An Experimental Study On Teaching And Learning Est Sub-Technical Terms By Collocation

In China, both General English (GE) teaching and Technical English (TE) teaching are faced with a lot of challenges now. GE, a course for the first and second-year university students, becomes the repetition of the Middle School English. TE, a Professional English course for junior and senior university students, mainly studies word formation and depends a lot on translation of the learning materials. This study believes that three conflicts result in problems of the university science students'English study. Firstly, there exists a gap between GE study and TE study. Secondly, both the lack of professional knowledge by the language teachers and the lack of linguistic knowledge by the subject teachers make Technical English teaching less satisfying. Lastly, teachers use the traditional teaching model to teach technical texts.Therefore, this study proposes that there should be a period of EST (English for Science and Technology) training before the TE study. To all these problems, especially the problem that there is not an EST lexical teaching and learning model for the language teachers to follow, this study explores an EST lexical teaching modal for the first year science students hoping to facilitate the future TE study and effective technical communication.Traditional GE lexical teaching and learning model is mostly dictionary-based. Lexical learning is conducted at the sentence layer, which is isolated from the learning text. EST texts, a different genre, are taught the same as the GE texts but with a special focus on the translation of technical terms. Furthermore, the pedagogical specialized technical dictionary can't catch up with the speed that new technical terms are created. As a result, EST teaching using the traditional lexical teaching model may not be very successful.Many researchers have proposed teaching and learning collocation in practical context. The vocabulary acquired in collocation, especially those densely packed noun phrases which create cohesion across written texts, help learners to communicate more complicated ideas. The corpus study reveals that technical vocabulary accounts for only 9% of the lexis, while sub-technical terms, context-independent words which occur with high frequency across disciplines, and collocated nominal phrases play a central role in the EST texts. Therefore, this study proposes a more effective model: A Collocation-Based Sub-Technical Term (CBSTT) model to teach and learn EST sub-technical terms by collocation, which is based on functional theory, employs lexical collocation approach, especially the lexical repetition which makes contribution to the text cohesion. Pedagogical experiments are conducted among HIT first-year science students.To test the effects of the model, the experimental group which employs the CBSTT model and the control group which uses the traditional lexical teaching model are divided. Two tasks: a Phrase Combination Task and a Writing Task are employed for data collection to examine the CBSTT model's effect on collocational competence, production competence with EST sub-technical terms and the students'textual competence by using the cohesive device: lexical repetition. Quantitative analyses are performed by running the SPSS V15.0 while analyzing the data collected from the pretest scores and data from the experiments. Independent-samples t-test is used to compare means of the experimental and control groups.The statistical results reveal that collocational competence with the sub-technical terms of the experimental group is significantly higher than that of the control group. However, the CBSTT model's effect on the simple nominal phrase collocational competence is more significant than the effect on the complex nominal phrase collocational competence. From the perspective of production competence, the overall results of the experimental groups are significantly higher than the overall results of the control group. The complex nominal phrase production competence is not significantly developed at the beginning of the experiment. With the progress of the experiment, the differences from the two groups become salient. However, the results show no significant difference between the two groups on the employment of cohesive devices in the writing. The statistical findings reveal that the CBSTT model facilitates the learners'collocational and production competence with EST sub-technical terms.Further findings indicate that text difficulty and the amount of language input in the pedagogical practice may be the factors affecting the enhancement of collocational competence. Three types of collocational errors are found from the writing samples: structural errors, semantic errors and wrong uses of'of'. The last error may result from over use of'of'or missing of'of'in the nominal phrases. Hill (2000) suggests that'The more exposure students have to good quality input and more awareness they develop of the lexical nature of language, the more they will eventually recognize and produce longer chunks themselves.'The significant improvement in the complex nominal phrase production proves that EST teaching and learning follows this rule. The statistical results also prove that EFL learners'receptive EST sub-technical vocabulary is larger than the productive one.Major methodological implications of this study are,(1) This study proposes that there should be a period of EST training before the TE study to fill in the gap between GE and TE.(2) This study proposes the CBSTT model, an EST lexical teaching and learning model for first-year science university students: Teaching and Learning EST sub-technical terms by collocation, and presents a comprehensive teaching and learning framework.(3) The marking system employed by this study sheds light on the test for EST productive vocabulary.Major pedagogical implications of this study are,(1) This study investigates the possibility of teaching and learning EST for the first-year university science students so as to relieve their fear of EST, thus hoping to facilitate their future TE study or technical communication.(2) This study directs EST lexical teaching and learning to the study of simple nominal phrases and complex nominal phrases with sub-technical terms.(3) The findings in the error analysis shed light on the EST lexical teaching.