CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background and Motivation
The importance of collocations has long been discussed and emphasized in the field of second language learning for many decades by previous research (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan, 1999; Granger, 1998; Lewis & Conzett, 2000; Schmitt, 2004; Schmitt, Ng,
& Garras, 2011; Wray, 2002). Collocations, as word combinations in make a decision or
commit suicide, play an essential role to help learners think more efficiently and quickly in
listening, speaking, reading and writing (Hill, 2000). Collocation knowledge is also significant in vocabulary learning because, as Woolard (2000) has stated, “learning more vocabulary is not just learning new words; it is often learning familiar words in new combination.” Once learners get familiar with these word combinations, their language usages can become more accurate and fluent (Wray, 2002).Three kinds of word combinations, including free combinations, collocations and idioms, have been discussed in studies of collocations. Collocations located in the middle of the continuum between free combinations, which are phrases freely combined depending on rules of syntax, and idioms, which are used in restricted senses and cannot be determined its meanings according to its literal meanings (Howarth, 1998; Nattinger & DeCarrico, 1992).
Collocations, therefore, fall around the middle ground of the continuum and are regarded as
“habitually occurring lexical combinations that are characterized by restricted co-occurrence of elements and relative transparency of meaning” (Laufer & Waldman, 2011).
Many researchers have found that foreign language learners have difficulties in the usage of collocations.Some learners may doubt that why people cannot say “conduct a diary” or
“maintain a diary”; instead, they should say “keep a diary.” Similar instances occur in everyday life and Benson, Benson, and Ilson (1997) also provided some good examples of difficulties that learners might face:
Collocations are arbitrary and non-predictable. Non-native speakers cannot cope with them; they must have a guide. They have no way of knowing that one says in English
make an estimate, (but not *make an estimation), commit treason (but not *commit treachery). In English, one says commit fraud and perpetrate fraud. However, only the
collocation commit suicide is possible; one does not say *perpetrate suicide. One saysbake a cake, but make pancakes (p. 258).
Previous research showed that EFL learners usually make collocation errors due to the lack of collocation knowledge in their writing or translation tasks (Bahns & Eldaw, 1993;
Laufer & Waldman, 2011; Nesselhauf, 2003; Zinkgräf, 2008). Due to the avoidance of using unfamiliar collocations, many students tend to ‘rely on larger, rarer, and clumsier words which make their language sound stilted and awkward’ (Sinclair, 1991, p. 79). Cobb (2003) also mentioned that learners would produce grammatically acceptable sentences that are unidiomatic and strange to native speakers because of their unfamiliarity of collocations.
Likewise, Laufer (2010) found that students had trouble finding the right verbs of collocations, and they thought they knew the collocations without a need to consult dictionaries but actually they did not. When learners face difficulties in finding the right collocations, they tend to rely on lexical simplification strategies, such as avoidance, synonyms, paraphrasing, and L1 equivalence (Mohammed Farghal & Obiedat, 1995).
However, learners sometimes find it difficult to paraphrase collocations that they cannot
Sometimes, learners’ misuse of collocations are originated from overusing certain collocations with core verbs (make, do, have, etc.) without utilizing native-like expressions due to their deficiency in collocation knowledge (Altenberg & Granger, 2001; De Cock, 1998;
Granger, 1998). The overuse may be attributed to their overdependence on those high frequent verbs, with which they feel comfortable since they learn them early and use them widely (Hasselgren, 1994). Furthermore, since these verbs lack specific meanings, learners tend to overgeneralize them and combine them freely with other nouns (Zinkgräf, 2008), which also explain why learners overuse the high frequent verbs. These phenomena reveal that overusing collocations with core verbs sometimes results in learners’ misuse of collocations, and learning collocations are challengeable for language learners.
Learning collocations is a long and tiring process for not only low proficiency learners,
but also advanced learners. Several studies have revealed that even for advanced learners, they still make a variety of collocation mistakes in their writing tasks (Bahns & Eldaw, 1993;
Mohammed Farghal & Obiedat, 1995; Nesselhauf, 2003). The finding of Gitsaki (1996) might somehow explain the difficulties among advanced learners. Gitsaki (1996) observed that Greek junior high school students’ collocation knowledge did not increase as their grammatical competence improved, which showed that learners’ language competence did not match collocation competence. This implies that even though advanced learners’
grammatical competence is well developed, they could still have trouble dealing with collocations.
According to Benson et al. (1997), collocations can be divided into two categories:
grammatical and lexical collocations. Grammatical collocations are composed of a dominant word—noun, verb, adjective, participle, and a preposition or a grammatical construction. On the other hand, lexical collocations do not contain a dominant word and they have structures, like verb + noun, adjective + noun, noun + verb, noun + noun, adverb + adjective, adverb +
verb, etc. Studies have revealed that EFL learners have relatively more problems with lexical collocations rather than grammatical ones (Bahns & Eldaw, 1993; Gitsaki, 1996, 1999).
Especially, much research revealed that learners have difficulties in the usages of verb noun lexical collocations (Bazzaz & Samad, 2011; Mohammed Farghal & Obiedat, 1995; Granger, 1998; Juknevičienė, 2008; Laufer & Waldman, 2011; Liu, 2002; Nesselhauf, 2003; Todirascu
& Gledhill, 2008; Zinkgräf, 2008). Therefore, it seems that verb noun collocations can be a potential area to further explore.
Previous research tended to explore verb noun collocations from two different perspectives, conducting collocation tests (Bahns & Eldaw, 1993; Bazzaz & Samad, 2011;
Boers, Demecheleer, Coxhead, & Webb, 2013; Jaén, 2007) and exploring learner corpora. In terms of the latter one, most previous studies have extracted EFL learners’ use of verb noun collocations from learner corpora through the method of manual extraction (Mohammed Farghal & Obiedat, 1995; Liu, 1999; Nesselhauf, 2003; Zinkgräf, 2008). The manual extraction of miscollocations is mostly time-consuming and needs substantial humor labor.
For instance, Bazzaz and Samad (2011) observed Iranian EFL learners’ verb noun collocations in the writing tasks and the number of verb noun collocations were counted manually. Nesselhauf (2003) extracted German advanced learners’ use of verb noun collocation errors in their free writing manually. Likewise, Zinkgräf (2008) manually searched for instances of verb noun miscollocations in the writing production of 102 Spanish students.
On the other hand, some studies attempted to resort to the assistance of concordancer for the purpose of accelerating the process of extraction but researchers still needed to check each concordance to find collocations. Altenberg and Granger (2001), for example, compared French learners and Swedish learners’ lexical patterning of make with native speakers’
Juknevičienė (2008) manually selected the verb noun collocations of five core verbs (have, do, make, take, give) through the aid of Wordsmith Tools as well. From studies above, it can be found that many studies chose to manually search for miscollocations, which means they need to go through learners’ production to achieve the purpose, which is really time-consuming. Even though some studies indeed resorted to some tools, such as Wordsmith
Tools, to search for miscollocations, which is more efficient than pure manual extraction but
it is still necessary for them to look at each concordance to find the collocation errors after they typed in certain target words, Accordingly, it seems that a more efficient way to retrieve collocation errors is needed.Studies that discussed collocations mostly attributed learners’ collocation errors to L1 interference (Altenberg & Granger, 2001; Biskup, 1992; Nesselhauf, 2003, 2005; Zinkgräf, 2008). Since these studies investigated one or two non-native learner groups, the L1 influence would be more obvious or emphasized more often. However, it seems that those collocation errors may not be totally due to the influence of learners’ mother tongues. Other strategies, such as using synonyms or extension of analogy, which is the process of substituting one lexical item for another known element, might play important roles as well. For example, Källkvist (1999) found that Swedish and Norwegian learners tend to overuse delexical verbs, referring to verbs without specific meanings, such as make, because of L1 influence since these two languages are both Germanic languages. However, French learners also overuse those delexical verbs (Granger, 1996), which revealed that this finding is not totally L1-related. There is a need to further compare collocation errors among different L1 backgrounds to have more insight in the causes of these errors.
Although previous studies provided fruitful insight of learners’ misuse of verb noun collocations, two aspects of verb noun collocations seemed to be neglected and unsolved.
First, it can be observed that these studies only focused on collocation use in one or two
nonnative groups. Few studies investigated learners’ collocation use across different L1 groups; in this way, a wide range of cross-linguistic differences remain unstudied. Second, most research adopted a manual method to extract the verb noun collocations, which is laborious, tiring and cannot confirm the reliable cover of all miscollocations in learner corpora. While some studies indeed utilize the corpus tools, such as Wordsmith tools, those researchers still need to look at each concordance carefully to find the collocations, which could be time-consuming.
These phenomena show that there still remains a need to further explore the cross-linguistic different use of verb-noun collocations in order to discover what kinds of verb noun miscollocations are universal for learners of different first languages (L1s) and what kinds of errors tend to be made only by learners of certain L1s. In order to explore the cross-linguistic differences, the innovative tool of extracting collocations is needed to save time and energy while researchers examine verb noun collocations.
Therefore, the present study aims to investigate EFL learners’ verb noun miscollocations across eleven L1 groups in the learner corpus of TOEFL 11 through its comparison with British National Corpus (BNC) and Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) in a platform—The Sketch Engine to innovatively and efficiently save time and human labor.