英語のコロケーション習得に関する問題点の再考： 日本人大学生の英作文における誤用分析

The purpose of this paper is to present my ongoing research in ESL learners’ performance in verb + noun collocations. In this paper, 60 Japanese college students’ compositions were analyzed. Students produced both intra-lingual and inter-lingual errors. Some errors were frequently caused by the lack of ollocational knowledge, while other errors resulted from insufficient knowledge of morphological, lexical, grammatical, semantic or phonological components of English. I will discuss eighteen error types identified in this study and provide some thoughts about the current state of the study of second language collocations and implications for further study and language pedagogy. \n本論文の目的は、日本人英語学習者の「動詞＋名詞」のコロケーションの運用能力について研究報告を行なうことである。日本人大学生60 人の英作文の分析を行なった結果、誤用の原因は学習者の母語である日本語の干渉によるもの (inter-lingual errors) と、学習者の母語とは関係なく現れるもの (intra-lingual errors) があった。また、コロケーションの知識不足による誤用が多く見受けられる一方、英語の形態素、語彙、文法、意味、音声に関する知識など、コロケーションの知識以外のさまざまな要因もコロケーションの誤用に関わっていることが分かった。本分析で見つかった18 種類の誤用パターンについて考察し、コロケーションの第二言語獲得に関する最近の研究に触れながら、今後の研究課題や英語教育への示唆を提示する

Collocational processing in typologically different languages, English and Turkish::Evidence from corpora and psycholinguistic experimentation

Unlike the traditional words-and-rules approach to language processing (Pinker, 1999), usage-based models of language have emphasised the role of multi-word sequences (Christiansen & Chater, 2016b; Ellis, 2002). Various psycholinguistic experiments have demonstrated that multi-word sequences (MWS) are processed quantitatively faster than novel phrases by both L1 and L2 speakers (e.g. Arnon & Snider, 2010; Wolter & Yamashita, 2018). Collocations, a specific type of MWS, hold a prominent position in psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics and language pedagogy research. (Gablasova, Brezina, McEnery, 2017a). In this dissertation, I explored the processing of adjective-noun collocations in Turkish and English by L1 speakers of these languages through a corpus-based study and psycholinguistic experiments. Turkish is an agglutinating language with a rich morphology, it is therefore valid to ask if agglutinating structure of Turkish affects collocational processing in L1 Turkish and whether the same factors affect the processing of collocations in English and Turkish. In addition, this study looked at L1 and L2 processing of collocations in English. This thesis firstly has investigated the frequency counts and associations statistics of English and Turkish adjective-noun collocations through a corpus-based analysis of general reference corpora of English and Turkish. The corpus study showed that unlemmatised collocations, which does not take into account the inflected forms of the collocations, have similar mean frequency and association counts in the both languages. This suggests that the base forms – uninflected forms of the collocations in English and Turkish do not appear to have notably different frequency and association counts from each other. To test the effect of agglutinating structure of Turkish on the collocability of adjectives and nouns, the lemmatised forms of the collocations in the both languages were examined. In other words, collocations in the two languages were lemmatised. The lemmatisation brings the benefit of including the frequency counts of both the base and inflected forms of the collocations. The findings indicated that the vast majority (%75) of the lemmatised Turkish adjective-noun combinations occur at a higher-frequency than their English equivalents. In addition, agglutinating structure of Turkish appears to increase adjective-noun collocations’ association scores in the both frequency bands since the vast majority of Turkish collocations reach higher scores of collocational strengths than their unlemmatised forms. After the corpus study, I designed psycholinguistic experiments to explore the sensitivity of speakers of these languages to the frequency of adjectives, nouns and whole collocations in acceptability judgment tasks in English and Turkish. Mixed-effects regression modelling revealed that collocations which have similar collocational frequency and association scores are processed at comparable speeds in English and Turkish by L1 speakers of these languages. That is to say, both Turkish and English speakers are sensitive to the collocation frequency counts. This finding is in line with many previous empirical studies that language users process MWS quantitively faster than control phrases (e.g. Arnon & Snider, 2010; McDonald & Shillcock, 2003; Vilkaite, 2016). However, lemmatised collocation frequency counts affected the processing of Turkish and English collocations differently, and Turkish speakers appeared to attend to word-level frequency counts of collocations to a lesser extent than English speakers. These findings suggest that different mechanisms underlie L1 processing of English and Turkish collocations. The present study also looked at the sensitivity of L1 and L2 advanced speakers to the frequency of adjectives, nouns and whole collocations in English. Mixed-effects regression modelling revealed that L2 advanced speakers are sensitive to the collocation frequency counts like L1 English speakers because as the collocation frequency counts increased, L1 Turkish-English L2 speakers responded to the collocations in English more quickly, as L1 English speakers did. The results indicated that both groups showed sensitivity to noun frequency counts, and L2 English advanced speakers did not appear to rely on the noun frequency scores more heavily than the L1 English group while processing adjective-noun collocations. These findings are in conflict with the claims that L2 speakers process MWS differently than L1 speakers (Wray, 2002)

An Analysis of Collocations Used in Written Assignment

The aims of this research were to find out the types of collocation that students dominantly make mistake in writing assignment and to discover the students’ strategies in solving the problem in understanding collocation. The study used qualitative method. The populations were the seventh semester students of Department of English Language Education of UIN Ar-Raniry. Five students were selected by using purposive sampling. In collecting the data, this research used the students’ written assignment in using collocation and the interview. The study showed two points; through the students’ written assignment would result the students’ type mistakes and the interview would show the strategies in solving the problem in understanding collocation. The research findings showed that students made a total of 42 mistakes which consist of verb + noun 29 mistakes, adjective + noun 8 mistakes, and verb + adverb 5 mistakes Moreover, the interview showed the students’ strategies in solving the problem of understanding collocation by reading book/dictionary, asking the lecturer, and exploring much information about collocation itself. In conclusion, verb + noun was the most dominant students’ making mistakes in using collocation and reading book was the students’ strategies in solving the problem of understanding collocation. Key Words: Mistake, collocation and written assignment

What are the collocational exemplars of high-frequency English vocabulary? on identifying Mwus most representative of high-frequency, lemmatized concgrams

Collocations, simply defined, are words that have a high frequency of co-occurrence (Biber et al., 1999: Shin, 2006). Collocational fluency is an essential aspect of communicating in and comprehending a second language in a native-like fashion. However, second language learners of English struggle to obtain such fluency since there is a lack of focus on it in the classroom and in ESL resources. This stems from the lack of a large-scale resource that identifies which collocations to teach to help learners master high-frequency English. So, although a large number of researchers agree upon the importance of collocational fluency and focusing on high-frequency collocations directly, learners, teachers and materials writers lack guidance as to which items to focus on. Such a resource is not available because research that has consideration for all the important aspects of identifying collocations that previous researchers have identified has yet to be implemented on a large scale. Therefore, this thesis set out to accomplish such a task. The goal was to create a methodology which would result in a practical resource which identifies multi-word units most representative of high-frequency collocations of high-frequency lemma of English, and which of these items would be most useful for Japanese learners to study. It aimed to identify such items by collecting and analyzing corpus data with the help of eight native English speaking university teachers in Japan who teach English as a second language, two native English speaking junior high school teachers in Japan who teach English as a second language, five native Japanese translators with native-like ability in English, one native English speaking university professor who teaches English as a second language and has extensive knowledge developing concordance software, and one Romanian translator with native-like ability in both English and Japanese. Once identified, Japanese university freshmen were tested on their knowledge of these items. This study took a corpus linguistics approach, working with data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), to identify high-frequency collocations and the multiword units they most commonly occur in. A frequency cut-off was identified which resulted in approximately 11,000 multi-word units that only consist of approximately 3,000 word families, of which the vast majority are high-frequency. Corpus dispersion and chronological data were iii deemed unreliable for determining whether or not items selected had general usefulness over a variety of genres and throughout time, and time-consuming manual analysis for general usefulness was deemed essential. This was due to the fact that this study’s data analysis alone would either lead to items deemed worthy of direct instruction by native speakers being flagged as having unbalanced data dispersion at certain parameters, while at other parameters items deemed unworthy of direct instruction were shown to have balanced data dispersion. Also, consideration for colligation was found to only improve upon a small percentage of items, and while useful for improving the quality of data, the process was found to be extremely complex and time consuming due to the lack of an established methodology and dedicated software. Expanding multi-word units beyond their core was found to be an essential step in that native speakers opted to do this in over half of the items identified. For example, concordance data identified equal access as the most frequent multi-word unit that the two lemma equal/access occur in (the core unit), but the native speaker opted to add the next most common multi-word unit instead (equal access to) in regards to what unit should be studied directly by learners. Semantic transparency analysis to help select only items that are semantically opaque and thus deserve more study time was not fruitful since the majority of items identified were considered to be semantically transparent. In contrast, L1-L2 congruency was found to be a very important criterion to consider with half of the items identified being considered incongruent to an extent, thus deserving more study time. Furthermore, native speaker intuition was found to be extremely reliable in regards to context creation using mostly high-frequency vocabulary. Out of 130,000 tokens of example sentence context created, the added content only reduced the percentage of tokens in the high-frequency realm (3,000 word families) by 0.92 percent. Confirming this was essential in that if their intuition could be relied upon for context creation that used mostly high-frequency vocabulary it would help avoid adding additional learning burden. Finally, university students’ knowledge of a balanced selection of the items with consideration for frequency and L1-L2 congruency was found to be quite low overall, highlighting the need for increased focus on the list in general. This study thus filled a major gap in the research in that it resulted in a list of items which can be utilized to help create resources or studied directly to help improve collocational fluency. A variety of steps were taken to create this resource which helped highlight the value or lack iv thereof of each of these steps to achieve this study’s goal. Therefore, this study should be considered a valuable contribution towards research which aims to help second language learners achieve collocational fluency