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The Acquisition of Basic Collocations by Japanese Learners of English PDF

427 Pages·2005·2.89 MB·English
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The Acquisition of Basic Collocations by Japanese Learners of English A Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of Waseda University by KOYA Taeko In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2005 Contents List of Tables.................................................................................................................................v List of Figures.............................................................................................................................vii Acknowledgements.....................................................................................................................viii Chapter 1. Introduction 1.1. General background.............................................................................................................1 1.1.1. Vocabulary acquisition research since the 1980s........................................................1 1.1.2. Importance of collocation studies and related problems.............................................2 1.1.3. Change of vocabulary treatment for Japanese learners of English in the government guidelines for foreign language teaching................................................4 1.1.4. Lack of pedagogical consensus on collocation in Japan.............................................6 1.2. The main research questions and organization of the chapters............................................7 Chapter 2. Literature review (1): Definition of collocation 2.1. Introduction..........................................................................................................................9 2.2. Terminology of three major groups of phraseology.............................................................9 2.2.1. Collocation, idiom and free combination..................................................................10 2.2.2. Terminology problem................................................................................................25 2.3. Previous studies on collocations........................................................................................25 2.3.1. Descriptive studies....................................................................................................25 2.3.2. Semantic studies........................................................................................................41 2.3.3. Computational studies...............................................................................................51 2.3.4. Lexicographic studies................................................................................................64 2.3.5. Pedagogical studies...................................................................................................75 2.4. Importance of collocation..................................................................................................85 2.5. Summary............................................................................................................................88 Chapter 3. Literature review (2): Empirical research on collocation 3.1. Introduction........................................................................................................................93 3.2. Empirical research on collocation to date..........................................................................93 3.2.1. Collocation research mainly in terms of L1 influence..............................................93 3.2.2. Collocation research in terms of several factors including L1 influence..................99 3.2.3. Other collocation research.......................................................................................108 3.2.4. Summary.................................................................................................................111 3.3. State of collocation in Japan to date.................................................................................115 3.3.1. Collocation research in Japan..................................................................................115 3.3.2. Description of collocations in collocation dictionaries and English-Japanese dictionaries.................................................................................119 3.3.3. Summary.................................................................................................................122 - i - Chapter 4. Pilot study 4.1. Introduction......................................................................................................................123 4.2. Definition of collocation in the present research.............................................................123 4.3. Pilot Study I: Corpus-based research...............................................................................124 4.3.1. Pilot Study I-1: Same leveled six English I textbooks............................................125 4.3.2. Pilot Study I-2: English I textbooks vs. English II textbooks.................................128 4.3.3. Pilot Study I-3: Revised English I textbooks vs. former English I textbooks.........130 4.3.4. Pilot Study I-4: History textbooks in the UK..........................................................133 4.3.5. Summary of the four pilot studies...........................................................................137 4.3.6. New research questions raised by the four pilot studies.........................................139 4.4. Pilot Study II: Empirical research....................................................................................141 4.4.1. Pilot Study II-1........................................................................................................142 4.4.2. New research question raised by Pilot Study II......................................................147 Chapter 5. Methodology: Phase I. Corpus-based research 5.1. Introduction......................................................................................................................150 5.2. Purpose and research questions........................................................................................150 5.3. Materials: Corpus.............................................................................................................152 5.3.1. British National Corpus (BNC)...............................................................................152 5.3.2. Making the TIME corpus........................................................................................154 5.3.3. Making the English I textbook corpus....................................................................155 5.4. Selection of collocations..................................................................................................156 5.5. Procedure.........................................................................................................................159 Chapter 6. Results and discussion: Phase I. Corpus-based research 6.1. Introduction......................................................................................................................161 6.2. Results..............................................................................................................................161 6.2.1. Analysis of the BNC................................................................................................161 6.2.2. Analysis of the TIME corpus..................................................................................164 6.2.3. Features of collocations in the BNC and the TIME corpus.....................................167 6.2.4. Are high-frequency collocations topic-oriented?....................................................169 6.2.5. Do collocations occurring in English textbooks for upper secondary school students in Japan deviate from those of native-speaker English?.................170 6.2.6. Summary.................................................................................................................176 6.3. Discussion........................................................................................................................178 6.4. Basic collocations determined by analyses of corpora.....................................................183 Chapter 7. Methodology: Phase II. Empirical research on the development of learners’ collocational knowledge 7.1. Introduction......................................................................................................................186 7.2. Research questions...........................................................................................................186 7.3. Selected collocations........................................................................................................187 - i i- 7.4. Materials...........................................................................................................................191 7.4.1. Test A: Vocabulary size test.....................................................................................191 7.4.2. Test B: Productive collocation test..........................................................................193 7.4.3. Test C: Receptive collocation test...........................................................................194 7.5. Subjects............................................................................................................................194 7.6. Data collection procedure................................................................................................195 7.7. Scoring procedure............................................................................................................196 Chapter 8. Results and discussion: Phase II. Empirical research on the development of learners’ collocational knowledge 8.1. Introduction......................................................................................................................199 8.2. Results..............................................................................................................................199 8.2.1. Research question 1.....................................................................................................199 8.2.2. Research question 2.....................................................................................................205 8.2.3. Research question 3.....................................................................................................208 8.2.4. Research question 4.....................................................................................................212 8.2.5. Extra finding...............................................................................................................219 8.3. Discussion........................................................................................................................221 8.3.1. Discussion of research questions................................................................................221 8.3.1.1. Research question 1..............................................................................................221 8.3.1.2. Research question 2..............................................................................................223 8.3.1.3. Research question 3..............................................................................................226 8.3.1.4. Research question 4 and extra findings................................................................228 8.3.3. Discussion of ease or difficulty of collocation acquisition in reception and production in the different vocabulary groups.............................................................233 8.3.4. Summary of the collocation acquisition in the different vocabulary level groups......243 8.3.5. Pedagogical implications............................................................................................245 Chapter 9. Conclusions 9.1. Overview..........................................................................................................................250 9.2. Pedagogical implications for effective compilation of English textbooks.......................254 9.3. Limitations of the study...................................................................................................256 9.4. Future research.................................................................................................................258 References....................................................................................................................................261 Appendices Appendix A......................................................................................................................................276 Appendix B......................................................................................................................................301 Appendix C......................................................................................................................................343 Appendix D.....................................................................................................................................368 Appendix E......................................................................................................................................393 - ii i- Appendix F......................................................................................................................................394 Appendix G.....................................................................................................................................401 Appendix H.....................................................................................................................................406 Appendix I.......................................................................................................................................410 Appendix J.......................................................................................................................................413 Appendix K.....................................................................................................................................414 Appendix L......................................................................................................................................417 - iv - List of Tables Table 1. Decreases of the number of words in the government guidelines for foreign language teaching published by MEXT...........................................................5 Table 2. Various names for two criteria..........................................................................................24 Table 3. Various terms for collocation............................................................................................25 Table 4. Lexico-grammatical system by Halliday (1966, pp. 152-153).........................................28 Table 5. Semantic field of cause and effect by Stubbs (1995, pp. 252-253)...................................49 Table 6. Grammatical collocations by Benson et al. (1997, pp. xv-xxxiii)....................................69 Table 7. Lexical collocations by Benson et al. (1997, pp. xv-xxxiii).............................................70 Table 8. 19 categorization of collocations by Kjellmer (1994, pp. xxiii-xxix)..............................72 Table 9. Empirical research on collocation..................................................................................112 Table 10. Two main criteria defining collocation...........................................................................123 Table 11. Verb-noun collocations selected in Pilot Study I-1.........................................................127 Table 12. Verb-noun collocations selected in Pilot Study I-2.........................................................129 Table 13. Verb-noun collocations selected in Pilot Study I-3.........................................................132 Table 14. Verb-noun collocations extracted from a history textbook in Pilot Study I-4................135 Table 15. Verb-noun collocations extracted from English I textbooks in Pilot Study I-4..............136 Table 16. Three groups of subjects.................................................................................................143 Table 17. Selected collocations (a) with a Japanese equivalent and (b) without a Japanese equivalent............................................................................144 Table 18. Tokens and types in TIME..............................................................................................155 Table 19. Four main categories......................................................................................................155 Table 20. Tokens and types in four English I textbooks.................................................................156 Table 21. Levels of nouns and verbs according to JACET 8000....................................................158 Table 22. Procedure of the corpus-based research.........................................................................160 Table 23. Number of V-N collocations in the BNC........................................................................162 Table 24. Level of the nodes and collocates per 100 collocations in the BNC..............................163 Table 25. Number of collocations appearing in the TIME corpus.................................................164 Table 26. High-frequency collocates in collocations in the TIME corpus (five times or more)....165 Table 27. High-frequency collocations in the TIME corpus (10 times or more)............................165 Table 28. Level of the nodes and collocates per high-frequency collocations in the TIME corpus.........................................................................................................166 Table 29. Rank of high-frequency collocations in the BNC and the TIME corpus........................168 Table 30. Rank of six high-frequency collocations in the TIME corpus except collocations shown in Table 29...........................................................................168 Table 31. Number of high-frequency collocations in the categorized four topics..........................170 Table 32. Frequency of appearance of verb-noun collocations in each level of the English I textbook corpus.....................................................................................171 Table 33. Means and standard deviations per text..........................................................................172 Table 34. Frequency of appearance of Level 1 verbs and nouns and Level 1 verb-noun collocations................................................................................172 Table 35. Appearance of collocations in textbooks........................................................................173 Table 36. Frequency of each collocation in each textbook............................................................174 Table 37. Rank of high-frequency collocations in the BNC, the TIME corpus and the English I textbook corpus within rank 100........................................................175 v Table 38. Four criteria to select basic collocation based on the corpus analyses...........................184 Table 39. Basic collocations...........................................................................................................185 Table 40. Selected collocations......................................................................................................188 Table 41. Six features and the sub categories of collocations........................................................190 Table 42. Way of estimating the number of words in the VST......................................................192 Table 43. Four groups of subjects..................................................................................................195 Table 44. Categorization of correct and incorrect answers............................................................197 Table 45. Descriptive statistics: Mean scores for general vocabulary size, productive collocation size and receptive collocation size.............................................200 Table 46. Pearson correlation between vocabulary size and receptive and productive collocation size......................................................................................200 Table 47. Descriptive statistics: Mean scores for receptive collocation size and productive collocation size of the four different vocabulary level groups...............201 Table 48. One-Way ANOVA results for the relationship between the receptive and productive collocation sizes of the four different vocabulary groups......................201 Table 49. Tukey’s HSD tests for the relationship of receptive and productive collocation sizes of the four different vocabulary groups..........................................................................202 Table 50. Percentage of correct answers of each collocation in the four different vocabulary level groups-in production (with graph)....................................................203 Table 51. Percentage of correct answers of each collocation in the four different vocabulary level groups-in reception (with graph)......................................................204 Table 52. Comparison of receptive knowledge of collocation (R) and productive knowledge of collocation (P) within different vocabulary groups (t test)......................206 Table 53. Percentage of correct answers of each collocation in reception and production (with graph) .................................................................................................................207 Table 54. Kruskal Wallis analysis of variance for the sub category difference in the semantic opacity (Productive test)........................................................................210 Table 55. Mann-Whitney U analyses for the sub category difference in L1 equivalence, collocational restriction, delexicalized verbs, core meanings of verbs and nouns and collocational structure (Productive test)..............................................210 Table 56. Kruskal Wallis analysis of variance for the sub category difference in the semantic opacity (Receptive test).........................................................................211 Table 57. Mann-Whitney U analyses for the sub category difference in L1 equivalence, collocational restriction, delexicalized verbs, core meanings of verbs and nouns and collocational structure (Receptive test)...............................................212 Table 58. Descriptive statistics: Mean scores for measurements of alternative collocations and other expressions.....................................................................................................213 Table 59. One-Way ANOVA results for measurements of alternative collocations and other expressions.....................................................................................................213 Table 60. Tukey’s HSD tests for measurements of alternative collocations and other expressions.....................................................................................................214 Table 61. Number and percentage of incorrect answers and blanks..............................................215 Table 62. Descriptive statistics: Mean scores for frequency of ways used in unknowing collocations..............................................................................................217 vi Table 63. One-Way ANOVA results measuring frequency of ways used to deal with unknown collocations.....................................................................................................217 Table 64. Tukey’s HSD tests for the frequency of ways used to deal with unknown collocations.....................................................................................................218 Table 65. Descriptive statistics: Mean scores for appropriate adjectives with correct collocations.................................................................................................220 Table 66. One-Way ANOVA results for appropriate adjectives with correct collocations.............220 Table 67. Tukey’s HSD tests for appropriate adjectives with correct collocations........................220 Table 68. Levels of collocational difficulty in reception................................................................233 Table 69. Levels of collocational difficulty in production.............................................................234 Table 70. Order of high frequency and low frequency correct answers in the productive collocation test – all groups (N=130).................................................236 Table 71. Order of high frequency and low frequency correct answers in the receptive collocation test – all groups (N=130)....................................................236 Table 72. Order of high frequency and low frequency correct answers in the productive collocation test – 2000 level (N=31)..................................................237 Table 73. Order of high frequency and low frequency correct answers in the receptive collocation test – 2000 level (N=31).....................................................238 Table 74. Order of high frequency and low frequency correct answers in the productive collocation test – 3000 level (N=26)..................................................239 Table 75. Order of high frequency and low frequency correct answers in the receptive collocation test – 3000 level (N=26).....................................................239 Table 76. Order of high frequency and low frequency correct answers in the productive collocation test – 4000 level (N=41)..................................................240 Table 77. Order of high frequency and low frequency correct answers in the receptive collocation test – 4000 level (N=41).....................................................240 Table 78. Order of high frequency and low frequency correct answers in the productive collocation test – 5000 level (N=32)..................................................241 Table 79. Order of high frequency and low frequency correct answers in the receptive collocation test – 5000 level (N=32).....................................................242 Table 80. Judgment of 70 acceptable collocations by the three groups (Phrase II. Empirical research).......................................................................................257 List of Figures Figure 1. Categorization of English word combinations by Aisenstadt (1979, p. 71, 1981, pp. 53-54)..........................................................................................10 Figure 2. Continuum of word combinations by Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992, p. 178)...............12 Figure 3. Levels of collocational complexity by Schmitt (2000, p. 79)...........................................15 Figure 4. Multiword expressions by Fernando (1996, p. 32)...........................................................17 Figure 5. Proportion of Level 1 and Level 2 verbs and nouns.......................................................166 Figure 6. Factors influencing the development of collocational knowledge.................................244 vii Acknowledgements This doctoral dissertation would not have been completed without considerable help and encouragement of many special persons. First of all, I would like to express my greatest gratitude to my supervisor, Professor YANO Yasukata. His invaluable advice and thoughtful encouragement throughout the years made it possible to pursue critical reading of previous pieces of research and the originality of my dissertation. It has been my honor to complete it under his continuous instruction. I would also like to express my deep appreciation to my dissertation committee members: Emeritus Professor SHINODA Yoshiaki, Professor Paul Snowden, Professor NAKANO Michiko and Professor MURATA Kumiko. Their constructive and critical comment on the draft of this dissertation helped me to polish it to the level of doctoral dissertation. I would like to extend my great appreciation to Professor KAWAGUCHI Yoshikazu and Associate Professor NAMAI Kenichi, who helped to collect data for my research. I also wish to thank Professor Jeffrey Miller for reading through my manuscript patiently within a limited time. My special thanks are due to the late Emeritus Professor TANABE Yoji who proofread the abstract of this dissertation and gave me appropriate advice. I am particularly grateful to my parents for their deep understanding and warm-hearted encouragement for years. They have always supported my pursuit of academic interests. Finally, I owe a sincere gratitude to my husband, SHIMOYAMA Yukinari. He always gave me inspiring comments on my research and encouraged me to continue writing my manuscript wholeheartedly. Without his support and patience, I could not have completed this dissertation. viii

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Change of vocabulary treatment for Japanese learners of English in the government guidelines for foreign . Collocation research in terms of several factors including L1 influence 99. 3.2.3. for foreign language teaching published by MEXT . Semantic field of cause and effect by Stubbs ( 1995
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