A Corpus-Based, Pilot Study of Lexical Stress Variation in American English

Phonological free variation describes the phenomenon of there being more than one pronunciation for a word without any change in meaning (e.g. because, schedule, vehicle). The term also applies to words that exhibit different stress patterns (e.g. academic, resources, comparable) with no change in meaning or grammatical category. A corpus-based analysis of free variation is a useful tool for testing the validity of surveys of speakers' pronunciation preferences for certain variants. The current paper presents the results of a corpus-based pilot study of American English, in an attempt to replicate Mompéan's 2009 study of British English

METRICC: Harnessing Comparable Corpora for Multilingual Lexicon Development

International audienceResearch on comparable corpora has grown in recent years bringing about the possibility of developing multilingual lexicons through the exploitation of comparable corpora to create corpus-driven multilingual dictionaries. To date, this issue has not been widely addressed. This paper focuses on the use of the mechanism of collocational networks proposed by Williams (1998) for exploiting comparable corpora. The paper first provides a description of the METRICC project, which is aimed at the automatically creation of comparable corpora and describes one of the crawlers developed for comparable corpora building, and then discusses the power of collocational networks for multilingual corpus-driven dictionary development

EFFECTS OF MEANING- AND FORM-FOCUSED INSTRUCTION ON THE ACQUISITION OF VERB-NOUN COLLOCATIONS IN L2 ENGLISH

 The study investigated the effect of meaning- and form-focused instruction on the acquisition of collocations by L1 Polish learners of English as a foreign language. Forty-three intermediate learners were divided into three groups: meaning-focused instruction plus focus-on-forms (MFI plus), meaning-focused instruction (MFI only) and a control group. During a three-week treatment, the two experimental groups were provided with two different types of instruction. The MFI plus group read stories that contained target collocations and additionally completed explicit exercises focused on collocational patterns, while the MFI only group read the same stories but no mention of collocations was made. The target collocations were verb-noun combinations with frequent delexical English verbs (e.g. ‘give birth’ or ‘take a step’) likely to be known by participants receptively but causing difficulty in language production. Three tests tapping into collocational competence at different levels of vocabulary mastery revealed that MFI followed by Focus on Forms (FonFs) is an effective way of enhancing learners’ collocational knowledge at both the productive and receptive level, whereas MFI only does not seem to lead to much improvement. The study is discussed in relation to prior research on L1 influence on L2 vocabulary acquisition and offers insights into language pedagogy

THE TREATMENT OF COLLOCATIONS IN ENGLISH TEXTBOOKS FOR VIETNAMESE STUDENTS

The present study investigates collocational profiles that appear in the English textbook series for Vietnamese students from elementary to high school grades by identifying how the series covers collocations in terms of frequency and how the mode of collocation presentation aligns with recommendations in the existing literature. A total of 30,005 collocations of both verb-noun and adjective-noun patterns were identified, of which 1,078 are targeted collocations. The study found that the frequencies of occurrences of collocation tokens increase steadily alongside the three grade levels, while the frequencies of collocation types are not distributed proportionately. As for the mode of collocation presentation, targeted collocations and collocation exercises follow the best practices recommended in the literature to a certain extent and in some criteria; inconsistency, however, was found to be one of the shortcomings across those evaluation criteria. Pedagogical implications for teachers and textbook authors are discussed