The Effect of a Collocation Teaching Innovation on Students’ Use of Collocations

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Published: Dec 17, 2020
Keywords:
collocation corpus-based approach EFL writing language transfer PPP OHE

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Poonyapat Boonyarattanasoontorn
Faculty of Humanities, Srinakharinwirot University, Bangkok, Thailand
Sirawich Tampanich
Faculty of Humanities, Srinakharinwirot University, Bangkok, Thailand
Chomploen Pimphakorn
Faculty of Humanities, Srinakharinwirot University, Bangkok, Thailand

Abstract

The present study investigates the problems of lexical collocation usage found in Thai EFL learners’ writing. The collocation teaching lessons in the present study were developed adopting Lewis’s (1993) Observe-Hypothesis-Experiment (OHE) lexical approach and Presentation-Practice-Production (PPP) approach (Gollin, 1998). The aims were to solve lexical collocation error problems as well as to improve the students’ recognition of lexical collocations. Thirty-six Thai undergraduate students majoring in English studying in Thailand were the participants of the study. The corpus was retrieved from 262 pieces of writings of the participants, and the research instruments included AntConc version 3.4.4, the Leeds Collections of Internet Corpora, and the Oxford Collocations Dictionary in order to facilitate the identification of the collocation errors in the participants’ writing, while the pre- and the post-tests were employed in order to test the learners’ recognition. The data analysis utilized descriptive statistics and Dependent-samples t-test in order to determine if the gained scores were significantly different due to the collocation lessons. The results revealed that the participants made verb + noun lexical collocation errors the most and that they benefited from the series of explicit collocation teaching lessons. Additionally, the major sources of collocation errors were interlingual and intralingual.

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How to Cite
Boonyarattanasoontorn, P., Sirawich, S., & Chomploen, C. (2020). The Effect of a Collocation Teaching Innovation on Students’ Use of Collocations. Journal of Studies in the English Language, 15(2), 98–129. Retrieved from https://so04.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/jsel/article/view/240158
Issue
Vol. 15 No. 2 (2020): July - December
Section
Research Articles
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