A Study On Senior High School Students’ English Verb-Noun Collocation Acquisition Guided By Concept

Collocations are quite common in the corpus,which play a vital role in the vocabulary ability.However,the collocational ability of English learners in our country is relatively lower,thus,many collocational errors are produced,especially for the verb-noun collocational errors.L2 learners tend to produce the collocations based on L1 concepts.Meanwhile,traditional teaching method focuses on the forms of language and ignores the teaching of the L2 verbs’ concepts,which is not helpful for the establishment of systematic L2 verbs’ conceptual knowledge.Lots of scholars quite focus on the researches about collocational teaching,for example,the researches about collocational teaching based on the corpus and the researches about implicit learning and explicit learning.In recent years,carrying out the collocational teaching in the explicit way has been the hot issue of researches about the collocational teaching.Based on the Vygotsgy’s sociocultural theory,Concept-based Language Instruction(CBLI),which was developed by Professor Lantolf and his team,has been verified to be an effective instruction to improve the collocational ability.It centers on the L2 concepts,and obeys three fundamental principles-materialization,verbalization and internalization to help the L2 learners understand and transfer the concepts.However,the current studies of CBLI applied in the acquisition of verb-noun collocation mainly concentrate on the learning gains and learning retention level of verb-noun collocations.And they tend to choose the college students as the participants.Thus,the studies of senior high school students which focus on the understanding and learning transfer of verb-noun collocations are relatively less.Hence,to verify the feasibility and the effectiveness of CBLI on the senior high school students’ acquisition of verb-noun collocations,two research questions were raised:(1)Compared with traditional teaching method,does CBLI help students develop a better understanding of verb-noun collocations?(2)Compared with traditional teaching method,does CBLI promote the students’ learning transfer of verb-noun collocations?The current study designed a teaching plan based on CBLI,and 64 senior high school students were comparable in terms of their English proficiency.They were assigned to the experimental group and the control group.Then a pretest-instruction-posttest experiment was carried out.Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected from tests,class assignments and verbalization tasks to analyze the students’ understanding and learning transfer of verb-noun collocations.Besides,the experimental group and the control group were asked to fill in the students’ information questionnaire before the instruction,and the experimental group was arranged to complete the follow-up questionnaire after the instruction.The collected data of these two questionnaires was used to analyze and explain the performance about the understanding and the learning transfer of the verb-noun collocations.Based on the results of the quantitative data analysis and the qualitative data analysis,two conclusions could be made.Firstly,CBLI and traditional teaching method both could improve the learning gains of verb-noun collocations,and the students guided by CBLI performed better than the students guided by traditional teaching method on the meaning recall of verb-noun collocations.However,the students guided traditional teaching method outperformed the students supported by CBLI on the form recall of verb-noun collocations.Meanwhile,the students supported by CBLI performed well the same as traditional teaching method on the form recognition of verb-noun collocations.Specifically,the students supported by CBLI could present the conceptual meanings make,do,take and get in their own drawings of collocation events.What’s more,the students also could explain the conceptual differences of make & do,take & get in the sentences.Secondly,CBLI could develop the students’ transfer ability of verb-noun collocations,and to some extent promote the students’ learning transfer on the meaning recall,more specifically,the target verb get presents the transferability,and make,do and take failed to transfer.