Acquisition of lexical collocations : a corpus-assisted contrastive analysis and translation approach

Abstract

Research from the past 20 years has indicated that much of natural language consists of formulaic sequences or chunks. It has been suggested that learning vocabulary as discrete items does not necessarily help L2 learners become successful communicators or fluent and accurate language users. Collocations, i.e. words that usually go together as one form of formulaic sequences, constitute an inherent problem for ESL/ EFL learners. Researchers have submitted that non-congruent collocations, i.e. collocations that do not have corresponding L1 equivalents, are especially difficult to acquire by ESL/ EFL learners. This study examines the effect of three Focus-on-Forms instructional approaches on the passive and active acquisition of non-congruent collocations: 1) the non-corpus-assisted contrastive analysis and translation (CAT) approach, 2) the corpus-assisted CAT approach, and 3) the corpus-assisted non-CAT approach. To fully assess the proposed combined condition (i.e. the corpus-assisted CAT) and its learning outcomes, a control group under no-condition was included for a baseline comparison. Thirty collocations non-congruent with the learners’ L1 (Arabic) were chosen for this study. 129 undergraduate EFL learners in a Saudi University participated in the study. The participants were assigned to the three experimental groups and to the control group following a cluster random sampling method. The corpus-assisted CAT group performed (L1/ L2 and L2/ L1) translation tasks with the help of bilingual English/ Arabic corpus data. The non-corpus CAT group was assigned text-based translation tasks and received contrastive analysis of the target collocations and their L1 translation options from the teacher. The non-contrastive group performed multiple-choice/ gap-filling tasks with the help of monolingual corpus data, focusing on the target items. Immediately after the intervention stage, the three groups were tested on the retention of the target collocations by two tests: active recall and passive recall. The same tests were administered to the participants three weeks later. The corpus-assisted CAT group significantly outperformed the other two groups on all the tests. These results were discussed in light of the ‘noticing’, ‘task-induced involvement load’, and ‘pushed output’ hypotheses and the influence that L1 exerts on the acquisition of L2 vocabulary. The discussion includes an evaluation of the three instructional conditions in ii relation to different determinants, dimensions and functions within the hypotheses.