An Investigation Into The Acquisition Of English Lexical Collocation Of Senior High School Students

Collocation has become a particular domain of vocabulary research both theoretically and practically.Vast previous studies have reported students' lack of collocational competence and the difficulties they encounter in learning and using collocations,but few of which have been carried out to investigate the acquisition of lexical collocation in senior high school.This study aims to examine the receptive and productive lexical collocational acquisition of senior high school students.It also investigates the differences in lexical collocation between learners of different language levels and differences between learners' productive and receptive lexical collocation,addressed as the following four research questions:(1)What is the performance of high school students in receptive and productive test of lexical collocation?(2)What are the possible differences between high proficiency group and low proficiency group in the lexical collocation?(3)What are the possible differences between learners' productive and receptive lexical collocation?(4)What is the relationship between lexical collocation strategy and the acquisition of lexical collocation of students?The participants in the present study were 200 grade two students from a senior high school in Changchun.They are divided into high proficiency group and low proficiency group according to their English grade in the mid-term exam.The questionnaire was used mainly to test students' various strategies for collocation,and adapted from Schmitt's(2000)taxonomy of vocabulary learning strategy.The productive collocational knowledge was measured by a gap-filling test.Forms of collocations such as verb + noun(pronoun,prepositional phrase),adjective+ noun,noun + verb,quantifier+ noun were tested.Their receptive collocational knowledge was measured by multiple choice questions.The SPSS(version 24.0)was used to analyze the quantative data.The major findings are presented as follows: 1)Most high students have poor performance on lexical collocation,and they master better at verb + noun(pronoun,prepositional phrase);adjective + noun type of collocation,but worse at other four types of lexical collocation;2)senior high school students with different levels of language proficiency have significant differences in lexical collocation performance;3)a significant difference exists between the receptive and productive lexical knowledge of the senior high school learners;4)lexical collocation is positively related with lexical collocation strategies.Based on the results,the study proposed corresponding suggestions for teaching to improve the status of lexical collocation in vocabulary teaching and students' ability of lexical collocation.