A Study On Explicit Vocabulary Instructions In Verb Collocation

Collocation is very essential to acquiring the vocabulary knowledge of a foreign language. The number of collocations that one masters will certainly affect his language level. In other words, a learner with inadequate knowledge of collocations will be doomed to fail in the further development of second language competence. However, as to the teaching concerning vocabulary, collocation is always a lion in the way. Students are complaining that their teachers' explanation of collocations is too limited, while the teachers are annoyed by the students' carelessness of collocations. It is clear that most students learn their foreign language and acquire vocabulary collocations in the classroom. Correspondingly, L2 teachers should be responsible for enlarging students' vocabulary knowledge in terms of collocations effectively and thus building a strong foundation of their further English development.As such a point, this paper reviews the theories of input & output and explicit vocabulary instruction in verb collocation, following puts forward the theoretical framework based on a model of second language acquisition by Gass. With a contrastive experiment, this thesis indicates that compared with traditional instruction, explicit vocabulary instruction is more effective in helping learners acquire verb collocations, and suggests that L2 teachers should adopt suitable vocabulary instruction to improve their students' learning interest in vocabulary collocations as well as the related aspects.