Symposium: Vocabulary knowledge and other dimensions of second language proficiency
Url: none
Date: 2007
Place: Lund, Sweden
Presenter: Robert Lee Revier
Position: Ph.d. fellow
University: Aarhus University
Format: Oral presentation
Field: Language development
Topic: Second language acquisition
Focus: Collocation knowledge
Title of presentation: Work in progress: Measuring foreign language learners’ productive and receptive knowledge of English collocations—discrete test instruments Abstract:
Despite a marked growth in interest in collocations in the EFL context, research in this area continues to suffer in terms of both methodology and scope. The methodology employed in much of the non-corpus-based research is plagued by a failure to systematically delimit collocations from other kinds of word combinations. The scope of the knowledge assessed in experimental or test- based research is often narrowly restricted such that it targets only receptive knowledge of L2 collocations. In the few studies of this kind that do address collocation production, the measures employed appear to capture exclusively compositional use, while disregarding phraseological use of L2 collocations. In this talk, I will present the early stages of experimental research which sets out to address these shortcomings as well as to obtain additional pedagogical insight for the teaching of English (verb + object-noun) collocations in the foreign language classroom. The focus of my talk will be on three central theoretical parameters that shape the experimental design of this research.
The first is the way in which collocations are to be delimited and classified. The second is the way in which productive collocation knowledge is to be conceptualized so that it accommodates both a phraseological as well as a compositional view of language processing. The third is the way in which this knowledge construct is to be operationalized so that it can be assessed using a discrete test format that requires the testee to generate the whole collocation i.e. not just the (verb) collocate but also the (nominal) node (in the case of verb + object noun collocations).
