View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by BCU Open Access VOCABULARY INCREASE AND COLLOCATION LEARNING: A CORPUS-BASED CROSS-SECTIONAL STUDY OF CHINESE EFL LEARNERS HAIYAN MEN A Thesis Submitted to Birmingham City University in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy March 2015 The Faculty of Arts, Design and Media Acknowledgements I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to all those who have directed me into the field of English linguistics and provided me with so much guidance and encouragement throughout the period of my doctoral study. First and foremost, my deepest gratitude goes to my supervisor, Professor Richard Ingham, whose rigorous academic training, thought-provoking guidance, and invaluable spur in various viewpoints have always been treasures for me in the writing process and beyond. I would also like to thank him for his endless patience in revising the draft chapters, and my conference abstracts. Apart from being my supervisor, he is also a wonderful mentor. I have also benefited much from him for his humour and unique ways of thinking. Thanks to his valuable instruction and warm support, I am able to pursue this doctoral study and accomplish it in time. I am very much indebted to two other supervisors, Dr. Ursula Lutzky and Prof. Antoinette Renouf, for their valuable comments and assistance, and for their conscientious proofreading of the drafts. I am particularly grateful to Prof. Yang Huizhong for not only his lively and stimulating instruction throughout my MA study, but also for his continuous monitoring and constant critical comments on my doctoral thesis. I also owe my debt to him for his constant care of both my academic study and life overseas. At an institutional level my thanks are due to Shanghai Sanda University for providing financial support for this doctoral study, and for providing funds for me to attend conferences of this field. Finally, my gratitude is reserved for my parents and friends. Special thanks are given to my fiancé and now husband, Mr. Wang Shuai for his unselfish help and unfailing support. Though immense help has been received from those whose contributions have been acknowledged above, I take sole responsibility for any errors and failings I have not been able to correct. I Abstract Collocation learning has long been recognised as a problematic domain for even high-level learners and acknowledged to lag far behind acquisition of other SLA aspects. This thesis explores the role of vocabulary growth in the learning of L2 collocations. It addresses the relationship between vocabulary increase and L2 collocation learning, aiming to identify whether increasing lexemes in a syn(onym)set (Fellbaum, 1998) is the main factor responsible. A corpus-based cross-sectional study was undertaken on Chinese EFL learners’written production of three types of collocations: verb + noun collocations (the main research target), adjective + noun and noun + noun collocations. Lexical verbs in verb + noun collocations were classified into synsets and analyses were performed on collocations within these synsets. It finds a lag in L2 learners’verb + noun collocational knowledge with rising proficiency. This lag in collocational knowledge was found to be associated with an increase in lexical verbs learnt at higher levels. Collocation errors were seldom made where there was no increase in verb synsets. However, for synsets in which there was a verb increase, collocation errors involving new verbs were significantly more likely than errors with old verbs. The occurrence of collocation errors became increasingly limited to synsets with a verb increase as learners proceeded to more advanced levels. An alternative explanation was attempted to see if newly acquired nouns were also a factor responsible for the collocation lag. Results showed that in the majority of new nouns produced by higher levels of learners, collocations were target-like, and the percentages of new nouns in erroneous verb + noun collocations remained constant at both higher levels. In contrast, it finds an improvement in L2 learners’knowledge of adjective + noun and noun + noun collocations. The thesis attempted to account for such differing performance from the perspective of vocabulary growth within synsets. The decreasing synonym density of verbs, adjectives and nouns may account for the relatively poorer performance on verb + noun collocations, and better performance on adjective + noun and noun + noun collocations. These findings are discussed with a view to a clearer understanding of the process of second language collocation learning, and to pedagogical implications. II Abbreviations Corpora: BNC British National Corpus CLEC Chinese Learner English Corpus ICLE International Corpus of Learner English Dictionaries: Bilingual dictionaries: NCCED New Century Chinese-English Dictionary OALECD Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary (7th Edition) English dictionaries: BBI The BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English: Your Guide to Collocations and Grammar (3rd Edition) EVCA English Verb Classes and Alternations OCDSE Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English (2nd Edition) ODSA Oxford Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms COBUILD Collins COBUILD English Dictionary (2nd Edition) Chinese dictionaries: CCD Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (5th Edition) Other abbreviations: AN adjective + noun DeLexVN delexical verb + noun EFL English as a foreign language ELT English language teaching ESL English as a second language FL foreign language FLT foreign language teaching L1 first language/mother tongue L2 second language/foreign/target language LexVN lexical verb + noun NN noun + noun NNSs non-native speakers NSs native speakers POS Part of Speech SL second language SLA second language acquisition VN verb + noun III Contents List of Tables.................................................................................................................................... VIII List of Figures ...................................................................................................................................... X Chapter 1: Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 1.0 General background ................................................................................................................ 1 1.1 Aims of the thesis .................................................................................................................... 3 1.2 The shape of the thesis ............................................................................................................ 7 Chapter 2: Literature review (1): The notion of collocation ................................................................. 9 2.0 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 9 2.1 The importance of collocation................................................................................................. 9 2.1.1 The pervasiveness of phraseological tendency............................................................. 9 2.1.2 The importance of collocation for L2 learners ........................................................... 12 2.1.3 Summary .................................................................................................................... 13 2.2 The notion of collocation....................................................................................................... 14 2.2.1 Collocation previously approached ............................................................................ 14 2.2.1.1 The psychological approach ............................................................................ 15 2.2.1.2 The Firthian approach...................................................................................... 17 2.2.1.3 The phraseological approach........................................................................... 21 2.2.2 Collocation defined in this study................................................................................ 27 2.2.3 Collocations classified in this study ........................................................................... 30 2.2.4 Summary .................................................................................................................... 33 Chapter 3: Literature review (2): Collocation studies in second language learner English ................ 34 3.0 Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 34 3.1 Methodologies adopted in L2 collocation studies................................................................. 34 3.1.1 Elicitation data-based collocation studies .................................................................. 35 3.1.2 Spontaneous data-based collocation studies............................................................... 39 3.2 Previous findings from L2 collocation research.................................................................... 42 3.2.1 Forms of collocation deficiency: overuse, underuse and misuse ............................... 43 3.2.1.1 Overuse and underuse...................................................................................... 43 3.2.1.2 Collocation misuse .........................................................................................