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摘要：This article reports on a study which took place in the context of the design and development of an online dictionary prototype for learners of French. Aspects of the 'usability', i.e. the quality of the 'learner-task-dictionary interaction' of the prototype were tested. Micro-tasks were designed to focus on learners' productive knowledge of French collocations. Learners (n = 6) completed the tasks individually, with access to the dictionary prototype. The computer sessions were screen-captured. The product (the language input provided by the learners) and the process (the learners' behavior) of the interaction were analyzed based on a set of defined effectiveness and efficiency parameters. The results provide an insight into the learners' dictionary search and look-up strategies highlight areas of the prototype's interface that deserve further design attention and consolidate the methodology used to test the usability of the prototype. Adapted from the source document

摘要：The present study investigates the use of English verb-noun collocations in the writing of native speakers of Hebrew at three proficiency levels. For this purpose, we compiled a learner corpus that consists of about 300,000 words of argumentative and descriptive essays. For comparison purposes, we selected LOCNESS, a corpus of young adult native speakers of English. We retrieved the 220 most frequently occurring nouns in the LOCNESS corpus and in the learner corpus, created concordances for them, and extracted verb-noun collocations. Subsequently, we performed two types of comparisons: learners were compared with native speakers on the frequency of collocation use and learners were compared with other learners of different second-language proficiencies on the frequency and correctness of collocations. The data revealed that learners at all three proficiency levels produced far fewer collocations than native speakers, that the number of collocations increased only at the advanced level, and that errors, particularly interlingual ones, continued to persist even at advanced levels of proficiency. We discuss the results in light of the nature of collocations and communicative learning and suggest some pedagogical implications.

摘要：Using the academic writing sub-corpora of the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus as data and building on previous research, this study strives to identify the most frequently-used multi-word constructions (MWCs) of various types (e.g., idioms, lexical bundles, and phrasal/prepositional verbs) in general academic writing across the academic divisions of the corpora and to examine their usage patterns. The study produces: (1) a list of the 228 most common MWCs in general academic written English across the academic divisions in the corpora, organized by frequency and semantic function respectively, (2) new findings regarding the usage patterns of academic written MWCs, and (3) results about differences in the use of MWCs between American and British English. The study also demonstrates the critical importance of using large corpora in the study of MWCs in general academic writing. [Copyright The American University; published by Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：In this paper I use two case studies to show how corpus linguistics can be used to help in the teaching of business English. Senior managers in global companies often find themselves having to do their job in a foreign language. Given that language is one of the key tools of management, the senior managers are normally very keen to develop a sophisticated command of what they perceive to be key lexis. Consequently, the business English teacher may be required to answer searching and demanding questions in a very precise and accurate way. In this paper I show how a corpus-based investigation of the collocational behaviour of key lexis can be used to answer many of these questions. For example, a study of this kind can reveal the different senses of a word and show how it may be associated with a particular semantic prosody. By studying the collocations associated with a group of so-called synonyms it is often possible to identify slight but significant differences in the meaning of the words in the group. [Copyright The American University; published by Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：The development of adequate collocational knowledge is important for foreign language learners; nonetheless, learners often have difficulties in producing proper collocations in the target language. Among the various ways of learning collocations, the DDL (data-driven learning) approach encourages independent learning of collocations and allows learners to directly use corpora and tools to search for proper collocations. Concordancers have been one of the key tools in the DDL approach. However, based on the findings of empirical studies, many existing web concordancers have not been very helpful in retrieving collocations. To help EFL students and teachers quickly locate proper collocates, this article introduces a web-based collocation retrieval tool, WebCollocate, which is based on a large part of speech-tagged Gutenberg corpus. To determine if the new tool can facilitate the searching of collocations, this tool and the Hong Kong Polytechnic web concordancer were used by two groups of college EFL students to find proper collocates in a translation task. The results showed that the students who used the WebCollocate tool found more proper English collocates. In addition, a group of 35 pre-service English teachers were also invited to evaluate the effectiveness of this collocation tool. These EFL teachers indicated that they could easily find proper English collocates with the help of WebCollocate. However, they also suggested that the search options and the presentation of search outcomes of this tool can be further improved. It seems that a more dedicated collocation retrieval tool can facilitate collocation teaching and learning, but the functions of this tool can be further enhanced. The findings of this study can be useful for language teachers, researchers, and developers of corpus-based tools. Adapted from the source document

摘要：In this article I examine the collocational behaviour of groups of semantically related verbs (e.g., head, run, manage) and nouns (e.g., issue, factor, aspect) from the domain of business English. The results of this corpus-based study show that much of the collocational behaviour exhibited by these lexical items can be explained by examining some of the linguistic features and processes which influence the way collocations are formed. These include the semantics of the individual items themselves, the use of metaphor, semantic prosody, and the tendency for many of the selected items to be part of larger phraseological units. I show that it is possible to explain many of these collocations by considering the linguistic features and processes which have influenced the way they have been formed. My contention is that, if the learner is encouraged to look for an explanation, it makes the process of learning collocations more memorable. Adapted from the source document

摘要：The purpose of this study is to examine whether learning a known-and-unknown word combination is superior in terms of retention and retrieval of meaning to learning a single unknown word. The term 'combination' in this study means a two-word collocation of a familiar word and a word that is new to the participants. Following the results of Kasahara (2010), the study predicted that attaching a known word to a word to be remembered could help learners to retain and retrieve the meaning of the target word. Sixty-six university students took part in the experiment. They were divided into two groups with the same vocabulary size. One group was told to remember the 20 target words; the other was told to remember the 20 two-word collocations (known words + the target words). Each group was asked to define the meaning of the target words or the collocations respectively in immediate and delayed tests. The results of both tests revealed that the collocations allowed significantly better retention and retrieval of the meanings than the single target words. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：Second language (L2) learners' successful performance in an L2 can be partly attributed to their knowledge of collocations. In some cases, this knowledge is accompanied by knowledge of the semantic and/or grammatical patterns that motivate the collocation. At other times, collocational knowledge may serve a compensatory role. To determine the extent to which second language learners' interlanguage relies on collocational knowledge in lieu of precise semantic knowledge, an experiment examined the performance of advanced adult English learners (N=90) from Chinese, Korean, and Spanish L1 backgrounds on a fill-in-the-blanks test in which matched items targeted the same specific sense of a preposition but varied in word co-occurrence frequency, as determined through a corpus analysis. An ANOVA indicated that collocational frequencies of the phrase in which the preposition was embedded had a significant effect (p <.001) on the performance of the learners. The study suggests that even fairly advanced NNSs use collocational knowledge when acquiring prepositions' noncentral senses. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

摘要：This article reports on the results of a study which investigated advanced Cantonese English as a Second Language (ESL) learners' use of a monolingual dictionary for determining the meanings of familiar English words used in less familiar contexts. Thirty-two university English majors in Hong Kong participated in a dictionary consultation task, which included nine English sentences each containing a target lexical item the meaning of which depended on the grammatical contexts they were in. Different self-reporting protocols were used to tap into the participants' thinking processes and/or to gather their evaluation of the effectiveness of the dictionaries. The results of the study show that learners demonstrate some degree of success in the use of a monolingual dictionary for determining word meanings, yet the facilitative effects of a dictionary are quite limited, and problems such as learners' preoccupation with typical word collocations and their ignorance of dictionary information may hinder decision making. Such dictionary behavior may affect second language acquisition and requires attention. It is suggested that ESL teachers alert learners to the importance of grammatical associations in language comprehension. Adapted from the source document

摘要：The prevalence of formulaicity in naturally occurring language use points to an important role in the way language is acquired, processed, and used. It is widely recommended that second-language instruction should ensure that learners develop a rich repertoire of formulaic sequences. If this is justified, it follows that learner failure to use formulaic sequences should present some barrier to communication. However, it seems that few researchers have sought to objectively evaluate how learner deviations from the target-language (formulaic or otherwise) impact on online processing. Operationalizing formulaic sequence through collocation, this article reports the combination of corpus-based approaches and psycholinguistic experimentation to investigate the processing by native speakers of learner collocations that deviate from target-language norms. Results show that such deviations are associated with an increased and sustained processing burden. These findings support the widely asserted claim that formulaic sequences offer processing advantages and provide empirical support for the importance of formulaic sequences in language learning. Usage-based models form the basis for some hypotheses concerning cognitive processes that underlie the increase in processing demands. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This study investigated the effects of three factors (the number of collocates per node word, the position of the node word, synonymy) on learning collocations. Japanese students studying English as a foreign language learned five sets of 12 target collocations. Each collocation was presented in a single glossed sentence. The number of collocates (6, 3, 1) varied per node word between three of the sets, the position of the node word (+ 1, -1) varied between two of the sets, and the semantic relationship between collocations (synonyms, non-synonyms) varied between two sets. Productive knowledge of collocation was measured in pre- and post-tests. The results showed that more collocations were learned as the number of collocates per node word increased, the position of the node word did not affect learning, and synonymy had a negative effect on learning. The implications for teaching and learning collocations are discussed in detail. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This article assesses the influence of L1 intralexical knowledge on the formation of L2 intralexical collocations. Two tests, a primed lexical decision task (LDT) and a test of receptive collocational knowledge, were administered to a group of non-native speakers (NNSs) (L1 Swedish), with native speakers (NSs) of English serving as controls on the LDT. The tests assessed collocations in three critical conditions: (i) collocations with translation equivalents in Swedish and English (L1-L2), (ii) collocations that were acceptable in English but not in Swedish (L2-only), and (iii) unrelated items for baseline data. Our results showed that the L1 may have considerable influence on the development of L2 collocational knowledge. NNSs both processed [with faster reaction times (RTs) on the LDT] and recognized (with higher receptive scores) L1-L2 collocations more effectively than L2-only collocations. However, the results of the LDT also showed considerable variability for the L2-only condition, suggesting that the overall slower RTs in this condition might have been linked more to a lack of priming for individual items rather than slower RTs for this condition as a whole. Adapted from the source document