The Role Of Focal Attention In Second Language Acquisition Of Verb-Noun Collocations

This study is aimed at exploring the role of focal attention, which was studied from two different levels, in second language acquisition of verb-noun collocations. Firstly, this study, in accordance with the BBI’s classification of collocations, agrees that collocations could be generally divided into lexical collocations and grammatical collocations, and the target collocational type in this study belongs to the verb-noun collocations falling into lexical collocations. Secondly, this study, as the theoretical prerequisite, admits an influential research finding in the field of attention, in the sense that focal attention is necessary for Chinese students’learning a foreign language. Thirdly, the subjects were chosen from the parallel classes in some senior high school, and they were more or less in the same language proficiency level. Lastly, this study particularly centers around two different levels of focal attention which are focal attention at the level of instance chunking and that at the level of rule understanding, and discusses their respective functions in second language acquisition of verb-noun collocations, hoping that the research findings could provide certain pedagogical implications.Two levels of focal attention were studied:instance chunking——subjects were instructed to read passages containing the target collocations, they were asked to do matching exercises, and they were required to memorize the target collocations for a later test; rule understanding——subjects were instructed to read passages containing the target collocations and to do matching exercises, they were provided with explicit target collocational rules, and they were required to study how the rules were applied to the collocational instances appeared in the passages. After carefully selecting all the verb-noun collocations in the English textbook of grade3Senior English for China Student s Book3, make, take, form, solve and enjoy were counted as the top five frequently used verbs and thus they were chosen to be the target verbs. However, in the actual experiment, these five target verbs were replaced by their pseudo-forms ject, ceed, lide, tice and voke respectively, with their basic meanings and collocational patterns the same as those of the real target verbs. There were20students voluntarily participating in this study, and as mentioned before their language proficiency level was the same. They were randomly assigned to one of the two focal attentional conditions as specified above and received a four-day treatment. On the fifth day, they were asked to complete a test consisting three parts:choosing the basic meaning of each target verb; writing down as many noun collocates as possible for each target verb within six minutes; judging whether a sentence containing one of the target verbs was an appropriate English sentence or not. Immediately after the test, a questionnaire was implemented to further check the subjects’ commanding of the target collocational patterns.The studying results reveal that as regards the senior high school students whose cognitive ability of processing information is not so mature, learning under explicit rule-level focus can facilitate the storage of target collocational rules, which can be highly used in the judgment test but not reach the level of automatic knowledge application demanded by the specified production test. However, learning under non-rule-oriented focus may show greater advantage when producing collocates for each target verb especially that of simpler collocational rules. In other words, if the target rules are relatively simple, focal attention at the level of instance chunking is enough to help learners detect the underlying rules while focal attention at the level of rule understanding doesn’t necessarily exert significant effect on rule acquisition.