Chapter One Introduction
1.1Background to study of collocation
Though college English teaching and leaning have made greatachievements in China the demand to improve the communicativeabilities is still challenged current college English teaching for non-English majors. However, the ability to write and speak for most of thenon-English majors‘ is not enough, especially compared with theirreading competence. It‘s notable that the language they use in theircommunication is frequently error-laden. It is sometimes full ofcollocation errors. It not only makes our students sound non-native, butalso causes confusion in communication. College English learners alwayshave difficulties in deciding which words should be put together. That is,they often meet with the problem of how to choose and use the correctcollocations in writing and speaking. Choosing right collocations willboth help learners convey the precise meaning, and make their speeches and writings much more natural and native-like. However, many studentsare likely to use unacceptable collocations in their writings. A big portionof the sentences they use are merely literal translation of Chinese ideas. Inaddition, many do not make sense or sound natural though they aregrammatical.
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1.2Relationship between vocabulary and English writing
Vocabulary research has tended to focus on reading, and there isextensive research indicating that a rich vocabulary is a critical element ofreading ability. However, vocabulary is obviously necessary for the otherthree skills as well. In some ways, the ability to write effectively hingesupon having an adequate vocabulary even more than does the ability to read (Engber, 1995). Therefore, generally speaking, vocabulary is a keycomponent to successful writing. Developing a rich vocabulary is a toppriority and an on-going challenge for foreign language learning andteaching.English writing is the process of selecting, combining, arranging anddeveloping ideas in effective sentences, paragraphs, and often, longerunits of discourse. The process requires the writer to cope with a numberof variables:methods of development( narrating, explaining, describing, reportingand persuading)tone (from personal to quite formal)form (from a limerick to a formal letter to a long research report)purpose(from discovering and expressing personal feelings andvalues to conducting the impersonal ―business of everyday life)possible audiences( oneself, classmates, a teacher, ― the world)English writing is an extremely complex cognitive activity in whichthe writer is required to demonstrate control of a number of variables content, format, sentence structure, vocabulary, punctuation, spelling andletter formation. Beyond the sentence, the writer must be able to structureand integrate information into cohesive and coherent paragraphs andtexts.Vocabulary choice is significantly governed by who is saying what,to whom and why. It is a relationship between the content of a message,its sender and receiver, its situation and purpose, and how it iscommunicated. Apparent synonyms may often be distinguished on thegrounds of register alone. Obvious examples would be ―kid and―children, or ―fags and ―cigarette; for example, ―fags would beunlikely to feature in a formal scientific article on smoking and health.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Understanding of vocabulary
All the words in a language make up its vocabulary, accordingRichard (1992). ―Vocabulary means a set of lexemes, including singlewords, compound words and idioms. The term ―vocabulary is used indifferent senses. Not only can it refer to the total number of the words in alanguage, but it can also stand for all the words used in a particularhistorical period, for example, Old English Vocabulary, Middle EnglishVocabulary and Modern English Vocabulary. We also use it to refer to allthe words of a given dialect, a given discipline and the words possessedby an inpidual person. English is one of the word‘s highly developedlanguages. Naturally the vocabulary is one the largest and richest. Wilkins alsoemphasized the importance of the vocabulary, ―people could describe fewthings without grammar, but they could express nothing withoutvocabulary. Therefore, Vocabulary is indispensable when languagefunctions as a medium for communication. In other words, without wordsto express the idea, the communication can not happen in any way even ifthe students manage the English grammar very well and have perfectpronunciation. In contrast, even though the speaker didn‘t know thegrammar rules very well, the listener can understand him with correctvocabulary. Therefore, it is reasonable that vocabulary is the core ofEnglish teaching and learning.
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2.2 Understanding of Collocation
Many linguists gave the definition of collocation:Collocations are combinations of words which more or lessfrequently co-occur (Firth, 1957; Sinclair, 1991; Zhang, 1993; Lewis, 1993,1997);Collocations are combinations of words which are grammaticallystructured (Halliday, 1996; Mitchell, 1975; Bolinger, 1976;Benson, andIlson, 1997);Collocations are combinations of words which are closely adjacent(Kilgarriff, 1992);Collocations are combinations of words which are more or lessgrammatically fixed in forms allowing changes in their part of speech orword order (Bolinger,1976; Cowis and Howarth,1995);Collocations are combinations of words which tend to be more orless lexically fixed permitting substitution in at least one of theircomponents (Cowie,1981; Howarth,1998; Gitsaki,1999);Collocations are combinations of words which are more or lessunique in meanings (Firth, 1957; Nation, 2001);Collocations are combinations of words whose meanings are moretransparent than idioms and can be understood based on the literalmeanings of their components (Bahns and Eldaw, 1993.
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Chapter Three Research Methodology.......20
3.1 Research questions.........20
3.2 Research subjects.....21
3.3 Research instrument.......21
3.4 procedure and data collection ....22
Chapter Four Results and Discussion.........24
4.1 Results and discussion of questionnaire ......24
4.2 Results and discussion on research question 2 ........29
4.3 Results and discussion on research question 3 ........30
Chapter Five Conclusion......34
5.1 Major findings....34
5.2 Implication for language teaching .........34
5.3 Limitations and suggestions for future research......42
Chapter Four Results and Discussion
4.1 Results and discussion of questionnaire
From the questionnaire, we collect 150 answer sheets together fromthe participates, among which 144 are valid. We list the data in thefollowing table: The questionnaire is analyzed from 4 aspects: understanding aboutcollocation and lexis, the using of lexis, the input and test. By SPSSsoftware, we get the data in form of mean and standard deviation. Thequestionnaire is a five-point scale, so a mean score which is above 3means disapproval of this viewpoint with high frequency while a meanscore which is below 3 means approval of this viewpoint with highfrequency. From the point of understanding about collocation and lexis, the datashows that the students have not known collocation clearlybefore(M=4.1668 SD=0.99096); they do not know the difference betweencollocation and set phrase clearly(M=3.7522 SD=0.30322); they thinkcollocation is more important in language learning(M=2.3062SD=0.74071); the grammar is the most important in language learning(M=1.3551 SD=0.20235); Vocabulary learning is to enlarge thevocabulary (M=1.4522 SD=1.0123). There are some misunderstandings,according to Item.18, about vocabulary learning, that is ―the collocation isthe combination of verb and preposition, in their awareness. And there isstill some misunderstanding about vocabulary learning, it is not just toenlarge the number of the new words and the grammar should not be themost important part of foreign language learning. We can understand thestudents do not understand collocation very well, although it is useful andimportant to language learning.
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Conclusion
Based on the literature review on collocation, this paper deliberatelyillustrates the definition of collocation, types of collocation and itsimportance in the language acquisition. The present study aims to find outthe causes for learners‘ low writing proficiency from the perspective oftheir collocational competence. By analyzing the statistics obtained fromthe subjects, it is found that, it is positively correlated betweennon-English major‘s collocational competence and their writingproficiency, students make more mistakes on lexical collocations thangrammatical ones. Through the questionnaire, we get the conclusion thatthe whole collocational competence of non-English Major in writing islow, and collocation is still not gained the enough attention and correctmethods of learning. Aiming at this problem the suggestions are providedin this present paper. Students and teacher should make a good use ofdictionaries and other resources to improve students‘ collocational competence, and researchers should design more tests and exercises forstudents.
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Reference (omitted)