A Corpus-based Study ofThe vocabulary collocation in Adult EFL Learners’ Writing

1.The research problem

(1) Solve collocation problem.

According to the idiom principle, the words in the natural language have the influence of each other. However, Chinese learners often don’t consider the principle of idioms of English, only according to the concept of vocabulary and grammatical compilation of sentences, resulting in a lot of Chinese and English collocation. Collusion errors in the CLEC in the sixth language error rate, accounting for 4.06% of all language errors. For collocation problems, if teachers directly correct, often can’t cause students’ interest. The probability of repeated mistakes is still high. In order to improve their target language processing depth, and eliminate their false assumptions, teachers can find a typical match, and asked them to use the English language learners’ corpus out of the law and correction, but also in the classroom through a collective discussion summed up the rules. This data-driven learning model can cultivate independent learning habits, and improve learning outcomes.

(2) Improve discourse skills

After introducing the corpus into the writing teaching, students can use the written library of Chinese learners’ corpora to search, analyze, and summarize the writing mode commonly used by native speakers, and cultivate the macroscopic thinking of English discourse learning. English discourse cohesion mainly through grammatical means, vocabulary and logical relations. To solve the problem of language link, students can use the English language learner corpus for special exercises. For example, the use of contexts to show a class of logical relational words and their context, using the search word masking function to cover the associated words. According to the context, they determine what kind of words should be filled with smooth and coherent text, and guide students to sum up the rules of the text structure.

2.The literature review

(1) Research Background

The modern meaning of the corpus is “stored in the computer in the original corpus text or after processing with linguistic information subject text”. So the corpus is a collection of texts, and the text in this collection must be processed and recognized by a computer. Specialists think that the main purpose of establishing a corpus is to provide a basis for a more accurate and reliable description language. Its main idea is to guide students to observe, summarize and summarize language phenomena from a large number of real language examples, self-discovery language rules, meaning expression and pragmatic features.

(2) Research Significance

Since the application of corpus in language teaching, in view of its own objectivity, large data and other characteristics are a language teacher’s technical teaching major tools. It has been noted by a number of teachers, adults have entered the workforce after completing their studies, some at the secondary level and others at university. Although a good number of students pass the certificate exam to obtain an intermediate level diploma, only a few are able to pass the advanced level exam after two more years of classes.

(3) Research Status

The teaching of writing in English to adult students involves facing a number of challenges, namely: time restrictions, learner differences in terms of aptitude and motivation, and a lack of experience and practice of language use. The teaching of writing differs from other skills. The necessary investment of time to develop good writing habits is considered too high, if adult learners often need to use the language. Moreover, learners can perceive the use of the corpus as a means of accomplishing their language goals.

(4) Research Tendency

The use of English language learners’ corpus, through the selection, classification, retrieval, observation, analysis, summary and other procedures can improve the ability of chapter, enhance the sense of style. We use the corpus to retrieve the various parameters of the words and phrases, and provide an important basis for the evaluation by comparing the written English with the English corpus.

3.The research design

(1) The research context

This research proposal is a corpus-based of English construction in adult EFL learner’s writing. Based on the theories of IL, CIA, LT and EA, the results indicate that the basic types of structural expansions used in construction are acquired by learners at the very beginning. Subsequently with the increase of learners’ proficiency, there is a tendency of reduction for the simple types and the trend for the complex types is increasing gradually. There are some explicit characteristics in the errors of construction use committed by adult EFL learners.

(2) Participants

Students from 16 students of English majors from Haizhu Branch of Guangzhou Radio & TV University participated in this survey. The reason why they are chosen as subjects are because they have the conditions of corpus-based learning environment. They want to use different vocabulary collocation learning strategies to help them improve writing.

(3) The teaching experiment design

Using corpus to teach and learn English vocabulary collocation, you can provide a rich example in the real context, to help students understand the various terms of English vocabulary and the vocabulary of the grammar, pragmatic features. With the COBUILD corpus, the word commit is retrieved and the following rows can be retrieved randomly:

1) Merely by staying on, did not commit a criminal offence.

2) She drove him onto commit murder.

3) A knock-out or somebody’s going to commit a major faux pas, and outside of prison laws.

4) However, I feel that by refusing to commit itself to a date for the special.

5) The size of the new German army and commit the Aliesto synchronized.

6) A determined and deliberate act to commit murder.

7) In and decide whether he should commit suicide or not.

8) Congregation of young people to commit their lives to Christ.

9) It doesn’t matter where he sends me didn’t commit any crime

10) Of a computer keyboard but on they commit their companies to high-risk.

From the above search line, it is much easier for the students to learn this less frequently used word. Take the word “commit” as an example, extract all the use of the word “commit” in the library from the CLEC. First, from the whole use, the students use the word very little, the use rate is very low. Second, from the point of view of the mix, they use the word “commit” with the meaning of crime or suicide, and some other meanings are rarely used. Third, from the structural point of view, the structure used by them only use commit + N. By observing the summary, the learner knows how the vocabulary is used together. Similarly, teachers can also extract the use of the word from the Chinese learner corpus and conduct a comparative study to find that Chinese English learners and native speaker users in English use of words. .

(4) Research methods

1) Literature research method

Through the access to information and documents to fully and correctly grasp the situation to be studied. First to collect research and related issues related to the literature, such as books, information and documents, and then select the important material can be used in the appropriate to record. The final analysis and conclusions are on the basis of the research to sum up their new ideas.

2) Questionnaire survey method

Preparation phase: select the survey object, determine the scope of the need to investigate, understand the basic situation of the survey, development of questionnaires. Implementation phase: According to the plan to investigate the students, and students use the corpus for the effectiveness of teaching after the feedback. Finishing the stage: collect the materials, do the material classification, analysis the statistics, and synthesis of conclusions.

3) Content Analysis

In this study, the teaching contents of the research to be studied are analyzed, and the teaching ideas are summarized to form the optimization teaching design. The data show that students tend to hold a positive attitude towards vocabulary collocation learning in corpus-based learning activities, especially in writing activities.

4. Analysis

In the process of English learning, most English learners are accustomed to study the meaning of vocabulary collocation from the textbooks in the independent and split learning. In this way, the understanding of a word is often one-sided and fragmented. If the learner learns a vocabulary alone, then the connection will not be understood. The technology of the corpus helps to solve this question.

5. Conclusion

In China, there are a number of corpus built and under construction, such as original corpus, parallel corpus, learner corpus, etc. Among the learners ‘corpus, the CLEC is representative and has a considerable effect on Chinese English teaching. It is a great value to the study of the characteristics of English vocabulary collocation for Chinese learners, and their results have a high reference value for promoting English teaching in our country. The important role of corpus in language teaching and research is an indisputable fact, and it is also playing a great role in the field of research and practice of English vocabulary teaching. This is not only the form of teaching, teaching methods of change, but also led to a teaching concept of innovation. It has changed the long-term teacher-centered traditional teaching model, and began to establish a student-oriented active and personalized teaching methods.

References:

[1]Poul Baker. Diachronic Lexical Change in American English [M]. Shanghai: Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press, 2012.

【作者簡介】王宇，廣州市廣播電視大學海珠區分校 。