Book Notices

Obra ressenyada: Nadja NESSELHAUF, Collocations in a learner corpus. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2005

Review: Nadja Nesselhauf, Collocations in a learner corpus. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2005, xii +331 pp

This is a review of Nesselhauf's book "Collocations in a Learner Corpus.

The use of adjective-noun, verb-noun and phrasal-verb-noun collocations in Estonian learner corpus of English

Vocabulary is one of the most crucial aspects of language learning but a large vocabulary does not always guarantee effective communication. The knowledge of collocations is also important as it improves the fluency and quality of spoken or written language. Unfortunately, learning collocations can be a difficult task because there are no exact rules why some words fit together and others do not. Studies have shown that congruency (i.e. the presence or absence of L1 translation equivalent) and collocate-node relationship (i.e. the type of a collocation) can influence the use of collocations in learner language. The characteristics of learner language can nowadays be studied by analysing written or spoken learner corpus stored in a computer database. Hundreds of learner corpora have been compiled around the world but in Estonia only few corpora have been built, none of them comprising of texts produced by Estonian learners of English. In 2014, a learner corpus of 127 essays was developed at the English Department of the University of Tartu, which finally made it possible to investigate the use of different collocations in Estonian EFL learners’ writing. The thesis has two main chapters. The first chapter describes the definitions of the term collocation¸ explains the role of learner corpus in language teaching and gives an overview of previous research conducted. The second chapter describes the empirical study carried out in this thesis, explains the methodology, target collocations and the procedure of collecting the data. The study in this paper adopts a combination of quantitative and qualitative corpus analysis approaches. The AntConc Word List and Concordance tools (Anthony 2014) were used in order to extract all adjective-noun, verb-noun and phrasal-verb-noun collocations that were related to the most frequently used nouns in the corpus. The subchapter addressing the results presents the most frequently used adjective-noun, verb-noun and phrasal-verb-noun collocations found in the study, the distribution of collocations based on collocate-node relationship and congruency, and finally it analyses the naturalness of the collocations found in the English language. The last section in the second chapter presents an interpretation of the findings.http://www.ester.ee/record=b4581563*es

Book Notices

Obra ressenyada: Elena MIRONESKO BIELOVA ; José Antonio HITA JIMÉNEZ, Introducción a la estilística rusa. Estilo coloquial. Barcelona: PPU, 2004

Assessing English language learners' collocation knowledge:A systematic review of receptive and productive measurements

Since collocation knowledge is integral to second language vocabulary depth, it necessitates a careful examination of various measurement approaches. To this end, the current paper provides an overview and evaluation of extant collocation measurements used in empirical studies on L2 English (N = 153) published between 1980 and 2023 indexed in the SSCI, SCIE, AHCI, SCOPUS, and ERIC databases. Six instruments, seven item formats, and three other assessment tools were identified and reviewed for the assessment of receptive and productive collocation knowledge. The review focused on the collocation knowledge measured by each tool, the instrument and/or item format employed, item design, reported reliability, and potential drawbacks of employing each instrument and item format in research or practice. The review proposes several theoretical and practical considerations for future assessments of and research on English collocation knowledge.</p

Uma análise quantitativa de colocações em produções acadêmicas de estudantes brasileiros e britânicos

Language is formulaic in nature, which means that appropriate writing goes beyond knowing isolated words. The objective of this paper is to analyze the quantitative difference in the use of collocations of the Academic Collocation List (ACL) in two academic corpora, the British Academic Written English (BAWE) and the Brazilian Academic Written English (BrAWE). In order to conduct this analysis, we used corpus linguistics as our methodology. The results show that only few collocations of ACL came up as statistically significant when we investigated the BrAWE corpus in comparison with BAWE, indicating that Brazilians use academic collocations appropriately when compared to British. This research points to the importance of focusing on collocations in Academic English teaching contexts, since they cooperate to guarantee conventionality in language. Moreover, both British and Brazilians use academic collocations that are not necessarily present in ACL, suggesting a possible mismatch between what is prescribed and what is actually used in authentic language.A língua é formulaica por natureza, o que significa que a redação adequada vai além do conhecimento de palavras isoladas. O objetivo deste artigo é analisar a diferença quantitativa do uso de colocações da Academic Collocation List (ACL) em dois corpora acadêmicos, o British Academic Written English (BAWE) e o Brazilian Academic Written English (BrAWE). Para realizar essa análise, utilizamos a Linguística de Corpus como metodologia. Os resultados apontam que poucas colocações do ACL se mostraram estatisticamente significativas quando investigamos o corpus BrAWE em comparação com o BAWE, indicando que os brasileiros utilizam as colocações acadêmicas de forma adequada quando comparados aos britânicos. Esta pesquisa ressalta a importância do foco em colocações nos contextos de ensino de inglês acadêmico, uma vez que elas ajudam a garantir a convencionalidade no uso da língua. Além disso, observamos que britânicos e brasileiros usam colocações acadêmicas que não estão necessariamente presentes na ACL, sugerindo um possível descompasso entre o que é prescrito e o que é realmente usado na linguagem autêntica

The collocation in learning vocabulary: the Problems and pedagogical suggestions

This was a descriptive qualitative research which was administered to 20 students of STMIK Jayanusa Padang. The data from the observation shown that the lack of collocation competence of the students noticeable when non-native speakers of English need productive language knowledge. they only experienced the limited number of lexical collocations they know or under the influence of their first language “create” unnatural and farfetched collocations. In order to solve this problem, this investigation aimed to expose the students' collocation problems in vocabulary teaching by using collocation tests and questionnaire. The data found were used to offer some pedagogical suggestions that can be applied in class as a starting point, especially to advanced students. Then it is hoped that students will have properly developed and balanced in learning collocations which will help them speak and write English in a more natural way

O važnosti odabira riječi: Analiza kolokacija pridjev-imenica u korpusu učeničkih eseja

Foreign language learners’ choice of collocations is traditionally considered to be one of the main markers of foreignlanguageness (Korosadowitz-Struzynska 1980: 115), hence relevant in achieving a high degree of competence in the target language. In this study we analyse the Croatian Corpus of English Learner Essays (CELE), which consists of 298 argumentative essays written as part of the state school-leaving exam. The corpus, consisting of over 74k tokens was collected in 10 different counties, and the essays were produced in 2010 and 2011. The learner’s use of adjective-noun collocations is compared against both findings from a native speaker corpus (BNC) and a corpus of learner English (ICLE). Instead of viewing learner usage of collocations as deficient, the claims about the overuse and the underuse of statistically significant collocations are made on the basis of joint findings from the BNC and the ICLE. This approach demonstrates how native speaker data can be used for comparison, without being the norm against which the learner data should be measured, and, on the other hand, how other learner data can help distinguish between general characteristics of learner language and L1-transfer.Odabir i uporaba kolokacija često se ističe kao jedan od pokazatelja inojezičnosti (engl. foreignlanguageness, usp. Korosadowitz-Struzynska 1980), ali ujedno i visoke razine jezične sposobnosti. U ovome je istraživanju analiziran Hrvatski korpus eseja učenika engleskoga jezika (CELE) sastavljen od 198 eseja koje su napisali učenici engleskoga jezika iz deset županija 2010. i 2011. godine kao dio Državne mature iz engleskoga jezika. Korpus čini preko 74 000 pojavnica. Uspoređuje se uporaba kolokacije pridjev˗imenica s nalazima iz korpusa izvornih govornika (BNC) i korpusa učenika engleskoga jezika (ICLE). Uporaba kolokacija ne karakterizira se isključivo kao manjkava (usp. Shih 2000), nego se promatra pretjerana ili rijetka uporaba statistički značajnih kolokacija u usporedbi s nalazima iz korpusa BNC i ICLE. Taj pristup pokazuje s jedne strane da se jezična uporaba izvornih govornika ne mora primijeniti u usporedbi s jezičnom proizvodnjom neizvornih govornika isključivo kao norma, a s druge strane da podaci drugih učenika mogu poslužiti u razlikovanju općih obilježja međujezika i prijenosa iz materinskoga jezika (Ringbom 1998: 191)

Uma análise quantitativa de colocações em produções acadêmicas de estudantes brasileiros e britânicos

Language is formulaic in nature, which means that appropriate writing goes beyond knowing isolated words. The objective of this paper is to analyze the quantitative difference in the use of collocations of the Academic Collocation List (ACL) in two academic corpora, the British Academic Written English (BAWE) and the Brazilian Academic Written English (BrAWE). In order to conduct this analysis, we used corpus linguistics as our methodology. The results show that only few collocations of ACL came up as statistically significant when we investigated the BrAWE corpus in comparison with BAWE, indicating that Brazilians use academic collocations appropriately when compared to British. This research points to the importance of focusing on collocations in Academic English teaching contexts, since they cooperate to guarantee conventionality in language. Moreover, both British and Brazilians use academic collocations that are not necessarily present in ACL, suggesting a possible mismatch between what is prescribed and what is actually used in authentic language.A língua é formulaica por natureza, o que significa que a redação adequada vai além do conhecimento de palavras isoladas. O objetivo deste artigo é analisar a diferença quantitativa do uso de colocações da Academic Collocation List (ACL) em dois corpora acadêmicos, o British Academic Written English (BAWE) e o Brazilian Academic Written English (BrAWE). Para realizar essa análise, utilizamos a Linguística de Corpus como metodologia. Os resultados apontam que poucas colocações do ACL se mostraram estatisticamente significativas quando investigamos o corpus BrAWE em comparação com o BAWE, indicando que os brasileiros utilizam as colocações acadêmicas de forma adequada quando comparados aos britânicos. Esta pesquisa ressalta a importância do foco em colocações nos contextos de ensino de inglês acadêmico, uma vez que elas ajudam a garantir a convencionalidade no uso da língua. Além disso, observamos que britânicos e brasileiros usam colocações acadêmicas que não estão necessariamente presentes na ACL, sugerindo um possível descompasso entre o que é prescrito e o que é realmente usado na linguagem autêntica