On The Relationship Between Vocabulary Learning Strategies And Collocational Errors

Vocabulary learning, a very important part of English learning, has attracted more and more attention in English teaching. However, lexical collocation, one aspect of the depth of vocabulary knowledge, has been neglected in second language vocabulary teaching. In the traditional vocabulary teaching, vocabulary is taught in a word-by-word pattern. Collocation knowledge is considered to be natural intake with the increasing of language knowledge. But, lexical collocation is not only a matter of accumulation of vocabulary knowledge. Just as Bahns and Eldaw pointed out that for advanced learners, collocation is a major problem for the production of correct English.A lot of systematic researches have been done on the linguistic features of collocation. Collocation, a group of co-occurred words, which is not only restricted by the semantic elements but also by grammatical forms, is not free combination of unrelated words. Besides, collocation is involved in contextual coherence; the incorrectness in collocation will bring about problems of understanding. What differentiate the second language learners from native speakers in language production is the idiomaticity and correctness in collocations. The native speakers have usually stored numerous lexical phrases, collocations and lexical chunks instead of simply a large size of individual words.The English majors in Chinese colleges should have stored a large size of vocabulary (according to the teaching syllabus of 2000, English majors should have recognized 5,500 to 6,500 words by the time they have finished their two-year study at college). However, a large number of collocational errors can be found in their production of language. Thoughsome teachers and researchers did some analyses of the collocational errors in the writings of English learners, yet all of them were done unsystematically. But what are key causes for producing collocational errors? According to the cognitive theory, individuals are said to "process" information, and the thoughts involved in this cognitive activity are referred to as "mental process". Learning strategies are special ways of processing information to enhance comprehension, learning or retention of the information. The process of memorizing, storing and retention of the information ultimately results in automatic language comprehension and production. Therefore, this thesis puts forward such a hypothesis that the use of VLS has direct influence on the production of collocational errors.In order to support our hypothesis, we propose and try to answer the following questions:1. Is vocabulary size related to the depth of vocabulary knowledge?2. Do both of them connect with vocabulary learning strategies?3. Do good learners differ from poor ones in using vocabulary learning strategies (VLS)?4. Is there any relationship between VLS and the production of collocational errors (CE)?5. What are the underlining causes of the collocational errors?6. How can strategy-based instruction help learners to improve their collocation competence?In order to answer the above six questions, we have done some empirical study.In our study, 180 junior English majors from Yulin Teachers' College participated in the vocabulary size (VS) and depth of vocabulary knowledge (DVK) tests and to do the questionnaire on vocabulary learning strategies (VLS). Based on the scores of the tests of VS and DVK, 108 students were sorted out as good learners (54) and poor learners (54).