A Study On The Collocation Learning Of Non-English Majors In China

There has been general agreement in recent years that collocation is an important aspect of knowledge for language learners. An increased knowledge of collocation not only allows learners to improve levels of accuracy, but it also aids fluency and the development of pragmatic skills. As such, collocation is now seen as playing a fundamental role in the development of a learner’s inter-language and it has received increased attention from researchers at both theoretical and pedagogical levels. However, the experimental research with collocation as a primary focus is still in its infancy. Besides, the majority of previous studies have been corpus-based and primarily descriptive in nature, with only a small number of researchers addressing the issue of how collocation can be most effectively learnt in the language classroom.In order to shed further light on this issue, the present study researches three specific questions related to the explicit learning of collocation in a classroom setting. These research questions are:(1) how does the number of collocates per node word influence learning gains?(2) how does the position of a node word influence the learning of collocation?(3) how may synonymy affect the learning of collocation?To solve these questions, a one-group pretest-posttest research design was adopted to investigate the effects of three factors (the number of collocates per node word, the position of the node word and synonymy) on collocations’ learning.86valid test papers were taken for data analysis. After analyzing the research data, the present study concluded that:1) increasing the number of collocates will facilitate the learning of collocations;2) the position of the node word will not affect learning;3) learning the collocations for pairs of synonyms together is not an effective method of learning collocations.Based on the findings of the study, some suggestions on collocation’s teaching and learning are proposed in the present study:1) to learn collocations in glossed sentences;2) to learn multiple collocates for a small number of node words;3) to learn collocations for pairs of synonyms separately.