Acquisition Of Collocation By English Majors: A Data-Driven Learning Approach

This thesis is intended to investigate the collocational acquisition on the part of English majors by employing the data-driven learning approach. With the pendulum of language teaching shifting from a teacher-centered approach to a learner-centered one, corpus linguistics and the data-driven learning (DDL) approach have attracted more and more attention of a number of scholars and researchers. Built on the collective strength of previous theoretical and empirical studies, research efforts have been made to testify the effectiveness of DDL on the acquisition of collocation. To be specific, an exploratory study has been conducted to explore how the collocational features of synonyms are acquired and integrated into the second language lexicon over a period of time. The following questions are addressed in this study:A: Which treatment is more effective in the process of collocational acquisition, DDL instruction or traditional teaching method?B: Can the DDL group maintain what they have learned better than the traditional group over time?C: Can students accept DDL method promptly?D: What factors affect the acquisition of collocation?The comparison of the two teaching approach are made among 105 English majors from three intact classes in Grade One in a university of Shandong Province. In the present study, three pairs of synonyms are selected carefully by the systematic random sampling from 900 lexical practices for TEM-4 (East China University of Science and Technology Press). On-line corpora with abundant and renewable data are used as references to check the native speakers'use of collocations pertinent to the selected word pairs. Two tests are carried out with one week intervals between instant test and posttest. The statistical software SPSS 13.0 has been used to process the data and the statistical procedure including descriptive statistics and some hypothetical tests such as T-test, one-way ANOVA are employed to draw a general picture of collocational acquisition and test hypotheses.Compared with the traditional teaching method, DDL instruction reveals its priority in both instant test and posttest. The results illustrate that: 1) DDL can not only arouse the learning interests but also contribute to the internalization of collocational knowledge into the long-term memory; 2) There are many factors interfering with the quality of collocational acquisition, such as the lexical features of the words, the interests of the pedagogy, etc; 3) Language transfer can be very helpful in distinction and acquisition of the synonyms which has minimal difference in meaning. Teachers should design the teaching plan according to the words'meanings, the characteristics of semantic prosody and the collocational features. Through different teaching methods, teachers can improve the quality and efficiency of the collocational acquisition and cultivate students'learning autonomy. Consequently, it is premature to pursue the modern teaching philosophy over-enthusiastically and devalue the traditional teaching method entirely.Hopefully, the findings of the present study may offer some implications for the theoretical construction of DDL, the teaching of collocational knowledge, and the development of learning autonomy.