Learners' use of collocations: insights from the research

By jjpacres via Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

I often cite research in my talks so in this series of posts I would like to share some interesting studies which looked at how second language (L2) learners use collocations. This post reviews three studies which sought to answer, among others, the following questions:

1. At what level of proficiency are learners more likely to make collocational errors? 

2. To what extent are learner’s errors caused by negative transfer (aka interference) from L1?

One of the most widely cited studies on the topic (283 citations according to Google Scholar) was conducted in Germany by Nadja Nesselhauf. Nesselhauf investigated how advanced level students use verb+noun collocations (e.g. raise the question of, perform a task or conduct a study - from the previous sentence). After analysing more than 30 essays which were written by L2 German students and judged by native speakers she concluded that advanced learners have considerable difficulties producing correct verbs in verb-noun collocations. Their essays often included infelicitous combinations such as *make homework and *close lacks which she attributes to the negative transfer from L1 much more than earlier studies had suggested. In fact, L1 influence was responsible for more than half of all the learner errors in the essays under study.

In their study of Hebrew and Arabic-speaking students of different levels of proficiency Batia Laufer and Tina Waldman also concluded that negative transfer from L1 was one of the main factors in producing incorrect L2 collocations. About 1/3 of all (attempted) collocations produced in the large sample of learner writing were deviant. The sample included argumentative and descriptive essays by learners at three levels of proficiency (basic – Middle school, intermediate – High school and advanced – University). What is interesting is that the number of collocational errors increased with the level of proficiency. The researchers attribute it to the fact that collocations are often semantically transparent when encountered in texts and learners tend to overlook them. They stress the importance of contrastive analysis in class in order to raise learners' awareness of different collocational patterns in L1 and English, for example drawing students' attention that in English we make a decision while the same meaning is expressed by prendre une decision ("take a decision) in French or prinyat resheniye ("receive/host a decision") in Russian. See more examples in the tables below:

English	Russian	German
make a decision	prinyat resheniye	eine Entscheidung treffen
	receive/host a decision	meet a decision

English	French	Hebrew
meet requirements	répondre aux exigences	la'amod bedrishot
	respond to the requirements	stand in the requirements

Despite seemingly convincing evidence that collocational errors are almost always caused by L1 transfer, Ying Wang and Philip Shaw came to a different conclusion in their study. Once again the focus was on verb+noun collocations but this time two groups were compared: Swedish and Chinese learners of English. Their results revealed that learners’ mistakes were quite similar despite their vastly different L1s. The researchers attribute it to intralingual factors, i.e. factors inherent in the language being learnt, for example overgeneralization or misapplication of a rule, rather than stemming from L1 transfer. One such factor could be the learners’ tendency to resort to general words (e.g. do, make, put) rather than words of specific meaning, which sometimes works just as fine, for example make a visit as an alternative to pay a visit but oftentimes result in an error, for example *do a threat instead of pose a threat.

L1 transfer or inadequate teaching?

So where does this leave us? Certainly L1 has a role to play and transfer is inevitable especially when learners aren’t aware that certain words that can be combined in their L1 cannot be combined in English. Not having the right English collocation in their lexicon, they resort to word-for-word translation from L1 producing as a result such infelicities as *strong rain or *use a chance.

But the reason may also be their lack of awareness of the phenomenon of collocation, specifically collocational restrictions on word use and collocational differences between English and their L1. So while it’s easy to blame L1, lexical errors may also stem from the lack of explicit focus on collocations in the class or teaching materials. So teachers should take some responsibility too.

References

Laufer, B. & Waldman, T. (2011). Verb-noun collocations in second language writing: a corpus analysis of learners’ English. Language Learning, 61(2), 647-672

Nesselhauf, N. (2003). The use of collocations by advanced learners of English and some implications for teaching. Applied Linguistics, 24(2), 223–242

Wang, Y. & Shaw, P. (2008). Transfer and universality: Collocation use in advanced Chinese and Swedish learner English. ICAME Journal 32, 201-228