An Empirical Research On The Application Of Collocation To English Writing In Junior High School

As one of the four basic skills in English learning,writing is a kind of output training with high comprehensive language ability.In the process of writing,students often meet many problems,among which the usage of collocation is the most difficult part.At present,a large number of studies have shown that the correct application of collocation can help students grasp vocabulary more effectively and authentically,which is beneficial to improve their writing level.Collocation has been regarded as a linguistic phenomenon in which two related terms coexist in academia.However,most of the current studies focus on middle and advanced English learners and put emphasis on the analysis of collocation errors and their causes,as well as other functions of collocation,such as cohesive functions in discourse.The significance of this study lies in the use of collocation strategies on the effect of avoiding collocation errors in English writing by learners at the primary and intermediate stages.Based on the concept of collocation in linguistics and error analysis in second language acquisition,this study investigated the application of collocation in students' English writing from the following two aspects:(1)What is the problem of collocation in students' English writing? What kind of collocation errors do they make?(2)What's the effect of applying collocation on students' English writing?This study combined quantitative and qualitative methods.A questionnaire,two writing tests(pre-test and post-test)and an interview were used to conduct a three-month empirical study on two parallel classes of ninth grade students in a Middle School in Hangzhou.Before the experiment,the students' collocation problems in English writing were investigated through questionnaires,and then 60 compositions were collected through the pre-test to analyze the types of collocation errors.In the experiment,the teachers used collocation to teach the experimental class,which was mainly divided into two steps: input collocation in reading,output collocation by writing.In the controlled class,writing was taught in convention.After the experiment,based on the evaluation of the results,some students in the experimental class were interviewed to understand the impact of collocation on English writing.The author analyzed the experimental results and found that:(1)Before the experiment,students consciously used collocation,but the concept of collocation for them was vague,and they had no idea about how to use collocation.There were 409 collocation errors in total in the pre-test.Among them,135 were lexical collocation errors and 274 were grammatical collocation errors,of which 50% were verbal collocation errors.(2)After the experiment,the independent sample T-test in SPSS16.0 was used to analyze the post-test.The results showed that the performance of the experimental class was better than that of the controlled class,which denoted that students' writing ability has been enhanced,mainly reflecting in the accuracy and fluency of language expression;collocation was not only helpful to improve students' English writing performance,but also it was beneficial to stimulate their interest in learning and master more authentic and accurate expressions.Finally,the limitation of this paper lies in that the insufficient number of samples and the lack of experience of researchers will affect the experimental results.However,the results of this study have some implications for students to use collocations to improve their English writing proficiency.