The Acquisition of Basic Collocations by Japanese Learners of English

427 Pages·2005·2.89 MB·English

The Acquisition of Basic Collocations
by Japanese Learners of English

A Dissertation
Presented to the Graduate School of
Waseda University

by
KOYA Taeko

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

2005

Contents

List of Tables.................................................................................................................................v
List of Figures.............................................................................................................................vii

Acknowledgements.....................................................................................................................viii

Chapter 1. Introduction
1.1. General background.............................................................................................................1
1.1.1. Vocabulary acquisition research since the 1980s........................................................1
1.1.2. Importance of collocation studies and related problems.............................................2
1.1.3. Change of vocabulary treatment for Japanese learners of English in the
government guidelines for foreign language teaching................................................4
1.1.4. Lack of pedagogical consensus on collocation in Japan.............................................6
1.2. The main research questions and organization of the chapters............................................7

Chapter 2. Literature review (1): Definition of collocation
2.1. Introduction..........................................................................................................................9
2.2. Terminology of three major groups of phraseology.............................................................9
2.2.1. Collocation, idiom and free combination..................................................................10
2.2.2. Terminology problem................................................................................................25
2.3. Previous studies on collocations........................................................................................25
2.3.1. Descriptive studies....................................................................................................25
2.3.2. Semantic studies........................................................................................................41
2.3.3. Computational studies...............................................................................................51
2.3.4. Lexicographic studies................................................................................................64
2.3.5. Pedagogical studies...................................................................................................75
2.4. Importance of collocation..................................................................................................85
2.5. Summary............................................................................................................................88

Chapter 3. Literature review (2): Empirical research on collocation
3.1. Introduction........................................................................................................................93
3.2. Empirical research on collocation to date..........................................................................93
3.2.1. Collocation research mainly in terms of L1 influence..............................................93
3.2.2. Collocation research in terms of several factors including L1 influence..................99
3.2.3. Other collocation research.......................................................................................108
3.2.4. Summary.................................................................................................................111
3.3. State of collocation in Japan to date.................................................................................115
3.3.1. Collocation research in Japan..................................................................................115
3.3.2. Description of collocations in collocation dictionaries and
English-Japanese dictionaries.................................................................................119
3.3.3. Summary.................................................................................................................122
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Chapter 4. Pilot study
4.1. Introduction......................................................................................................................123
4.2. Definition of collocation in the present research.............................................................123
4.3. Pilot Study I: Corpus-based research...............................................................................124
4.3.1. Pilot Study I-1: Same leveled six English I textbooks............................................125
4.3.2. Pilot Study I-2: English I textbooks vs. English II textbooks.................................128
4.3.3. Pilot Study I-3: Revised English I textbooks vs. former English I textbooks.........130
4.3.4. Pilot Study I-4: History textbooks in the UK..........................................................133
4.3.5. Summary of the four pilot studies...........................................................................137
4.3.6. New research questions raised by the four pilot studies.........................................139
4.4. Pilot Study II: Empirical research....................................................................................141
4.4.1. Pilot Study II-1........................................................................................................142
4.4.2. New research question raised by Pilot Study II......................................................147

Chapter 5. Methodology: Phase I. Corpus-based research
5.1. Introduction......................................................................................................................150
5.2. Purpose and research questions........................................................................................150
5.3. Materials: Corpus.............................................................................................................152
5.3.1. British National Corpus (BNC)...............................................................................152
5.3.2. Making the TIME corpus........................................................................................154
5.3.3. Making the English I textbook corpus....................................................................155
5.4. Selection of collocations..................................................................................................156
5.5. Procedure.........................................................................................................................159

Chapter 6. Results and discussion: Phase I. Corpus-based research
6.1. Introduction......................................................................................................................161
6.2. Results..............................................................................................................................161
6.2.1. Analysis of the BNC................................................................................................161
6.2.2. Analysis of the TIME corpus..................................................................................164
6.2.3. Features of collocations in the BNC and the TIME corpus.....................................167
6.2.4. Are high-frequency collocations topic-oriented?....................................................169
6.2.5. Do collocations occurring in English textbooks for upper secondary
school students in Japan deviate from those of native-speaker English?.................170
6.2.6. Summary.................................................................................................................176
6.3. Discussion........................................................................................................................178
6.4. Basic collocations determined by analyses of corpora.....................................................183

Chapter 7. Methodology: Phase II. Empirical research on the development of
learners’ collocational knowledge
7.1. Introduction......................................................................................................................186
7.2. Research questions...........................................................................................................186
7.3. Selected collocations........................................................................................................187
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7.4. Materials...........................................................................................................................191
7.4.1. Test A: Vocabulary size test.....................................................................................191
7.4.2. Test B: Productive collocation test..........................................................................193
7.4.3. Test C: Receptive collocation test...........................................................................194
7.5. Subjects............................................................................................................................194
7.6. Data collection procedure................................................................................................195
7.7. Scoring procedure............................................................................................................196

Chapter 8. Results and discussion: Phase II. Empirical research on the
development of learners’ collocational knowledge
8.1. Introduction......................................................................................................................199
8.2. Results..............................................................................................................................199
8.2.1. Research question 1.....................................................................................................199
8.2.2. Research question 2.....................................................................................................205
8.2.3. Research question 3.....................................................................................................208
8.2.4. Research question 4.....................................................................................................212
8.2.5. Extra finding...............................................................................................................219
8.3. Discussion........................................................................................................................221
8.3.1. Discussion of research questions................................................................................221
8.3.1.1. Research question 1..............................................................................................221
8.3.1.2. Research question 2..............................................................................................223
8.3.1.3. Research question 3..............................................................................................226
8.3.1.4. Research question 4 and extra findings................................................................228
8.3.3. Discussion of ease or difficulty of collocation acquisition in reception and
production in the different vocabulary groups.............................................................233
8.3.4. Summary of the collocation acquisition in the different vocabulary level groups......243
8.3.5. Pedagogical implications............................................................................................245

Chapter 9. Conclusions
9.1. Overview..........................................................................................................................250
9.2. Pedagogical implications for effective compilation of English textbooks.......................254
9.3. Limitations of the study...................................................................................................256
9.4. Future research.................................................................................................................258

References....................................................................................................................................261

Appendices
Appendix A......................................................................................................................................276
Appendix B......................................................................................................................................301
Appendix C......................................................................................................................................343
Appendix D.....................................................................................................................................368
Appendix E......................................................................................................................................393
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Appendix F......................................................................................................................................394
Appendix G.....................................................................................................................................401
Appendix H.....................................................................................................................................406
Appendix I.......................................................................................................................................410
Appendix J.......................................................................................................................................413
Appendix K.....................................................................................................................................414
Appendix L......................................................................................................................................417

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List of Tables

Table 1. Decreases of the number of words in the government guidelines
for foreign language teaching published by MEXT...........................................................5
Table 2. Various names for two criteria..........................................................................................24
Table 3. Various terms for collocation............................................................................................25
Table 4. Lexico-grammatical system by Halliday (1966, pp. 152-153).........................................28
Table 5. Semantic field of cause and effect by Stubbs (1995, pp. 252-253)...................................49
Table 6. Grammatical collocations by Benson et al. (1997, pp. xv-xxxiii)....................................69
Table 7. Lexical collocations by Benson et al. (1997, pp. xv-xxxiii).............................................70
Table 8. 19 categorization of collocations by Kjellmer (1994, pp. xxiii-xxix)..............................72
Table 9. Empirical research on collocation..................................................................................112
Table 10. Two main criteria defining collocation...........................................................................123
Table 11. Verb-noun collocations selected in Pilot Study I-1.........................................................127
Table 12. Verb-noun collocations selected in Pilot Study I-2.........................................................129
Table 13. Verb-noun collocations selected in Pilot Study I-3.........................................................132
Table 14. Verb-noun collocations extracted from a history textbook in Pilot Study I-4................135
Table 15. Verb-noun collocations extracted from English I textbooks in Pilot Study I-4..............136
Table 16. Three groups of subjects.................................................................................................143
Table 17. Selected collocations (a) with a Japanese equivalent
and (b) without a Japanese equivalent............................................................................144
Table 18. Tokens and types in TIME..............................................................................................155
Table 19. Four main categories......................................................................................................155
Table 20. Tokens and types in four English I textbooks.................................................................156
Table 21. Levels of nouns and verbs according to JACET 8000....................................................158
Table 22. Procedure of the corpus-based research.........................................................................160
Table 23. Number of V-N collocations in the BNC........................................................................162
Table 24. Level of the nodes and collocates per 100 collocations in the BNC..............................163
Table 25. Number of collocations appearing in the TIME corpus.................................................164
Table 26. High-frequency collocates in collocations in the TIME corpus (five times or more)....165
Table 27. High-frequency collocations in the TIME corpus (10 times or more)............................165
Table 28. Level of the nodes and collocates per high-frequency collocations
in the TIME corpus.........................................................................................................166
Table 29. Rank of high-frequency collocations in the BNC and the TIME corpus........................168
Table 30. Rank of six high-frequency collocations in the TIME corpus
except collocations shown in Table 29...........................................................................168
Table 31. Number of high-frequency collocations in the categorized four topics..........................170
Table 32. Frequency of appearance of verb-noun collocations in each level
of the English I textbook corpus.....................................................................................171
Table 33. Means and standard deviations per text..........................................................................172
Table 34. Frequency of appearance of Level 1 verbs and nouns
and Level 1 verb-noun collocations................................................................................172
Table 35. Appearance of collocations in textbooks........................................................................173
Table 36. Frequency of each collocation in each textbook............................................................174
Table 37. Rank of high-frequency collocations in the BNC, the TIME corpus
and the English I textbook corpus within rank 100........................................................175
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Table 38. Four criteria to select basic collocation based on the corpus analyses...........................184
Table 39. Basic collocations...........................................................................................................185
Table 40. Selected collocations......................................................................................................188
Table 41. Six features and the sub categories of collocations........................................................190
Table 42. Way of estimating the number of words in the VST......................................................192
Table 43. Four groups of subjects..................................................................................................195
Table 44. Categorization of correct and incorrect answers............................................................197
Table 45. Descriptive statistics: Mean scores for general vocabulary size,
productive collocation size and receptive collocation size.............................................200
Table 46. Pearson correlation between vocabulary size and receptive
and productive collocation size......................................................................................200
Table 47. Descriptive statistics: Mean scores for receptive collocation size
and productive collocation size of the four different vocabulary level groups...............201
Table 48. One-Way ANOVA results for the relationship between the receptive
and productive collocation sizes of the four different vocabulary groups......................201
Table 49. Tukey’s HSD tests for the relationship of receptive and productive collocation sizes
of the four different vocabulary groups..........................................................................202
Table 50. Percentage of correct answers of each collocation in the four different
vocabulary level groups－in production (with graph)....................................................203
Table 51. Percentage of correct answers of each collocation in the four different
vocabulary level groups－in reception (with graph)......................................................204
Table 52. Comparison of receptive knowledge of collocation (R) and productive
knowledge of collocation (P) within different vocabulary groups (t test)......................206
Table 53. Percentage of correct answers of each collocation in reception and production
(with graph) .................................................................................................................207
Table 54. Kruskal Wallis analysis of variance for the sub category difference
in the semantic opacity (Productive test)........................................................................210
Table 55. Mann-Whitney U analyses for the sub category difference in L1 equivalence,
collocational restriction, delexicalized verbs, core meanings of verbs
and nouns and collocational structure (Productive test)..............................................210
Table 56. Kruskal Wallis analysis of variance for the sub category difference
in the semantic opacity (Receptive test).........................................................................211
Table 57. Mann-Whitney U analyses for the sub category difference in L1 equivalence,
collocational restriction, delexicalized verbs, core meanings of verbs
and nouns and collocational structure (Receptive test)...............................................212
Table 58. Descriptive statistics: Mean scores for measurements of alternative collocations
and other expressions.....................................................................................................213
Table 59. One-Way ANOVA results for measurements of alternative collocations
and other expressions.....................................................................................................213
Table 60. Tukey’s HSD tests for measurements of alternative collocations
and other expressions.....................................................................................................214
Table 61. Number and percentage of incorrect answers and blanks..............................................215
Table 62. Descriptive statistics: Mean scores for frequency of ways used
in unknowing collocations..............................................................................................217
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Table 63. One-Way ANOVA results measuring frequency of ways used to deal with
unknown collocations.....................................................................................................217
Table 64. Tukey’s HSD tests for the frequency of ways used to deal with
unknown collocations.....................................................................................................218
Table 65. Descriptive statistics: Mean scores for appropriate adjectives
with correct collocations.................................................................................................220
Table 66. One-Way ANOVA results for appropriate adjectives with correct collocations.............220
Table 67. Tukey’s HSD tests for appropriate adjectives with correct collocations........................220
Table 68. Levels of collocational difficulty in reception................................................................233
Table 69. Levels of collocational difficulty in production.............................................................234
Table 70. Order of high frequency and low frequency correct answers
in the productive collocation test – all groups (N=130).................................................236
Table 71. Order of high frequency and low frequency correct answers
in the receptive collocation test – all groups (N=130)....................................................236
Table 72. Order of high frequency and low frequency correct answers
in the productive collocation test – 2000 level (N=31)..................................................237
Table 73. Order of high frequency and low frequency correct answers
in the receptive collocation test – 2000 level (N=31).....................................................238
Table 74. Order of high frequency and low frequency correct answers
in the productive collocation test – 3000 level (N=26)..................................................239
Table 75. Order of high frequency and low frequency correct answers
in the receptive collocation test – 3000 level (N=26).....................................................239
Table 76. Order of high frequency and low frequency correct answers
in the productive collocation test – 4000 level (N=41)..................................................240
Table 77. Order of high frequency and low frequency correct answers
in the receptive collocation test – 4000 level (N=41).....................................................240
Table 78. Order of high frequency and low frequency correct answers
in the productive collocation test – 5000 level (N=32)..................................................241
Table 79. Order of high frequency and low frequency correct answers
in the receptive collocation test – 5000 level (N=32).....................................................242
Table 80. Judgment of 70 acceptable collocations by the three groups
(Phrase II. Empirical research).......................................................................................257

List of Figures

Figure 1. Categorization of English word combinations by Aisenstadt
(1979, p. 71, 1981, pp. 53-54)..........................................................................................10
Figure 2. Continuum of word combinations by Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992, p. 178)...............12
Figure 3. Levels of collocational complexity by Schmitt (2000, p. 79)...........................................15
Figure 4. Multiword expressions by Fernando (1996, p. 32)...........................................................17
Figure 5. Proportion of Level 1 and Level 2 verbs and nouns.......................................................166
Figure 6. Factors influencing the development of collocational knowledge.................................244

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Acknowledgements

This doctoral dissertation would not have been completed without
considerable help and encouragement of many special persons. First of all, I
would like to express my greatest gratitude to my supervisor, Professor
YANO Yasukata. His invaluable advice and thoughtful encouragement
throughout the years made it possible to pursue critical reading of previous
pieces of research and the originality of my dissertation. It has been my
honor to complete it under his continuous instruction.
I would also like to express my deep appreciation to my dissertation
committee members: Emeritus Professor SHINODA Yoshiaki, Professor
Paul Snowden, Professor NAKANO Michiko and Professor MURATA
Kumiko. Their constructive and critical comment on the draft of this
dissertation helped me to polish it to the level of doctoral dissertation.
I would like to extend my great appreciation to Professor KAWAGUCHI
Yoshikazu and Associate Professor NAMAI Kenichi, who helped to collect
data for my research. I also wish to thank Professor Jeffrey Miller for
reading through my manuscript patiently within a limited time. My special
thanks are due to the late Emeritus Professor TANABE Yoji who proofread
the abstract of this dissertation and gave me appropriate advice.
I am particularly grateful to my parents for their deep understanding and
warm-hearted encouragement for years. They have always supported my
pursuit of academic interests.
Finally, I owe a sincere gratitude to my husband, SHIMOYAMA Yukinari.
He always gave me inspiring comments on my research and encouraged me
to continue writing my manuscript wholeheartedly. Without his support and
patience, I could not have completed this dissertation.

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