Chinese EFL Learners' Incidental And Intentional Learning Of Collocations

Several Studies have shown that for EFL or ESL learners.L1 can influence the learning of English collocations.L1 can have a facilitative effect on the acquisition of congruent collocations,but an inhibitive effect on the acquisition of incongruent collocations.Congruent collocations are easier to learn than incongruent collocations(Wolter,2006;Wolter&Gyllstad,2011).However,most of these studies are descriptive in nature,as they try to analyze errors made by L2 learners and point out that L1's influence is one of the major factors that lead to these errors.Few studies have set out to further investigate the effective ways of learning incongruent collocations.Based on previous studies,this paper tries to find out whether incidental learning or intentional learning method is more effective in learning L1-L2 incongruent collocations.Three groups of freshmen(N= 79)in a Chinese university were exposed to 10 verb-noun incongruent collocation targets.The first group adopted incidental learning method and learned the collocations through reading stories,hence the Reading Group.Altogether 3 short stories were involved and the target collocations appeared once in each story.The second and the third group adopted the intentional learning methods and respectively learned the targets through translation and gap filling exercises,hence the Translation Group and the Gap-filling Group.They only read one story and then respectively did translation and gap-filling exercises on target collocations.The reason why translation and gap-filling exercises were adopted as two intentional techniques lies in that the two methods have been proved as effective in L2 vocabulary learning,and also they have different emphasis concerning incongruent collocation learning.The learning outcome and retention were measured by three immediate and delayed posttests:recall of the collocations,recall of the verbs and recognition of the verbs.Moreover,as the testing tasks,recall of the collocations(translation)test and the recall of the verbs(gap-filling)test mirror the two productive learning tasks,this paper tries to find out whether there exists any interaction between specific learning tasks and specific testing tasks,that is,whether learners would achieve higher scores when the learning task and testing task match than when they mismatch.The findings of this study are:In general,intentional learning methods yield better results than incidental learning methods in incongruent collocation learning.Translation exercise and the gap-filling exercise are of equal effects in learning incongruent collocations,with the translation exercise yields slightly better results.In addition,there is no interaction between specific learning tasks and specific testing tasks.This study has some pedagogical implications.Intentional learning methods are necessary in learning incongruent collocations.Teachers are advised to use some attention-drawing and awareness-raising techniques in the process of teaching incongruent collocations.