Collocation is one of the most difficult aspects in second language learning, but has been largely neglected by researchers and practitioners. A questionnaire survey shows advanced Chinese learners' collocational ability in English to be significantly inferior to that of native speakers. Our research attempts to correct this problem by developing an on-line correcting program which is able to detect some collocational errors in the learner's English writing and offer examples of standard collocations from a large corpus for reference. The system is based on two kinds of corpora: a learner corpus which is used for the study of known collocational errors, and a reference corpus which is used to extract standard English collocations. The system also makes use of a Dictionary of Synonyms derived from WordNet to discover the potential collocational errors in learners' input, as well as a Paraphrase Database gathered from the learners themselves to help diagnose un-collocational learner phrases. Altogether, it is hoped that the result of this research has not only produced a usable on-line collocational aid, but also demon-strates a simple and efficient way of using learner corpora and reference corpora to support CALL software design.
[1]
Frank Smadja,et al.
Retrieving Collocations from Text: Xtract
,
1993,
CL.
[2]
Kenji Kita,et al.
COLLOCATIONS IN LANGUAGE LEARNING: CORPUS‐BASED AUTOMATIC COMPILATION OF COLLOCATIONS AND BILINGUAL COLLOCATION CONCORDANCER
,
1997
.
[3]
Guy Cook,et al.
Principle and Practice in Applied Linguistics: Studies in Honour of H. G. Widdowson
,
1995
.
[4]
Bengt Altenberg,et al.
Amplifier collocations in spoken English
,
1991
.
[5]
Geoffrey Barnbrook.
Language and Computers: A Practical Introduction to the Computer Analysis of Language
,
1996
.
[6]
Geoffrey Leech,et al.
Corpus Annotation: Linguistic Information from Computer Text Corpora
,
1997
.
[7]
Rod Ellis,et al.
The Study of Second Language Acquisition
,
1994
.
[8]
Christina Gitsaki.
The Development of ESL Collocational Knowledge
,
1996
.