one word affects the

choice of others in its vicinity” (p 173) Sinclair gave the definition of collocation

as “the occurrence of two or more words within a short space of each other in a text” (p 170) and idiom “a group of two or more words which are chosen together

in order to produce a specific meaning or effect in speech or writing” (p 172)

There can be seen, apparently, a few similarities between the definitions of collocations and idioms Even Sinclair admitted that the line between the two was currently not yet clear However, it is rather clear that “the individual words that constitute idioms are not reliably meaningful in themselves” for the whole

combination of those words should work together so as to produce its meaning (p 173) In other words, if individual words occurring in a combination keep their own meanings, it is collocation; whilst if the whole unit constitutes a single unified meaning, it is an idiom

The difference between collocations and idioms, according to Palmer (1981) and Sinclair (1991), lies in the opaqueness of the meaning of the combined word group Based on such a criterion, the distinction between a collocation and an idiom can be drawn However, it could not be said that a collocation is not what an idiom is, for it would be too vague to understand One problem that might arise here is whether the phrase (to) be impressive is a collocation It could be strongly agreed that the phrase is not an idiom, but not that it is a collocation That is to say, the definitions by Palmer (1981) and Sinclair (1991) were not satisfactory enough

to be used as the operational definition in the current study

In the 1990s, Michael Lewis developed a new approach to language teaching known as LA Among the most fundamental ideas of LA is that of collocation According to Lewis (2000a), collocation is “the readily observable phenomenon

whereby certain words co-occur in natural text with greater than random

frequency” (p 8) In this definition, three characteristics were identified: (1)

readily observable, (2) natural-sounding, and (3) occurring frequently It would be not difficult to choose the correct one between heavy traffic and *crowded traffic, for the former can be frequently recognized in natural texts Nonetheless, the idea

of „greater than random frequency‟ is relatively vague and hardly helps to

determine whether a lexical phrase is a collocation

On the other hand, pursuing the phraseology-based approach, Cowie (1994)

defined collocations as “associations of two or more lexemes (or roots) recognized

in and defined by their occurrence in a specific range of grammatical

constructions” (p 3169) The concept of lexemes (or lemmas) is one of the

elements in a collocation, which both frequency-based and phraseology-based

approaches consider They refer to “the basic, contrasting units of vocabulary in a language,” defined Carter (1987, pp 6-7) Then he advanced towards categorizing

word combinations into four different types, which was summarized by Nesselhauf (2005) as follows:

Free combinations (e.g drink tea)

- the restriction on substitution can be specified on semantic grounds [i.e

you can substitute tea by coffee, water, juice, etc.]

- all elements of the word combination are used in a literal sense

Restricted collocations (e.g perform a task):

- some substitution is possible, but there are arbitrary limitations on

substitution [e.g you can also say do a task, but not make a task]

- at least one element has a non-literal meaning, and at least one element

is used in its literal sense; the whole combination is transparent

Figurative idioms (e.g do a U-turn, in the sense of „completely change

one s policy or behaviour‟):

- substitution of the elements is seldom possible

- the combination has a figurative meaning, but preserves a current literal

interpretation

Pure idioms (e.g blow the gaff):

- substitution of the elements is impossible

- the combination has a figurative meaning and does not preserve a

current literal interpretation (p.14)

Even though it looks rigorous, the classification was critiqued as not sufficiently satisfactory by Hodne (2009) due to the not very clear-cut boundary between the

two terms „literal‟ and „figurative.‟ She gave an example of constitutional

monarchy and customs agents to illustrate the point It is hard to determine whether those two are free combinations or restricted collocations, she claimed And if they are restricted collocations, which element in each of the combinations

is used with its literal sense?

The problem, nevertheless, was troubleshot with the adoption of Hodne‟s (2009)

definition of collocation:

Collocations are arbitrarily restricted lexeme combinations that are syntactically fixed to a certain degree, are included in the collocation dictionary, present an MI score [Mutual Information] higher than 3.0, and have a raw frequency [or RF for short] of more than three tokens in COCA”

[the Corpus of Contemporary American English, which would be further described in Chapter 3] (p 8)

The definition proved to be precise and comprehensive with reliable criteria for determining whether or not a phrase is a collocation However, for the current

study did not use a collocation dictionary (for which reason is going to be discussed later), together with Church and Hanks‟ (1990) belief that the threshold

of 3.0 MI score is more interesting in terms of the joining probability of the

components in a word combination, and Clear‟s (1993) requirement of at least

three-time frequency, the working definition of collocation was changed into:

Collocations are arbitrarily restricted lexeme combinations that are syntactically fixed to a certain degree, have a raw frequency (or FREQ for short) of at least three tokens 3 , and present an MI 4 score of at least 3.0 in COCA (which will be further described in Chapter 3)

2.1.2 Categorization of Collocations

Researchers have different points of view to classifying collocations into different groups Lewis (2000a) claimed that collocations range from strong to weak (foot the bill versus a nice day) as well as from frequent to infrequent (rapt attention versus scholarly attention) On the other hand, Hill (2000), grounded on collocation strength, recognized four categories: unique, strong, weak, and medium-strength collocations with such examples as shrug ones’ shoulder, rancid

butter, blue shirt, and hold a conversation respectively These two ways of

classification, in the researcher‟s opinion, would be better for the selection of what

collocations to teach, but not for research purposes of this study This is simply because in error analysis (which will be discussed in following parts), it would be inconvenient to spend too much time deciding which collocation is weak or infrequent, because there seems to be no clear-cut boundaries among those types Therefore, these classifications are not applicable to the present study

Benson, Benson and Ilson (1986) classified recurrent word combinations, or collocations, into two main groups: grammatical and lexical collocations

2.1.2.1 Grammatical Collocations

Benson et al (1986) defined grammatical collocations as those consisting of a dominant word (verb, noun, or adjective – a content word) together with a

preposition or a grammatical structure (an infinitive or clause – a function

word/phrase) Then they advanced the eight sub-categories of grammatical collocations, as shown in Table 2.1

G1 noun + preposition interest in (mathematics)

G2 noun + to-infinitive desire to discuss (the matter)

G3 noun + that-clause a necessity that a Fascist government

should come to power …

G4 preposition + noun with pleasure

G5 adjective + preposition attracted to The Wedding Present

G6 (predicate) adjective + to

infinitive it is necessary to work, she is ready to go

G7 adjective + that-clause urgent that we organize …

G8 (19) verb patterns sent it to him, screamed something to her,

bought her husband a shirt, etc

Table 2.1: Eight Types of Grammatical Collocations

This type of collocation is popularly known as colligation, a term introduced by Firth (1957) The term was also more clearly specified by Hoey (1998):

a) The grammatical company a word keeps (or avoids keeping) either within

its own group or at a higher rank;

b) The grammatical functions that the word‟s group prefer (or avoids);

c) The place in a sequence that a word prefers (or avoids) (cited in Hunston,

2001, 15)

2.1.2.2 Lexical Collocations

In contradiction to grammatical collocations, lexical collocations are those that do not comprise of prepositions, infinitives or clauses but is purely lexical: consisting

of nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs (Benson et al., 1986) Again, this collocation type falls into seven sub-categories (see Table 2.2)

Table 2.2: Seven Categories of Lexical Collocations (by Benson et al., 1986)

As can be seen from Table 2.2, the two groups L1 and L2 are similar with regard

to their components: verb + noun It is, moreover, not an easy task to differentiate between creation or activation and eradication or nullification with verbs such as beat, decrease, etc That leads to the fact that these two groups were combined into one in the current study, resulting in six types of lexical collocations, as shown in Table 3.3

Table 2.3: The Revised Six Categories of Lexical Collocations

The present study aims to examine lexical collocations only The very first reason

is that learners of English can easily learn grammatical collocations from textbooks of grammar and general dictionaries, which give a clear demonstration

should not be confused with the abbreviated form of „language‟ as usually seen with L1 – first language and L2 – second language in Second Language Acquisition

and exemplification Moreover, according to Pirmoradian and Tabatabaei (2012),

“the number of grammatical collocates is always limited while lexical collocates would seem impossible to be listed” (p 187) Lexical collocations, hence, are more

challenging and demanding to learners in a way that they requires a more selective and precise use of vocabularies

2.2 COLLOCATIONS IN EFL

During the past few decades, more and more emphasis has been placed on collocations, especially since the emergence of LA in the 1990s As one of the two most important linguistic items in the LA, collocations have demonstrated their significance in English as Second Language (ESL) and EFL Brown (1974) was among the first advocates of the integration of collocations into ESL/EFL She

affirmed that the increase in learners‟ knowledge of collocation leads to the

improvements in their oral proficiency, listening comprehension and reading speed This has been the premise for later investigations into collocations and its pivotal role in langauge teaching and learning

2.2.1 The significance of Collocations in EFL

To many linguists and researchers, knowing a word does not merely involve knowing its pronunciation, meaning and word family Among his eight assumptions about vocabulary teaching, Richards (1985) stated that knowing a word entails knowing its syntactic behavior and network of associations He also stated that once these bonds, known as grammatical and lexical collocations respectively, are established, learning will be facilitated Knowing a word, according to Nation (1990), means knowing its form (both spoken and written), position (grammatical patterns and collocation), function (frequency and appropriateness), and meaning (concept and associations) in both receptive and productive skills These are to underscore the significance of the knowledge and ability to use collocations of words in language learning, which is illustrated in such aspects as follows

Collocation is considered a universal linguistic phenomenon (Duan & Qin, 2012)

It is an undeniable fact that no language is free of collocations English is no exception, for it is hard to find any piece of spoken or written English with no collocation (Hill, 2000; McIntosh et al., 2009) Words, in any language, stick

together in collocations; as Wallace (1982) mentioned “words seldom occur in isolation” (p 30) For such a common and critical role in language, collocation has gradually gained its importance in “language processing and use”, despite its once

“peripheral” status in the past (Nesselhauf, 2005, p 1) Also, as Lewis (1993)

claimed that knowing a word entails mastering the collocational range of a word as well as the restrictions on such a range Therefore, collocations should be an indispensable part of the teaching of vocabulary: learners should be provided with collocations of new words Learners, likewise, should be able to use words with their proper collocations

Collocation, in addition, is the best way to help learners understand and make the best use of vocabulary There are many synonymous words that learners may find difficult to distinguish Lewis (2000) took the two words injury and wound as an example It is difficult for learners to see the difference(s) between the meanings of the two words, which they can hardly find in dictionaries The difference, actually,

lies in the “collocational fields” (ibid., p 13): stab wound not stab injury or

internal injuries instead of internal wounds According to McIntosh et al (2009),

“The precise meaning in any context is determined by that context: by the words

that surround the combine with the core word – by collocation” (p v) This

apparently helps with the distinction of various meanings of polysemous words (Duan & Qin, 2012) Learners can even memorize words better thanks to their

collocations because “collocational association can also act as memory aids”

(Rahimi & Sahragard, 2008, p 15) Vocabulary is believed to be learned best in context, and one word is better and more easily remembered if it is associated with context than those with no association Lewis (2000b) believed that it is best for language learners to study vocabulary not by translation of meanings, but thanks to

the “most natural, habitual contexts” in which they occur (p 134)

Last but not least, collocations help promote learners‟ communicative competence

As Nation (2001) stated “all fluent and appropriate language requires collocational knowledge” (p 318) A student with knowledge of collocations will be able to

express himself clearly (McIntosh et al., 2009) Moreover, for lacking the knowledge of collocations, learners have to rely on longer expressions with more grammaticalization in order to convey a particular idea that a native speaker would express via a precise lexical phrase with less grammaticalization, as popularly

known as „circumlocution‟ (Hill, 2000; McIntosh et al., 2009) Fillmore (1979)

also admitted that the knowledge of fixed expressions is to develop learners‟

fluency (cited in Li, 2005, p 15) Nesselhauf (2005) expressed the same idea when

he acknowledged that prefabricated units, known as collocations, are critical to

learners‟ fluency in language learning Students, according to Hill (2000), become more fluent when they “acquire more chunks of the language for instant retrieval”

(p 55) In addition, collocation is the factor that helps distinguish between native and non-native speakers (Schmitt, 2000; Nation, 2001; Brashi, 2006; Nesselhauf, 2005; Bazzaz & Samad, 2011) In order to sound native-like, learners have to have good knowledge and use of collocations That is to say that the knowledge of

collocations is essential to learners‟ complete mastery of the English language

It can be clearly seen that collocation has a significant role in the learning of the

English language Collocation knowledge is vital to learners‟ comprehension and use of words, like Brown (1974) said, “the words, by being used together, help to

define and delimit each other” (p 1) Collocation is a must to learners in order to use English properly and effectively: “collocation is the most powerful force in the

creation and comprehension of all naturally-occuring text” (Hill, 2000, p 49)

2.2.2 Collocations and Vocabulary Teaching

It has been made clear in the above part that collocation plays a fundamental role

in the success of language acquisition and production Also, the knowledge of collocation is essential to the acquisition of vocabularies That is to say that

collocation ought to be taken into consideration in the course of teaching vocabulary to EFL learners

Vocabulary teaching and learning is the core of LA When LA was first introduced

by Lewis (1993), he stated that vocabulary should be the most significant aspect of language learning and teaching, not grammar like what the previously-favored

approaches offered, that “language is grammaticalised lexis, not lexicalised grammar” (ibid., p 95) The approach highlights the development of learners‟

proficiency in words and words combination, i.e vocabulary in general

Vocabulary has always been a challenging task to learners, according to McCarten (2007), because of its large size and various types Also, Schmitt (2000) stated that

“knowing a word entails having mastery over various kinds of lexical knowledge”

(p 43) In order for vocabularies to be effectively taught, teachers have to consider

a number of factors such as word meanings, pronunications and spellings, families, grammatical structures, collocations, etc (Nation, 1990) Learning vocabulary, as

is believed by Harmer (1991), entails word meaning, word use, word formation and word grammar By this Harmer included collocation within word use, which is considered as an important aspect of vocabulary learning and teaching

It is now obvious that collocation is a component in the teaching and certainly learning of vocabulary That is to say, the act of vocabulary teaching can hardly be good without collocations, for the knowledge of collocations is beneficial to learners in a number of ways (see part 2.2.1)

2.2.3 Collocations and Writing

Writing has always been a challenging and difficult skill to EFL learners In the

researcher‟s experience, it is an observable fact that among the four basic English

skills, writing is the one that always instills fear into learners Even skilled writers also sometimes find writing not easy (Celce-Murcia & Olshtain, 2000) It is stated,

therefore, that “for the student, choosing the right collocation will make his

speech and writing sound much more natural, more native-speaker-like, even

when basic intelligibility does not seem to be at issue” (McIntosh et al.,

2009, p v) Several authors conducted empirical studies on the use of collocations

in learners‟ writings of English (Nesselhauf, 2003; Li, 2005; Hsu, 2007; Sun &

Shang, 2010; Bazzaz & Samad, 2011; Darvishi, 2011; Oskuee, Pustchi, & Salehpour, 2012; Tran, T H., 2012) This part will discuss these studies in further details

Nesselhauf (2003) investigated the use of collocations among advanced learners of English Particularly, he examined the verb-noun collocations used by advanced German-speaking leaners of English through free written production The verb-noun-collocation errors were identified, and then the influences of restriction of combination as well as those of mother tongue on collocation productions were also studied The findings revealed that the knowledge of the native language had a

major influence on these learners‟ use of collocations Also, the author of the study

addressed some implications for teaching: highlighting the roles of collocation teaching, making learners aware of the importance of collocations, choosing appropriate collocations to teach, and suggesting ways to teach collocations

Li (2005) carried out a study on collocational errors among 38 EFL Taiwanese

learners The unacceptable grammatical and lexical errors in the participants‟

in-class practice and assignments were identified according to The BBI Dictionary of English Word Combinations, the British National Corpus (BNC), and the Chinese e-learning project TANGO The participants‟ perception of difficulty of

collocations was also surveyed The results of the study revealed that participants‟

perception of collocational difficulty were different from the types of collocational errors they made in their assignments and in-class practice Finally, the study proposed several reasons explaining why the participants made such errors based

on theories of second language acquisition

Hsu (2007) conducted a survey into the relationship between the use of lexical collocations among 62 Taiwanese English majors and non-English majors and their online writing After being analyzed, these participants‟ online writings

showed remarkable correlations between the frequency as well as variery of lexical collocations and the scores marked for the writings Similarly, the study had some implications for pedagogy in terms of teaching and learning collocations

The fourth study is one on writing errors in a corpus-based approach by Sun and Shang ( 2010) This research did not narrow a single focus on collocations, but on general writing errors made by Chinese English majors Using the corpus of

English Majors‟ Composition of Ludong University, the author of the research

investigated all the errors in lexicon, grammar, syntax and discourse Among the lexicon errors, which ranked second in the list, collocational errors comprised a major percent The study ended with proposed strategies towards error minimization and writing teaching improvement Even though this study did not solely examine collocations, it still revealed that collocational errors are significant

in writing and thus more regard should be paid to the issue

Similar to Nesselhauf (2005), Bazzaz and Samad (2011) undertook a study on the use of verb-noun collocations in writing stories among 27 Ph.D Iranian students

The participants‟ knowledge of collocation was measured prior to asking them to

write six different stories in six weeks The results demonstrated a strong and postivie relationship between the knowledge of collocations and the use of verb-noun collocations in writing Some pedagogical implications and suggestions for future studies were given

Oskuee et al (2012) experimented the effects of pre-teaching vocabulary and

collocations on advanced learners‟ writing development The participants in the

experimental group who underwent twenty sessions of instructions and five composition tests showed better written performance than those in the control group without treatment The results showed that the pre-teaching of vocabulary and collocations is an effective method to help learners develop their writing products

Similarly, Tran T H (2012) also studied the effects of English collocation instruction on esssay writing scores and language use in writing among freshman

English-majors Despite the weak experimental research design (without a control group), the results of the research proved that the instruction of collocation led to better use of the language as well as better overall writing scores

The afore-mentioned studies released similar findings on collocations and their significance in writing It has been showed that EFL learners of all levels, from non-English majors to majors, from low to high level, and from college to Ph.D students, make collocational errors in their written production, i.e they lack the (necessary) knowledge of collocations One of the most important reasons for this

is the ignorance, or negligence, of collocations in language teaching and learning

If teachers do not direct learners‟ attention to the issue of collocations, learners

definitely will ignore the issue and cannot thoroughly master the language All the researchers, therefore, proposed that the significance of collocations be recognized and that collocations be taught in classrooms Collocations of every single new word, hence, should be introduced and highlighted to students In other words, collocations should be integrated into the teaching of the four English skills Furthermore, the use of collocation dictionaries or language corpora among EFL learners is also advocated

2.2.4 The Teaching of Collocations

Learners who have always been taught syntactic principles will certainly produce grammatically correct sentences However, when they enlarge their vocabulary, the sentences will contain more awkward or unaccetable use of content words (Brown, 1974) Also, it has been proved, in the previous parts in this chapter, that

collocational knowledge is essential to learners‟ written production These lead to

the necessity of teaching collocations in EFL classroom Two questions are made here: (1) How can we teach collocations? and (2) What collocations should we teach? These questions can be addressed through an overview of the relevant studies

2.2.4.1 How to Teach Collocations

The first issue of how to teach collocations has remained controversial for years Should collocations be taught implicitly or explicitly? Should teachers introduce

the term „collocations‟ to learners and complicate the matter? Conzett (2000), Hill

(2000), Lewis (2000), Lewis (2000b), and Woolard (2000), who followed LA, all agreed that the concept of collocation should be introduced and explained to learners When learners produce in their written language something like

*expensive price (instead of high price), teachers cannot merely say that is an error

just because „we just don’t usually say so‟, which might cause a lot of confusion

among learners There should be an explanation why such words co-occur For such a reason, learners ought to be made aware of collocations (Conzett, 2000) According to Hill (2000), collocations should play an important role in one‟s

teaching right from the very first lesson Because collocation exists in every

language, including learners‟ mother tongue, it would be not difficult for them to

understand the concept (Conzett, 2000)

2.2.4.1.1 Theoretical Issues

Collocations have been taught to learners thanks to the use of different approaches

and methods Hill (2000) said, “in order to teach collocation, we have to give it the

same kind of status in our methodology as other aspects of language such as

pronunciation, intonation, stress, and grammar” (p 59) Thanks to this, a few

experimental studies have been done on various ways to teach collocations: Chang and Myers (2009), Pirmoradian and Tabatabaei (2012), Chang (2013), and Jafarpour, Hashemian, and Alipour (2013)

Chang and Myers (2009) undertook an experimental study so as to investigate the effects of multiple strategies in teaching vocabulary and collocations The multiple-strategy-based approach refers to the use of various pedagogical activities

in teaching The strategies employed in this experiment include concept wheels, word maps, sentence plus definition method, individual vocabulary notebooks, pantomiming, semantic mapping, and verbal-visual word association Through the

results found in two treatment group, it was concluded that such an approach was helpful in vocabulary and collocation acquisition However, as it is shown in the study, this approach has little effect on the improvement of learners‟ writing skills

(although it does on the other three skills) This is to say that the approach is not among the best ones to teach collocations in writing skills, due to the fact it pays scant attention to writing The increased knowledge of collocations, in fact, is not sufficient yet; how collocations are applied to improve writing skills is essential

The next approach experimented is data driven learning, in which the Collins Collocation Dictionary was used as a concordancing tool on learning (lexical) collocations in Pirmoradian and Tabatabaei‟s (2012) study Data driven learning is

believed to be effective in helping learners make their own discoveries about language based on the database with which they are provided While, in the study, the control group received some text from books and were asked to notice collocations as well as mis-collocations, the experimental group had access to collocations via computers on which the dictionary was installed The findings showed that the experimental group had a better performance on lexical collocations than the control group, which is to prove that data driven learning was actually effective Also, the research results confirmed that the inductive approach was beneficial to learning, especially that of collocations

Another approach used for collocation teaching and learning is the blended instruction This was studied by Chang (2013) in her experimental research into the use of blended instruction in business english collocation teaching The control group were taught collocation in the traditional approach (that of giving examples

of collocations and providing exercises subsequently), and the experimental group blended instruction An electronic collocation platform was designed to provide collocation materials and sources in the blended learning model (apart from physical classroom teaching) It was later showed that both approaches could

facilitate collocation production However, comparing the participants‟

performance of business English collocations, the researcher realized that blended

instruction was more effective than the traditional approach in developing learners‟

performance The dominant feature of the blended learning approach is that it can help learners study untaught business collocations thanks to the electronic sources provided in the platform, which the traditional approach could not offer

If it is believed that the traditional method of teaching collocation (that of giving examples of collocations and providing exercises subsequently) is not very helpful, the use of language corpora proves to be more beneficial Jafarpour, Hashemian, and Alipour (2013) were able to verify this They compared the effects of the traditional approach with the corpus-based approach on the acquisition and use of collocations of near synonyms Learning collocations with the aid of concordancers from BNC, the participants in the experimetal group had better comprehension and production of collocations of near synonyms Collocations of words, in the corpus-based approach, are highlighted in context, to which participants are told to give their attention Then the participants know that they cannot put a word to the others only in their preference The corpus-based approach, moreover, provides authentic language, and hence helps learners to themselves discover word meanings, usages, patterns, and collocations In this era

of computer-assisted language learning, this approach proves to be important and efficient

At a single glance, it can be seen that these studies were undertaken from perspectives of different approaches However, apart from the study by Chang and Myers (2009) which employed the multiple-strategy-based approach, all the other three dealt with language corpora, from traditional paper dictionaries of collocations to modern computer-assisted concordancers This means that language corpora have acquired their significance in collocation acquisition If teachers wish their learners to have good collocational knowledge and production, they should have recourse to using corpora concordancers in their teaching Furthermore, concordancers can be integrated with dictionaries to produce the best use (Woolard, 2000)

2.2.4.1.2 Practical Strategies

The above discussion lays a theoretical framework on how collocations can be taught in EFL classrooms Nevertheless, the classroom conduct of collocation teaching should also be investigated

The very first thing that teachers should do is to raise learners‟ awareness of

collocations The best way to cope with this, according to Woolard (2000) is to

focus on learners‟ mis-collocations He further suggested that “it is a good idea to

keep a record of these mis-collocations as you correct your students‟ essays so that

you can bring them into the classroom at appropriate times to improve and extend

vocabulary teaching” (p 30) Hill (2000) advised encouraging learners to “think

bigger than the word, i.e learners should always seek for multi-word units Or

“more class time needs to be spent with some of the more common words, in

particular the „de-lexicalized6‟ verbs, get, put, take, do, make, etc.” (ibid p 62) In

addition to teaching learners the concept of collocation (see Part 2.2.3.1 above), these activities are to help learners attach more attention to collocations

Lewis (2000), based on his theories of LA, suggested that teachers should (1) give extra collocations, not only corrections when errors are found, (2) make learners‟

use of language more precise by giving the correct collocation, (3) provide collocates to differ two synonyms, (4) direct learners‟ attention to collocations in

given texts, (5) give collocations prior to learners‟ essay writing activities, (6)

make the most of what learners have known, and (7) give chances for record and recycling These activities have been done by the author and they have actually

showed their efficiency in developing learners‟ knowledge and production of

collocations In a similar way, Hill, Lewis, and Lewis (2000) also proposed these strategies but added another – essay feedback

Boonyasaquan (2009) further expanded these activities and combined them with a few more into a more comprehensive and easier-to-do set She confirmed that

6

have nothing to do, to take your time, to put someone at ease” (Lewis, 2000a, p 216)