A Study Of The Acquisition Of English Collocations By High School EEL Learners

Collocation plays a vital role in language communication. In recent years, with the increasing concern for language proficiency, English learners are paying more and more attention to collocations. Collocation, especially typical collocation, is a greatly important part of English learning. Typical collocation refers to the habitual word combinations, which occur with relatively high frequency. It reveals the general behavioral pattern of vocabulary and reflects the idiomaticity and naturalness of language usage. As a result, acquiring typical collocations can not only help English learners master the correct language usage but also know the rules as well as the proper context of the target collocations, and thus to enhance their fluency, accuracy and coherence in actual language communication. In language teaching, it is naturally a top concern to help students have enough collocations or habitual word combinaitons. The habitual combinations suggest that encounter frequency is one of the key factors the acquisition of collocational knowledge. Based on the theoretical framework of second language acquisition and collocations, frequency effects as well as L1 transfer, this research aims to address the following three research questions:1) What are the effects of different exposure frequency (high frequency and low frequency) on high school students’acquisition of English collocations?2) What are the effects of different semantic transparency (transparent collocations and semi-fixed collations) on high school students’ acquisition of English collocations?3) What are the possible reasons responsible for the above effects?To address the three research questions, an experiment was carried out. Altogether 130 senior high school students of Grade One participated in the experiment. They were in two parallel classes selected from 30 classes from Grade One in accordance to the English scores of the whole classes in the two latest monthly examinations. Then one of the two classes was used as the experimental group and the other class, control group. In the present study, the experimental group learned sixteen target collocations by translating and reading aloud. Eight of them are high-frequency collocations and eight are low-frequency ones. Meanwhile, eight of them are transparent and others are semi-fixed. And the control group only serves as a reference. After the training phase, the participants had a translation test, and the analysis of the effects of exposure frequency and semantic transparency on the acquisition of English collocations would be made according to the statistic of the two groups.The empirical research has the following findings on the acquisition of typical English collocations. Firstly, exposure frequency has a significant effect on the acquisition of typical English collocations. Typical collocations of high exposure frequency are acquired better than those of low exposure frequency, and there is significant difference between them. Secondly, semantic transparency has a significant effect on the acquisition of English collocations. Specifically, learners acquire the transparent collocations better than semi-fixed collocations, and there is significant difference between them. Thirdly, the possible reasons responsible for above effects are mainly as follows:for one thing, frequency effects play a vital role in second language acquisition, as a result, in the process of acquiring English collocations, high frequency of exposure can help participants acquire collocational knowledge better. For another, EFL learners’ L1 knowledge also influence the acquisition of different semantic transparent collocations. The negative L1 transfer is responsible for the worse effects of the acquisition of semi-fixed collocations than that of semantic transparent ones. Besides, cultural difference also made a significant contribution to learners’performance in test.These findings of the study can have some pedagogical implications for future teaching and learning of English collocations. Teachers can provide students with the target collocations in different contexts frequently to ensure students have enough exposure. Besides, learners should pay more attention on semantic transparency of target collocations and the effect of LI transfer or cultural difference in the process of acquisition of English collocations.