Volume 21 Number 3, October 2017 Special Issue on Corpora in Language Learning and Teaching
contributor.author:
Li, Shuangling
date.accessioned:
2018-01-29T20:50:11Z
date.available:
2018-01-29T20:50:11Z
date.issued:
2017-10-01
description.abstract:
This article investigates the role of direct corpus use in learners’ collocational competence in academic writing. An experiment was conducted between two groups of Chinese postgraduates who had no previous knowledge of corpora. It was embedded in a regular 4-month linguistics course in the students’ programmes, where a corpus-assisted method was used for the experimental group and a traditional, or rule-based, method was used for the control group. The English essays written by these two groups of learners from different time periods (before, immediately after, and two months after the course) were analysed regarding the learners’ collocational use—in particular, verb-preposition collocations. The results reveal that while both groups showed improvements in their academic writing, the students in the experimental group displayed a significant improvement in the use of collocations, including a higher rate of accuracy, or naturalness, and an increased use of academic collocations and fixed phraseological items. It is thus concluded that the knowledge and use of corpora can help students raise their awareness of habitual collocational use and develop their collocational competence. This supports the positive role of direct corpus application in an EFL context.
description.provenance:
Made available in DSpace on 2018-01-29T20:50:11Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1
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Previous issue date: 2017-10-01
endingpage:
171
identifier.citation:
Li, S. (2017). Using corpora to develop learners’ collocational competence. Language Learning & Technology, 21(3), 153–171. Retrieved from http://llt.msu.edu/issues/october2017/li.pdf
identifier.issn:
1094-3501 1094-3501
identifier.uri:
http://hdl.handle.net/10125/44625
number:
3
publicationname:
Language Learning & Technology
publisher:
University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center Michigan State University Center for Language Education and Research