Effective Methods of Teaching "Verb+Noun" Collocations: Japanese EFL learner subcorpus-based analyses

概要

論文の詳細を見る
In the present study I investigate the use of lexical collocations in Japanese EFL learners' written English, with a special focus on the verb "take." I compare differences in the use of "take" in academic essays written by Japanese university students and by American university students, using the ICLE Japanese subcorpus as a learner corpus and LOCNESS as a reference corpus. I examined lexical collocations of "take" in terms of frequency, variety, overuse, and underuse. The results revealed that although the total frequency of "take" with noun combinations was higher in the Japanese EFL learner data, learners tended to overuse fixed expressions and did not use native-like collocations. The overall results suggest the need to expand collocational knowledge on the part of Japanese EFL learners, which may prove to be beneficial in producing more natural sentences. To achieve the above goal, I propose three suggestions in this paper. The first is that the process by which Japanese EFL students learn collocations needs to be clarified. The second is that collocational data retrieved from corpora should be put to use in classroom English texts. Lastly, there should be a greater awareness of the importance of teaching collocations to Japanese learners of English.
昭和女子大学の論文
2014-02-01