Corpus-based Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis of Collocation in English Essays Written by Asian EFL learners

【摘要】 In order to explore collocational usage competence across two different contexts,NS and NNS,in the current study,I investigated usage and frequency of collocation of Taiwanese learners of English(TWN),Indonesian learners of English(IND) and English native speakers(NS),and found collocations statistically overused or underused by learner groups,which had not been studied before.Collocation is defined here as the word clusters composed of three and four words which occur 2 times and above,seen in English essays in the ICNALE corpus.All the collocations in the three corpora have been classified into 17 patterns based on the lexical and grammatical collocation categorization of Benson et al(1997).The results suggest that NNS have mastered different types of collocations to write essays,but use them differently from NS,as 27%in TWN and 38%in IND of the 150 most frequently used collocations are significantly overused or underused(p<0.0001).These findings obtained from a quantitative data analysis suggest that teachers in Taiwan and Indonesia should not only try to arouse students ’ awareness of collocations but also do a pre-writing exercise of listing collocations related to a certain topic.These implications may also be useful for other Asian EFL countries.更多还原

【Abstract】 In order to explore collocational usage competence across two different contexts,NS and NNS,in the current study,I investigated usage and frequency of collocation of Taiwanese learners of English(TWN),Indonesian learners of English(IND) and English native speakers(NS),and found collocations statistically overused or underused by learner groups,which had not been studied before.Collocation is defined here as the word clusters composed of three and four words which occur 2 times and above,seen in English essays in the ICNALE corpus.All the collocations in the three corpora have been classified into 17 patterns based on the lexical and grammatical collocation categorization of Benson et al(1997).The results suggest that NNS have mastered different types of collocations to write essays,but use them differently from NS,as 27%in TWN and 38%in IND of the 150 most frequently used collocations are significantly overused or underused(p<0.0001).These findings obtained from a quantitative data analysis suggest that teachers in Taiwan and Indonesia should not only try to arouse students ’ awareness of collocations but also do a pre-writing exercise of listing collocations related to a certain topic.These implications may also be useful for other Asian EFL countries.更多还原