Research Of Functions Of Collocation In Students' Reading

Collocation has received much attention from the linguists。Firth introduces the term"collocation"to refer to'the company the word keeps'.He studies collocation in the semantic field.Halliday deepens the theoretical study of collocation and pointed out val70us problems relating to collocation.His main interest turns to cohesion,a more lexicogrammatical topic within the more extensive environment of language as observed in the term'collocational cohesion'.Sinclair studies collocation in Corpus Linguistics.McIntosh chooses to deal with unusual collocations in his study and points out the special rhetoric effects of the unusual collocations.The theoretical study of collocation is enlarging and improving.But the empirical study of the functions of collocation in EFL has not aroused much awareness yet.Based on the previous findings on collocation,this paper attempts to prove the importance of collocation in reading and discuss the relationship of collocational knowledge and reading competence.A big part of the paper is devoted to illustrating the functions of collocations in three aspects:giving the context infomaation;explaining the value of lexical items; and making the text cohesive.Examples are provided to illustrate that the co-occurrence of the lexical items provides the contextual information necessary for understanding the text;the true value of a word can be inferred through its context; and the 1exical chains in a text can make the text cohesive.In order to testify the functions of collocation in learners'reading,eighty sophomore students from two classes are selected to take part in the experiment.One class is the control class,and the other is the experiment class.The experiment class receives collocation instruction while the contr01 class receives the normalinstruction in the two months.Both of the two classes are required to answer the questionnaire before the test.The result of the test proves that collocational knowledge has a positive effect on learners'proficiency in reading.This paper consists of six chapters:...