The Acquisition of English Collocations by Chinese L1 Learners of L2 English

Abstract

The present study investigated Chinese L1 learners’ acquisition of L2 English collocations by focusing on: 1) collocation-related variables involving English-Chinese congruency, L2 word category, corpus-based collocational frequency, L2 morphological knowledge, and L2 lexical knowledge, and 2) learner-related variables including Chinese learners' exposure to natural English and their English proficiency level. Specifically, this study aimed to explore: 1) whether learners' collocational acquisitions are influenced by collocation-related and learner-related variables, and 2) whether collocation-related and learner-related variables interact with each other in the acquisition of collocations. Using empirical evidence, this study comprehensively delineated how Chinese (L1) learners' collocational representations develop and change during the developmental process.

The present study performed two timed online tasks—the primed Lexical Decision Task (LDT) and the Acceptability Judgment Task (AJT)—and one untimed productive and receptive task involving fill-in-the-blanks and multiple-choice questions. Collocation items selected from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) were divided into: 1) English-Chinese congruent (e.g. seek help, green light) and English-Chinese incongruent collocations (e.g. catch fire, small wonder); and 2) collocations with two L2 word categories for example, Verb + Noun (VN) collocations, Adjective + Noun (AN) collocations; 3) morphological collocations (collocations with words in different morphological forms) (e.g., ‘natural’ world, ‘naturalist’ guide, ‘naturalistic’ research); 4) delexical collocations (collocations with delexical verbs) (e.g., take action, make payments, give suggestions). All collocation items were categorized into high- and low-frequency bands.

Research findings indicate that Chinese (L1) learners’ acquisition of English (L2) collocation is affected by English-Chinese congruency, collocational frequency, and L2 word category. Among the collocation-related variables, English-Chinese congruency is the most dominant factor affecting learners’ implicit and explicit collocational knowledge. Regarding learner-related variables, both exposure to an English-speaking environment and English proficiency levels facilitate Chinese (L1) learners’ acquisition of English (L2) collocations. The study also demonstrates that the interaction between learners’ exposure to and proficiency level in natural English was significant for their implicit knowledge of English-Chinese congruent collocations and their explicit knowledge of low-frequency collocations.

Further, the study finds that Chinese learners were inclined to have proceduralized storage of morphological and delexical collocations during the process of implicit learning, similar to native English speakers. By contrast, they did not show a native-like performance, in which Chinese learners lacked declarative knowledge of the use of patterns in morphological and delexical collocations during the process of explicit learning. This study assumes that, compared with native English speakers, L2 learners tend to have stored representations of form-meaning constructions in morphological and delexical collocations as whole units during the implicit learning mechanism, but L2 learners might fail to memorize and use the form-meaning patterns of morphological and delexical collocations in the explicit learning system.

The findings verify the underscoring of English-Chinese collocational congruency in the Developmental Bilingual Interactive Activation Model (BIA-d model). This study contends that collocational acquisition in English is a dynamic process and provides new insights into the nature of L1-L2 connectivity. The L1-L2 connection was initially activated from a semantic perspective. As learners’ exposure and proficiency levels in natural L2 develop, the L2-L1 connection is gradually inhibited, while the direct semantic activation of collocations in L2 is stimulated. Thus, the process of learners’ collocational acquisition involves developmental changes in which the L1 effect is modulated by L2 learners’ exposure to natural L2 and their proficiency level in L2. The findings of this study have pedagogical implications for designing instruction on English collocations for L2 learners.

Date of Award	7 Sept 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Yuet Hung Cecilia CHAN (Supervisor)