An Empirical Research Into The Effect Of Acquisition Of Collocations Upon English Reading Accuracy Of Non-English Majors

Growing attention has been attached to collocation among language researchers and teaching practitioners in recent years, as they come to realize that grammar is lexis-driven, the door-opener, however, may quite well lie in the hand of collocation, the grammaticalized lexis. Collocation should be learned holistically, stored and retrieved as a whole. Collocation competence helps college students achieve native-like fluency, boosts their comprehension, facilitates their production. Therefore, the knowledge of and the ability to use collocation are essential for college language learners.In light of its significance, it is imperative for linguists and language practitioners to explore deep into collocation. Many efforts have been made toward better understanding collocation so far, a majority of which, however, concentrate on theoretical discussion. Among the scanty empirical studies on collocation, an overwhelming number is focused on elicitation tests based more on the production than on the comprehension. Studying the outcome of collocation acquisition through the receptive end, i.e. reading remains comparatively few and deserves further research.This research is designed to explore possible collocation teaching methods that help facilitate collocation acquisition so as to guide classroom teaching. On the basis of VanPatten’s model of second language acquisition, the author of this thesis advances two collocation methods:input-only collocation teaching method and input plus output collocation teaching method, both of which treat collocation as the minimum unit of English teaching and learning, as against the traditional collocation teaching method which regards individual word as the minimum unit. During the twelve-week quasi-experiment, the mentioned three types of collocation teaching method are employed respectively on three intact language classes of Beijing Forestry University. Four types of testing techniques-banked-cloze, cloze, multiple-choice question, and short-answer question-are adopted to comprehensively gather information of reading comprehension at the content-word level, the words of all part of speech level, the intersentential and beyond level, and semi-productive level. SPSS V19software package is introduced to engage in the analysis of variance of the data collected from both pre-test and post-test of the experiment. Based on the data-analysis, the author concludes that I) compared with the traditional collocation teaching method, both input-only and input plus output collocation teaching methods are conducive to collocation acquisition and reading accuracy; II) when non-English majors are concerned, input plus output method is not necessarily superior to input only method. The author analyzes the conclusion obtained from data analysis and points out that it is necessary to introduce collocation into classroom teaching. In the course of classroom teaching, it is advisable for teachers to focus on raising students’ awareness that collocation is the minimum unit of language teaching and learning, and try to intensify such awareness though relevant exercises. In addition, teachers should make effort to guide students to incidental learning of collocation outside classroom to complement classroom intended teaching of collocation.