Chinese Adult Second Language Learners’ Collocation Learning Mechanism

Formulaic sequences have become an important research field in appliedlinguistics. Its importance in language use and language acquisition becomes more andmore significant. However, when it comes to the learning mechanism of secondlanguage formulas, there is still no consensus. Ellis (2003) proposes that secondlanguage formula learning follows the usage-based model, and learners can retain theformulaic sequences they encountered holistically. While Wray (2002) believes thatsecond language learners cannot retain formulaic sequence they encountered holistically.Instead, they will focus on individual words. The evidence provided by the currentempirical studies in this field is not adequate to examine the two models.The present study takes one type of formulaic sequences----collocations as thetesting point. It strictly controls the learners’ second language proficiency and the inputthey get under experimental conditions, and examines the retention of collocations ofChinese adult second language learners.The subjects of the present study are divided into two groups: the high-proficiencygroup and the low-proficiency group. The high-proficiency group contains30post-graduate English majors and the low-proficiency group contains30non-English-major freshmen. The experiment is divided into two sessions: the trainingsession and the testing session. During the training session, the subjects will be exposedto target nouns that appear under the collocation condition and the control condition.The testing session will be conducted as soon as the training session is finished. Duringthe testing session, the retention of the target nouns of the subjects will be tested. Theresults of the Two-way ANOVA repeated measure show that the retention of the targetnouns under the collocation condition by the two groups is significantly better than thatunder the control condition. This means that the paired adjectives exert a prime effect tothe recall of the target nouns. Therefore, it concludes that both high-proficiency learnersand low-proficiency learners can retain the collocations they encountered holistically. Insecond language acquisition, collocation learning follows Ellis’ model, that is, theusage-based model. The present study also finds out that high-proficiency learners’ recall of collocations is significantly better than that of low-proficiency learners, whichmeans that although proficiency has no significant influence on collocation learningmechanism, it has significant influence on the learning effect. Suggestions to futurestudies, implications and limitations of the present study are discussed.