Conference: Anéla Junior research meeting
Url: http://www.anela.nl/juniorresearchmeeting
Date: 2007
Place: Groningen, Holland
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: Assessing productive knowledge of collocations in a foreign language Abstract:
Despite a marked growth in interest in collocations in second language acquisition, there continues to be a lack of experimentally based research investigating the breadth and depth of L2 learners’
knowledge of L2 collocations. These limitations are especially pronounced with respect to both the assessment of L2 learners’ productive (as opposed to receptive) knowledge of L2 collocations and their holistic (as opposed to their compositional) use of L2 collocations. This paper presents the early stages of experimental research which sets out to address both of these shortcomings as well as to obtain additional pedagogical insight for the teaching of (verb + object-noun) collocations in the foreign language classroom. The paper will discuss two central theoretical elements that shape the experimental design of this research: the way in which productive collocation knowledge is to be conceptualized so that it accommodates both a phraseological as well as a compositional viewpoint, and 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 provide the whole collocation i.e. not just the (verb) collocate but also the (nominal) node (in the case of verb + object noun collocations).