A Corpus Study of Collocation in Chinese Learner English


Book Description

Based on two corpora: LOCNESS (Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays) and MLC (Non-English major Mainland Chinese Learner Corpus), this book explores the grammatical and lexical collocations of Chinese learner English. As one of the first systematic studies to investigate collocations in Chinese learner English based on learner corpora, this book provides significant implications for foreign language teaching and learning.




A Corpus Study of Collocation in Chinese Learner English


Book Description

Collocation is an important tool in describing lexical behaviour in language and has received increasing attention in recent years. Based on two corpora: LOCNESS (the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays) and MLC (the Non-English major Mainland Chinese Learner Corpus), this book explores the features of Chinese learner English with analysis of grammatical and lexical collocations. The findings show that Chinese university students use collocations with considerably less variety and Chinese language and culture exert a substantial influence on their English writing. It also discusses ways to tackle the problems Chinese English learners face and the pedagogical implications for teaching English and learning English collocations. As one of the first systematic studies to investigate collocations in Chinese learner English based on learner corpora, this book not only analyzes how Chinese learners use collocations in their English writing, but also provides significant implications for foreign language teaching and learning.




Vocabulary Increase and Collocation Learning


Book Description

This book highlights research that expands on our knowledge of second- language collocation acquisition. It presents original findings based on the largest collocation database to date, encompassing over 8,000 collocations: verb + noun, adjective + noun, and noun + noun. These collocations, collected from a one-million-learner corpus, were not confined to English as a foreign language (EFL) learners at a particular proficiency level, but also included learners at three levels. As such, the book provides a panoramic view regarding L2 collocation acquisition, not only in terms of learners’ acquisition of different types of collocations, but in terms of the developmental patterns in L2 collocation learning. One major discovery is that there is a collocation lag as learners’ proficiency levels rise, which is associated with vocabulary increase, in particular semantic domains—a remarkable insight for second-language acquisition researchers, English teachers and EFL learners alike. The findings reported shed new light on how collocations are acquired by EFL learners, offering guidance on how they can best be taught. In closing, the book discusses pedagogical aspects that arise from considering how learners can be helped with collocation learning.




Collocations in a Learner Corpus


Book Description

Collocations are both pervasive in language and difficult for language learners, even at an advanced level. In this book, these difficulties are for the first time comprehensively investigated. On the basis of a learner corpus, idiosyncratic collocation use by learners is uncovered, the building material of learner collocations examined, and the factors that contribute to the difficulty of certain groups of collocations identified. An extensive discussion of the implications of the results for the foreign language classroom is also presented, and the contentious issue of the relation of corpus linguistic research and language teaching is thus extended to learner corpus analysis.




Form, Meaning and Function in Collocation


Book Description

The issue of differences between translational language and native-speaker language has become a topic of increasing interest in linguistics and Translation Studies (TS). One of the primary tasks in this research area is to employ a corpus approach and analyse collocations with authentic language data by comparing comparable corpora consisting of translated and native-speaker texts. Collocation in linguistics and TS refers to the relationship of co-occurrence between lexical items. The book shows that examining the use of collocations constitutes an integral part in assessing the naturalness of second language (L2) use, and therefore can be a valid measure to make a distinction between translational language and native-speaker language. Nevertheless, the role of collocation has not been given enough attention or discussed systematically in TS and, to date, there are hardly any translation theorists who have clarified the mechanism of collocation in TS, by which translators acquire receptive and productive knowledge of collocations in their L2. In addition, previous research in this area is largely confined to Indo-European languages, resulting in a lack of empirical evidence involving Asian languages. This book therefore attempts to bridge the gap in the literature and constitute an integral part in the research area.




Language Ideologies in the Chinese Context


Book Description

This book explores language ideologies in China, which encounters the unprecedented global spread of English as a lingua franca, against the backdrop of globalisation where China emerges as a rapidly developing economy with vigorous promotion of Chinese around the world. The book addresses Chinese speakers' ideologies in relation to ELF and provides insights into non-native English speakers' engagement in the development of English in the future.




Patterns and Meanings of Intensifiers in Chinese Learner Corpora


Book Description

Intensification plays a major role in spoken and written interaction, enabling the writer or speaker to express different levels of commitment. This book explores the patterns and meanings of intensifiers in Chinese learner English by ways of comparison with native English. The study is conducted within the theoretical framework of Firthian contextual theory of meaning, Sinclairian model of Extended Units of Meaning (EUM) and Hunston's pattern grammar. The method of contrastive inter-language analysis (CIA) is adopted and the intensifier collocations in learner English and native English are explored by means of quantitative and qualitative analyses of corpora data. This book is the first attempt to investigate the patterning and meaning features of intensifiers systematically with the corpora data in Chinese learner English. Readers will obtain a relatively complete picture of how Chinese learners use intensifiers to realize their attitudinal meanings.




The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics


Book Description

The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics (CHECL) surveys the breadth of corpus-based linguistic research on English, including chapters on collocations, phraseology, grammatical variation, historical change, and the description of registers and dialects. The most innovative aspects of the CHECL are its emphasis on critical discussion, its explicit evaluation of the state of the art in each sub-discipline, and the inclusion of empirical case studies. While each chapter includes a broad survey of previous research, the primary focus is on a detailed description of the most important corpus-based studies in this area, with discussion of what those studies found, and why they are important. Each chapter also includes a critical discussion of the corpus-based methods employed for research in this area, as well as an explicit summary of new findings and discoveries.




Linking Up Contrastive and Learner Corpus Research


Book Description

The papers brought together in this volume explore, through corpus data, the link between contrastive and interlanguage analysis. Learner corpora are approached from a contrastive perspective, by comparing them with native corpora or corpus data produced by learners from other mother tongue backgrounds, or by combining them with contrastive data from multilingual (translation or comparable) corpora. The integration of these two frameworks, contrastive and learner corpus research, makes it possible to highlight crucial aspects of learner production, such as features of non-nativeness (errors, over- and underuse, unidiomatic expressions), including universal features of interlanguage, or more general issues like the question of transfer. The ten papers of this volume cover topics ranging from methodology to syntax (e.g. adverb placement, postverbal subjects), through lexis (collocations) and discourse (e.g. information packaging, thematic choice). The languages examined include English, Chinese, Dutch, French and Spanish. The book will be of interest to a wide array of readers, especially researchers in second language acquisition and contrastive linguistics, but also professionals working in foreign language teaching, such as language teachers, materials writers and language testers.




L2 vocabulary acquisition, knowledge and use


Book Description

This book is intended for researchers and students in the field of second language (L2) acquisition. As its title suggests, the book discusses L2 vocabulary acquisition, knowledge and use, and examines them from the perspectives of assessment and corpus analysis. The chapters also address some additional central research issues: the role of word frequency in the input, the difference between single words and multiword units, and the distinction between vocabulary of oral and written language. The first three chapters of the book present critical reviews of different aspects of vocabulary acquisition. The other four chapters contain empirical studies that relate to the central themes of the book. The data in the studies draw on a variety of source and target languages: English, French, Italian, Swedish, Hebrew and Japanese. The book offers some new insights into the field of vocabulary and suggests avenues of research.