Options in Collocation Instruction: An Overview of Teaching and Research

A substantial body of research has investigated how collocation instruction contributes to language development, particularly in reading, writing, and speaking. However, there has been very little discussion of how the knowledge provided by this research can inform language teaching. This article reviews studies that address how collocations can best be taught in terms of different theoretically motivated instructional options: (a) input, (b) explicit instruction, and (c) production practice. Furthermore, we consider a number of possibilities for the pedagogic utilization of the information it makes available, and provide an account of instructional options. The need for research that investigates how teachers integrate their professional knowledge into their personal pedagogical system is also recognized.

[1]  Alan Waters,et al.  English for specific purposes : a learning-centred approach , 1987 .

[2]  Stephen Krashen,et al.  Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition , 1982 .

[3]  R. Oxford.  Language learning strategies around the world : cross-cultural perspectives , 1996 .

[4]  S. Webb.  The Effects of Repetition on Vocabulary Knowledge , 2007 .

[5]  James R. Nattinger,et al.  Lexical Phrases and Language Teaching , 1992 .

[6]  Tim Johns,et al.  Perspectives on Pedagogical Grammar: From printout to handout: Grammar and vocabulary teaching in the context of Data-driven Learning , 1994 .

[7]  John Truscott,et al.  Selecting Errors for Selective Error Correction , 2001 .

[8]  Eric T. Liu,et al.  INVESTIGATING LEARNER VOCABULARY: A POSSIBLE APPROACH TO LOOKING AT EFL/ESL LEARNERS' QUALITATIVE KNOWLEDGE OF THE WORD , 2001 .

[9]  Rod Ellis,et al.  The Study of Second Language Acquisition , 1994 .

[10]  R. Schmidt.  The role of consciousness in second language learning , 1990 .

[11]  Batia Laufer,et al.  The Lexical Profile of Second Language Writing: Does It Change Over Time? , 1994 .

[12]  Yu-Chih Sun,et al.  Concordancers in the EFL Classroom: Cognitive Approaches and Collocation Difficulty , 2003 .

[13]  Shu-Fen Chang,et al.  A multiple-strategy-based approach to word and collocation acquisition , 2009 .

[14]  Andrew D. Cohen,et al.  Easifying second language learning , 1981, Studies in Second Language Acquisition.

[15]  A Barfield.  Review. Teaching Collocation: Further Developments in the Lexical Approach. M Lewis [ed] , 2001 .

[16]  James P. Lantolf,et al.  SLA Theory Building: “Letting All the Flowers Bloom!” , 1996 .

[17]  Dave Willis.  GRAMMAR AND LEXIS: SOME PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS , 2004 .

[18]  陳惠如,et al.  Effects of input in the acquisition of formulaic sequences by efl learners in Taiwan , 2007 .

[19]  Michael Lewis.  The Lexical Approach: The State of ELT and a Way Forward , 2002 .

[20]  Jens Bahns,et al.  Should we teach EFL students collocations , 1993 .

[21]  Sandra Lee McKay,et al.  Teaching the Syntactic, Semantic and Pragmatic Dimensions of Verbs. , 1980 .

[22]  Wei-Shi Wu,et al.  Use and Helpfulness Rankings of Vocabulary Learning Strategies Employed by EFL Learners in Taiwan , 2005 .

[23]  Morton Benson,et al.  The BBI dictionary of English word combinations , 1991 .

[24]  Jafarpour Ali Akbar,et al.  DATA-DRIVEN LEARNING AND TEACHING COLLOCATION OF PREPOSITIONS: THE CASE OF IRANIAN EFL STUDENTS , 2006 .

[25]  N. Schmitt,et al.  Vocabulary in Language Teaching , 2000 .

[26]  Rotimi Taiwo.  Helping ESL learners to minimize collocational errors , 2004 .

[27]  Nadja Nesselhauf.  THE USE OF COLLOCATIONS BY ADVANCED LEARNERS OF ENGLISH AND SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING , 2003 .

[28]  E. K. Blau.  Teaching Collocation—Further Developments in the Lexical Approach , 2002 .

[29]  M. Swain.  Communicative competence : Some roles of comprehensible input and comprehensible output in its development , 1985 .

[30]  M. Eraut.  Developing professional knowledge and competence , 1994 .

[31]  Stephen Krashen,et al.  The Input Hypothesis: Issues and Implications , 1986 .

[32]  Dave Willis,et al.  The Lexical Syllabus: A New Approach to Language Teaching , 1990 .

[33]  K. P. Wong,et al.  Collocational problems amongst ESL learners: a corpus-based study , 1994 .

[34]  Bill VanPatten,et al.  Grammar Teaching for the Acquisition‐Rich Classroom , 1993 .

[35]  Freeman Twaddell.  Vocabulary Expansion in the TESOL Classroom. , 1973 .

[36]  M. Farghal,et al.  COLLOCATIONS: A NEGLECTED VARIABLE IN EFL , 1995 .

[37]  Siok H. Lee.  ESL learners’ vocabulary use in writing and the effects of explicit vocabulary instruction , 2003 .

[38]  Paul Nation,et al.  Teaching and learning vocabulary , 1994 .

[39]  Verb-Noun Collocation Instruction with the Support of a Bilingual Concordancer , 2005 .