The impact of learning modes on the developmentof collocational competence of chinese efl learners

Abstract

This study takes collocation, one of the most prevalent types of formulaic expression, as the focus, and aims to answer two questions: 1) what is the collocational competence profile of intermediate Chinese EFL learners? 2) how do specific learning modes affect the development of such competence? In essence, this study strives to provide reference value with regard to collocation competence profiling as well as its development. Two kinds of pedagogical treatments, namely, extensive reading and classroom training, serve as the independent variables. Four groups of Chinese intermediate learners were recruited and received different combinations of such treatments. During pretest and posttest, both spontaneous speaking and untimed writing data were collected and analyzed to probe into their implicit as well as explicit collocational knowledge. A random yet balanced piece of data from Corpus of Contemporary American English serves as a proxy of native speaker reference. Based on the analysis of six aspects (i.e. general lexical proficiency, collocational lexical proficiency, collocation density, collocation diversity, collocation accuracy rate, and collocation strength), it is concluded that one's collocational competence is related to and harder to develop than his/her general linguistic competence, and learners tend to produce less diversified and weaker collocations compared to native speakers. In terms of pedagogy, the matching between treatment type (i.e. implicit/explicit) and resultant knowledge type (i.e. implicit/explicit) is largely confirmed, and the combination of both treatments seem to provide the biggest gain, except for the aspect of collocation strength.