Some empirical findings suggest that explicit collocation instruction is effective in promoting EFL learners' collocation knowledge. Among the explicit teaching methods under investigation, the use of web concordancer in classroom instructions received much attention (Sun & Wang, 2003; Chan & Liu, 2005). Some studies examined the effect of different tasks or learning conditions on collocation learning
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(Webb and Kagimoto, 2009, Webb and Kagimoto, 2011; Sonbul and Schmitt, 2013).
There are also some attempts to investigate how the use of collocation dictionaries can benefit collocation learning (e.g. Laufer, 2011).
Sun and Wang (2003) used a concordancer-based teaching, aiming to determine the effectiveness of inductive and deductive approaches to learning four collocation patterns, namely, distinguish A from B/ distinguish between A and B; in excess of;
indignant with/ indignant at; the gulf between A and B. The participants were introduced to three web-based concordancing tools. The inductive group was asked to search for instances of using the target collocations, induce the underlying patterns, and use their findings to correct the sentences. The deductive group was given rules and example sentences and asked to correct the sentences.
Error correction was used to test the learners’ knowledge. The results seem to favor the inductive group. The researchers attributed the benefits to the discovering process involved in the searching and analyzing of concordance lines. Although the notion of easiness and difficulty was arbitrary, they further found that easy collocation patterns tend to be more effectively learned by using inductive approach than by deductive approach. There was no difference in different approaches in the case of difficult collocation patterns.
Recognizing that the literature generally points to learners’ sufficient knowledge of verb-noun collocations and that using appropriate verb-noun collocations is particularly difficult for learners, Chan and Liou (2005) especially focused on the learning of verb-noun collocations via web-based practices and concordancing. The researchers designed five web-based learning units, covering four common error types involving synonymous verbs, hypernymy and troponymy verbs, delexical verbs and English verb-noun collocations which do not have L1 equivalents. Concordancing was incorporated only in the first three units dealing with collocations involving
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delexical verbs and English verb-noun collocations which do not have L1 equivalents.
The exercises used in the online units consisted of multiple-choice, sentence translation and gap-filling. The measurement test includes a total of 26 items selected from the 100 items taught in the five units and extra 10 items not taught in these units.
They found that the instruction significantly improved the learners’ collocation knowledge. The learner obtained around 10 out of 36 in pretests and around 19 in post tests. What’s more, a comparison between the pretest mean scores and delayed post-test mean scores indicated that the learning effects remain. They also analyzed the learning gains and retentions for the four types of collocations separately. It seems that collocations involving delexical verbs and English verb-noun collocations which do not have L1 equivalents especially amenable to instruction. It is not clear, however, if the benefits were related to the types of collocations or the type of learning activity (i. e. concordancing) involved. What’s more, the design of the tests do not capture a whole picture about how many of the item taught were actually learned by the learners.
Webb and Kagimoto (2009) used a reading task and a cloze task and compared the effectiveness of these two methods. In the reading task, 117 university students formed two experimental groups. One group was given a list of example sentences, with the target collocations glossed. Three example sentences were provided for each target collocation. The other group received cloze task where the same sets of sentences were used but the target collocations were replaced by blanks. The participants were given two sets of example sentences and two collocations. Their task was to fill in the blanks with appropriate collocations. The study used 24 target collocations.
To measure the effectiveness of the treatment, they used four tests to elicit the participants’ recognition of form, recognition of meaning, production of form and
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production of meaning. The results suggested that both experimental groups outperformed the control group, showing effectiveness of explicit instruction on collocations. Both the reading group and the cloze group improved significantly after treatment on both receptive and productive tests, but the improvement in the two groups did not differ significantly, indicating none of the tasks tend to be more effective than the other.
In spite of evidence showing collocation knowledge can be facilitated or enhanced by explicit instructions, it seems that collocations still are not often received due attention in classrooms. It seems acceptable to say that class time should be reserved for learners to practice communicating with each other. Learning of language aspects such as words or collocations can be helped with technology that encourages autonomous learning. In other words, teachers can create learning opportunities outside of classrooms for their students. This was attempted by Wu, Franken and Witten (2012). They proposed using web-based games to help students learn collocations. They, however, did not investigate the effectiveness of the games. The present study used a smart phone collocation learning game to create learning opportunities for collocation learning in an easy and enjoyable way.
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Chapter Three Methodology