Constraints on acquiring collocations of ctu bachelor seniors

CANTHO UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
ENGLISH DEPARTMENT
!"!

CONSTRAINTS ON ACQUIRING COLLOCATIONS OF CTU
BACHELOR SENIORS

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

SUPERVISOR:
Trương Thị Ngọc Điệp, M.A

Can Tho, 2007

WRITER:
Vũ Thị Ngọc Bích
Student code: 7032519
Course 29


Constraints on acquiring colloccations of CTU bachelor seniors

Vu Thi Ngoc Bich

ABSTRACT
This study examines constraints on acquiring English collocations of CTU Bachelor
seniors when studying English as a foreign language. The main objective of the study is to
find out the major reasons that result in the inadequacy in the acquisition of English
collocations in the case of CTU Bachelor seniors. The work presents some factors that have
strong influences on learners during the process of acquisition. The problem relating to

teaching methods, learning strategies and the lack of awareness of the importance of
collocations were theoretically analyzed to lay a foundation on which data collection and
analysis were based and focused. Translating tests and questionnaires were distributed and
collected from the seniors of four Bachelor classes in Can Tho University with an aim to
figuring out the most common kind of factors constraining the acquisition of English

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

collocations. The results show that collocation is a big problem for seniors although they have
known collocations during some courses such as Semantics, Theory of Translation and
Discourse Analysis. Besides, from the analysis of data, teaching is the main factor that
constrains the CTU Bachelor seniors’ acquisition of collocations. Together with the findings,
this study may be of help for teachers and learners to choose good ways to teach and learn
collocations effectively.

Supervisor: Truong Thi Ngoc Diep

4


Constraints on acquiring colloccations of CTU bachelor seniors

Vu Thi Ngoc Bich

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my deep gratitude to those who have encouraged me and
helped me a lot in completing this thesis. First, I am sincerely grateful to the enthusiastic help
of Ms. Trương Thị Ngọc Điệp – my supervisor who mainly guided and aided me in shaping
and conducting this study. Second, I am thankful to Mr. Nguyễn Thu Hương for his valuable

suggestions. I also wish to acknowledge the cooperation and interest of Mr. Daniel White
who helped me hand out the translation tests to most of his students. In addition, it will be my
fault if I do not recall my appreciation here to many other teachers in English Department for
their devotion to my study. Further, the quality of this study was greatly enhanced by the
participants of four English Bachelor Classes, course 29 who took part in my research and
contributed a great deal to the completion of this study. Finally, I would like to express my

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

gratitude to my family and friends for their support in different ways during the time I carried
out this research. Without these support, I was not able to finish the study.

Vu Thi Ngoc Bich

Supervisor: Truong Thi Ngoc Diep

5


Constraints on acquiring colloccations of CTU bachelor seniors

Vu Thi Ngoc Bich

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Pages
TABLE OF CONTENTS .................................................................................................... i
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS................................................................................................ ii
ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... iii
CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION ................................................................................. 1

1.1. Rationale and research aims......................................................................................... 1
1.2. Thesis organization .............................................................................................. 2
CHAPTER 2

LITERATURE REVIEW.......................................................................... 3

2.1. Definitions and categories of collocations.................................................................... 3
2.2. The inadequacy in the acquisition of collocations resulting from teaching methods ..... 5
2.3. The inadequacy in the acquisition of collocations resulting from learning strategies .. 11
2.4. The inadequacy in the acquisition of collocations resulting from lacking the awareness
of the importance of collocations..................................................................................... 12
CHAPTER 3

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY .......................................................... 14

3.1. Participants................................................................................................................ 14
Trung
tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu
3.2. Instruments................................................................................................................ 14
3.2.1. Translation test ....................................................................................................... 14
3.2.2. Questionnaire ......................................................................................................... 15
3.3. Research procedure ................................................................................................... 16
CHAPTER 4

DATA ANALYSIS, FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS........................ 17

4.1. Translation test analysis............................................................................................. 17
4.1.1. Findings ................................................................................................................. 17

4.1.2. Discussions of translation test results...................................................................... 19
4.2. Questionnaire analysis ............................................................................................... 26
CHAPTER 5

IMPLICATIONS, RECOMMENDATIONS AND LIMITATIONS ......... 34

5.1. Implications............................................................................................................... 34
5.2. Recommendations ..................................................................................................... 35
5.3. Limitations ............................................................................................................... 36
5.4. Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 36
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................ 37
APPENDIXES ................................................................................................................ 39

Supervisor: Truong Thi Ngoc Diep

6


Constraints on acquiring colloccations of CTU bachelor seniors

Vu Thi Ngoc Bich

CHAPTER 1:
INTRODUCTION

1.1.

Rationale and research aims:

Many researchers affirm that collocation knowledge has a great

contribution to learners’ performance. For example, Nation (2001:318) states,
“All fluent and appropriate language use requires collocation knowledge”.
Taiwoo (2004:1) affirms, “Effective performance of ESL learners depends on
their stock of conventional collocations, which are characterized by varying
degrees of restrictedness”. Despite the significant role of collocation in English
use, not many studies of collocations, especially studies in the acquisition of

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

collocations have been carried out with the Advanced Vietnamese students of
English. Therefore, the researcher makes a decision to conduct this thesis for the
purpose to partly contribute to examining the constraints on acquiring
collocations of CTU Bachelor seniors. Besides, as a student majoring in
English, the researcher realizes that one of the most crucial aspects that leads
seniors to producing unnatural translation is their lack of English collocation
knowledge although they have already learnt collocations. In reality, the results
the researcher gets after collecting and analyzing data show that the rate of
misusing collocations according to open-choice principle and idiom principle is
very high: 29.26 % for the former and 27.21% for the latter. This fact implies
that collocation is problematic to students who study English at a high level.
Supervisor: Truong Thi Ngoc Diep

7


Constraints on acquiring colloccations of CTU bachelor seniors

Vu Thi Ngoc Bich

Hence, it is necessary to find out reasons for the inadequacy in the acquisition of

collocations of CTU Bachelor seniors.
In this research, the theoretical analysis will be discussed in the first
section and then, in the following part, the data collection and analysis will be
conducted to discover whether or not the inadequacy in the acquisition of
collocations does exist, and what some main reasons for the inadequacy in the
acquisition of collocations are. Finally, a conclusion will be drawn to confirm
the results. The significance of the study is the discovery of one of the most
common and important causes leading to the inadequacy in the collocation
acquisition. This study is conducted based on surveying some previous research
and collecting data in real translating tests. Therefore, the researcher hopes that

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

it can benefit both teaching and learning English as a foreign language in Can
Tho University.

1.2.

Thesis organization:
The thesis comprises 5 chapters:

Chapter 1: Introduction: The rationale and the research aims as well
as the organization of the thesis are mentioned in this section.
Chapter 2: Literature review: The ideas of researchers and their
concepts as well as the overview of those notions will be mentioned in this
part.

Supervisor: Truong Thi Ngoc Diep

8

Constraints on acquiring colloccations of CTU bachelor seniors

Vu Thi Ngoc Bich

Chapter 3: Research methodology: 3 subparts included in this
chapter are participants, instruments and research procedure of the study.
Chapter 4: Results of the case study that the researcher carried out in
Can Tho University will be reported in this section.
Chapter 5: Implications, recommendations for further research and
limitations of the study: This chapter will mention implications,
recommendations for further research and limitations of the study as well
as the conclusion.

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

Supervisor: Truong Thi Ngoc Diep

9


Constraints on acquiring colloccations of CTU bachelor seniors

Vu Thi Ngoc Bich

CHAPTER 2:
LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1.

Definitions and categories of collocations:

Until now, many researchers have given definitions and categories of
collocations.
Schmitt (2000:76) states, “Collocation is the tendency of two or more
words to co-occur in discourse”. As a result, two factors that learners have to
pay attention are the co-occurrence of words and the degree of strength in the
relationship between them. A common example of strong collocation is “blond
hair” because “blond” occurs almost only with the “hair” or few other nouns

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

like “woman”, “lady”, but never occurs with “paint” or “wallpaper”. He affirms
that there is no reason semantically why they do not co-occur. An example of
weak collocation is “nice + noun”. “Nice” almost occurs with any noun such as
“view”, “car”, “salary” and so on. Thus, the fewer number of words a word can
combine with, the stronger the occurrence of them is. And idioms are
considered the strongest collocations, but “Idioms are the least complex because
they allow no variation” (Cowie and Howarth 1985:68).
Schmitt (2000) and other researchers such as Benson (1985), Biskup

(1992) and Bahn (1993) affirm that there are two basic kinds of collocations:
grammatical collocation and semantic collocation. Benson (1985:60) defines,
“Grammatical collocations are the ones in which an important word (usually
Supervisor: Truong Thi Ngoc Diep

10

Constraints on acquiring colloccations of CTU bachelor seniors

Vu Thi Ngoc Bich

content word) combines with a grammatical one”. For example, a noun, a verb
or an adjective co-occurs with a preposition. Benson (1985:60) also states,
“Lexical collocations are the ones in which two basically “equal” words cooccur with each other” such as a noun and a verb like “ball bounces”, a verb
and a noun like “spend money”, an adjective and a noun like “cheerful
expression” and so on. Besides these, Allerton (1984) believes that there is
another kind related to time preposition. These collocations seem to be arbitrary
rather than based on grammatical or semantic patterning because we cannot
explain why we use “at … o’clock”, but not “in … o’clock”.
Some other researchers care more about the characteristics of the
frequency of the word combination (collocations). For example, Goddard

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

(1998:2) states, “collocation is a frequently found- combination of words” .

Similarly, Cook (2003:73) says, “collocation is a regular combination of
words”. Moreover, collocations with very similar meanings occur with different
frequency. For example, although saying “provide assistance” or “supply
assistance” is acceptable, the former is used more frequently, so collocations
with great frequency should be used commonly. Besides, Cook affirms that
collocation choices are based mainly on semantics because many combinations
of words are sometimes grammatical, but they do not occur. Supporting this
point of view, Robinson (2001) says that learners usually make errors because
they only base on syntactic rules to select expressions, especially collocations.

Supervisor: Truong Thi Ngoc Diep

11


Constraints on acquiring colloccations of CTU bachelor seniors

Vu Thi Ngoc Bich

Consequently, when wanting to choose a right collocation, learners should care
more about its frequency and meaning.
In the definition of Sinclair (1991), there is something rather new and
different. It is connected with the number of words and the distance between
them in the combinations. He defines, “collocation is the lexical co-occurrence
of words within a short space of each other in a text” (Sinclair 1991:170).
Usually, a string of words includes one “node word” and 4 words in each side.
In reality, “there is no theoretical restriction to the number of words involve”,
Sinclair (1991:17) affirms. However, usually researchers carry out research with
collocation patterns limited in pairs of words because the more words in a
collocation researchers want to include, the more complicated the analysis

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

process is. Also in this thesis, the researcher carries out it with collocations in
pairs of words. It results from that the thesis is not a kind of large-scale study. In
other words, conducting it with collocations in pairs is the most appropriate with
time limitation, the scale of the thesis and the capacity of researcher. Besides,
this study also focuses on lexical collocation only because of its
unpredictability. It results from that one of the characteristics of words is
arbitrariness, leading to the possibility of creating new combinations with
various meanings.

Another prominent characteristic in Sinclair research is that he points out
two principles of choosing collocations: the open-choice principle and the idiom
one. The open-choice principle tries to cover the idea that language is creative,
Supervisor: Truong Thi Ngoc Diep

12


Constraints on acquiring colloccations of CTU bachelor seniors

Vu Thi Ngoc Bich

and in most instances there is a wide variety of possible words that could be put
into any “slot”. In other words, “At each point where a unit is completed (a
word, phrase or clause), a large range of choice opens up and the only restraint
is grammaticalness) (Sinclair 1991:109). He also states, “Virtually all
grammars are constructed on the open-choice principle”(p110). However, the
open-choice principle cannot cover all the choices in order that a normal text
would be produced. Therefore, he notes that language also has a systematicity
that constrains vocabulary choice in discourse, so the open-choice principle does
not capture. Another principle is the idiom one. It highlights the fact that there
are regularities in how words co-occur with each other. It means that much of
the systematicity is strictly linguistic: there is no reason why we do not speak

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

“to put something on fire”, but fluent members of English-speaking speech
community know that the appropriate phrase is “to set/ start something on fire”.
In general, with any choice of collocations, two principles: open-choice
principle and idiom principle must be applied. First, the open-choice principle

should be used. If learners cannot select which collocation is suitable, the idiom
choice should be added.

2.2.

The inadequacy in the acquisition of collocations resulting from

teaching:

Supervisor: Truong Thi Ngoc Diep

13


Constraints on acquiring colloccations of CTU bachelor seniors

Vu Thi Ngoc Bich

Researches on reasons for the inadequacy in the acquisition of
collocations have not been carried out in a wide range up to now. In fact, some
researches with different results have been done.
The first study the researcher wants to mention is the study of Nation
(1990). The study was designed to investigate how to teach collocation
efficiently. Especially, it pays much attention to using word-frequency list.
Nation (1990) suggests using word-frequency list to inform pedagogy. This
leads to good result in students’ collocation learning. However, when using
them, teachers need to be aware of their limitations. The first reason is that
many important words do not occur early in frequency lists of general language.
This indicates that teachers cannot use frequency lists as a strict prescription of

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

the order in which to teach words. They can be a useful guide, but teachers need
to be free to add what other words they feel are necessary for their students to
know. He notes that many of the most frequent words in general English might
not be suitable for beginning students such as, “company”, “issue”, “labor”.
Moreover, the most frequent words of all in English are grammatical words.
One cannot imagine teaching function words like “the”, “of” and “with” until a
number of content words are learned. Only then can function words be taught in
any context that will make sense to students. The most important thing is that
“teachers need to be sure that words lists they use truly represent the language
targeted” (Nation 1990:83). In conclusion, frequency-word lists help teachers

Supervisor: Truong Thi Ngoc Diep

14


Constraints on acquiring colloccations of CTU bachelor seniors

Vu Thi Ngoc Bich

much in teaching collocations, but they should be taught along with the contexts
in which collocations may be used.
Similarly, Hatch and Brown (1995:417) in the book “Vocabulary,
Semantics and Language Education” state, “word lists by themselves are not
particularly good for helping learners learn collocations … If all of the words
on the word lists are given in context, however, there are possibilities that
learners will get some of other information …. Having words in such contexts
can also help learners increase their abilities to use the process of guessing

meaning from context cues”. To these authors, word lists put in their contexts
become a useful instrument for teaching collocations. This is a tip teachers
should notice because “intuition fails the language teacher attempting to focus

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

on collocation and present collocation out of context in an item-by-item fashion
carries false expectations and does not give the learner an accurate picture of
the extent that collocation permeates language” (Walsh, 2005:9).
Mc Carthy (2001: 63) affirms, “An overemphasis in teaching and in
materials on single words out of context may leave second language learners
ill-prepared both in terms of comprehension of heavily chunked output such as
casual conversation as well as in terms of fluency”. He also says that using
usual dictionaries does not bring good results in collocation learning because
they offer very few examples of new words, which leads to the misuse of their
collocations. As a result, no matter how collocations are taught or learnt, they

Supervisor: Truong Thi Ngoc Diep

15


Constraints on acquiring colloccations of CTU bachelor seniors

Vu Thi Ngoc Bich

must be put in a specific context. Additionally, collocation dictionaries should
be used commonly.
Another researcher, Ellis (1992) also conducts a research on collocation
teaching. He promotes giving students language data. Students are given key

words to learn and can find their meanings and behavior in context by looking at
numerous concordance examples. By this way, it is easier for students to acquire
collocations. Usually, with the development of technology, corpus data are
commonly used to help learners acquire collocations better. However, it
contains a disadvantage – the expensiveness of facility for teaching, especially
in the case of Vietnam. In addition, the expert uses these date to make adequate
dictionaries, especially collocation dictionaries which students are usually

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

encouraged to use. It results from that collocation dictionaries provide more
information than a usual one. In other words, it has allowed an accurate
descriptive treatment of the way language is actually used. Schmitt (2000)
proves that it is the best for learners to use a collocation dictionary. Using a
monolingual one is also acceptable, bit it makes the choice of collocations more
complicated because it provides less information about typical collocations in
real language use. It is suggested bilingual dictionary should not used because at
that time teachers give more chances for learners to transfer from their mother
tongue, whereas collocation meaning is not the result of combining each word’ s
meaning. Oppositely, Conzett

(2000) claims that teachers should instruct

students to “look it up twice”. It means that students first look for new words in
Supervisor: Truong Thi Ngoc Diep

16


Constraints on acquiring colloccations of CTU bachelor seniors

Vu Thi Ngoc Bich

a bilingual dictionary, and then check them in a collocation one. Along with
this, teachers have to encourage them to notice patterns in text dealt with in
class as well as the example sentences in traditional dictionaries.
Bahn (1993) in his own research proves that teachers should not teach
collocations that can be transferred from those students’ languages. Besides,
collocations should be taught for advanced learners who are enhancing and
consolidating vocabulary that has already been partially learned. He believes
that learners are able to transfer directly translatable collocations from their
native language to the target one. Consequently, it is necessary to address
collocations with no direct translation equivalence. Nevertheless, it is
impossible because this way still leaves a large number of nontranslatable

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu
collocations that learners need to identify.

Schmitt (2000:87) also says, “There are a little ideas of the best way to
teach collocations. The majority of current collocation exercises are variations
of a basic matching task, often requiring learners to fill in blanks in grids”. One
problem remaining is that if students do not know the collocations on grids, they
just guess. So, this becomes more suitable for students who already have
knowledge of the words than for students who do not, but are initially taught.
He suggests that if students learn new words, it might be better to give them
completed grids so that they can study the appropriate collocation pairings
rather than guess blindly. Another problem is that grids comprehensive enough
to cover all the main collocation possibilities may be too large to be learnable.
Supervisor: Truong Thi Ngoc Diep

17


Constraints on acquiring colloccations of CTU bachelor seniors

Vu Thi Ngoc Bich

Thus, Schmitt (2000: 88) concludes, “Learners are likely to have the most
trouble with unpredictable collocation for which there are no obvious teaching
approaches”.

Josep G. Stockdale III in the article “Definition plus Collocation in
Vocabulary Teaching and Learning” states, “Definition is concerned with
establishing a single word’s meaning, whereas collocation takes definition for
granted and is concerned with the words that typically appear with any
particular word: the verbs that might occur with a noun, for example”. He
examines definition and collocations as they relate to presentations and
dictionaries. He concludes that when teachers focus solely on definition,

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

students are less likely to be able to use vocabulary for an expression, and they
miss countless opportunities to recycle words they know. Moreover, if teachers
focus only on collocation, students may be able to use words but not know what
they are saying. Thus, a teacher needs add a definition to a collocation, or a
collocation to a definition. Because of the importance of collocation in use,
acquisition and ultimate success in language learning, in a vocabulary
presentation, he suggests that one-tenth of time should be spent on establishing a
definition, and the rest should be spent on collocation and its use. With the help
of a collocation dictionary, a teacher can simply look up a word, view a word’s

collocates and incorporate the information and examples in a presentation. In
time, teachers will be as quick as to think of a word’s collocates as they are now
Supervisor: Truong Thi Ngoc Diep

18


Constraints on acquiring colloccations of CTU bachelor seniors

Vu Thi Ngoc Bich

to think of a definition. This method seems to be very useful, but it takes much
time because in reality when learners study English at a high level, teachers only
check their vocabulary learning through tests, rather than teach them new
vocabulary. In other words, learners are assigned to learn vocabulary
individually.
Totimi Taiwo in his article “Helping ESL learners to Minimize
Collocational Errors” stresses the fact that “the neglect of collocation in ESL
classroom should be a concern of teachers”. He also emphasizes, “Teachers
concentrate on the other problems and make little efforts to help students in
their lexical problems where the lexical aspect is taught at all … Very little
attention is paid to the syntagmatic aspects of lexis (ability of items to co-occur,

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

otherwise known as collocation”. To this author, the teachers’ neglect of
collocation prevents students from acquiring collocation. He also affirms that in
English, meaning of collocations is difficult to capture because it is mostly
based on convention rather on compatibility in meanings of the individual items.
When learners are not aware of these conventions, they may produce

unacceptable combinations. Finally, in this article, Taiwo suggests six ways by
which teachers can help students minimize collocation errors. These ways focus
on the role of teachers in suggesting methods to help students acquire
collocation such as using some aids to vocabulary: lexical matching and
networks, using English collocation dictionaries and so on.

Supervisor: Truong Thi Ngoc Diep

19


Constraints on acquiring colloccations of CTU bachelor seniors

Vu Thi Ngoc Bich

In the study “Collocation problems in EFL learning”, Mika Higuchi
wants to figure out how teachers can help students in acquiring collocation in
EFL learning. He conducts the research on his Japanese students whose age is
from 18 to 20. After collecting thirty sets of short essays and personal letters, he
realizes that collocation is a major problem in their performance. These
collocation problems are mainly related to the students’ attempts to write
creatively in L2. He agrees with some researchers that “the disproportional
emphasis on grammar and neglect of vocabulary and collocation in EFL
learning lead students to be unable to produce sentences in communication”
(Rudzka et al 1986:i). As Mc Carthy (1990:12) states, “collocation is an
important organising principle in the vocabulary”, focusing on collocation is an

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

appropriate approach to enrich vocabulary and enable students to produce

naturally sounding sentences from the early stage. Higuchi suggests the way to
raise students’ consciousness of collocation is taking up examples with
collocation problems from the students’ texts, discussing problems and devising
exercises. In term of collocation teaching, neglect of teaching collocations
sometimes is a natural outcome because the teachers also have to face
challenges of collocations. Mentioning this, he concludes, “Since EFL students
mostly live outside English-speaking countries, many of their teachers are also
non-native English speakers, who can be regarded as very advanced learners,
but not someone equipped with native-like competence. These views may
suggest that non-native English teachers generally do not have sufficient
Supervisor: Truong Thi Ngoc Diep

20


Constraints on acquiring colloccations of CTU bachelor seniors

Vu Thi Ngoc Bich

competence in this area. Consequently, they are unable to teach to their
students; hence they even sometimes avoid tackling this matter” (p46). Besides,
Mc Carthy (1990:13) states, “Knowledge of collocation appropriacy is part of
native speakers’ competence” and “competence of collocation knowledge
belongs to native speaker’s intuition”. Fortunately, he also suggests that nonnative teachers can acquire collocation knowledge although it takes much time.
In addition, due to the development of computer technology, computer corpora
are commonly used to help teachers in teaching collocations. Another factor that
could produce collocation problems in EFL teaching and learning is that when
teachers give their students stories and novels, it is natural for the students to
have a poor sense of collocation. As Diegnan et al. (1998:45) says, “Novelists

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

sometimes break usual collocation conventions in order to create special
effects”, so students cannot distinguish what are typical collocations and what
are not. Therefore, teachers play an important role in pointing out that problem
and explain new collocations “Because collocations reflect what is expected, we
often try to violate those expectations to achieve certain effects. Poets achieve
remarkable effects by constructing unusual collocations”. (Hatch and brown
1995:201).

2.3.

The inadequacy in the acquisition of collocations resulting from

learning strategies.

Supervisor: Truong Thi Ngoc Diep

21


Constraints on acquiring colloccations of CTU bachelor seniors

Vu Thi Ngoc Bich

There are some researchers paying attention to collocation learning
strategies such as:
First, Ahmed (1980) conducts a research on vocabulary learning
strategies that learners apply. He figures out that successful learners are more
aware of what they could learn about new words, and become more conscious

of textual learning. They also pay more attention to collocations in the context.
In contrast, less successful learners are so passive in learning. They learn a new
collocation in separate ways. Additionally, Schouten-van Parrern (1989) finds
that the less successful students tend to neglect the context.
Likewise, Gu and Johnson (1996) study 850 university EFL students in
China to discover how different vocabulary learning strategies are related to

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

language learning results. They find out that self-initiation, selective attention,
deliberate activation of newly learned words consistently predicted general
proficiency. Moreover, contextual learning, dictionary and note-taking strategies
also contribute to their collocation learning results. Supporting them, Lewis and
Morgan (2000) also suggest that encouraging students to keep notebooks
journaling encountered collocations can be productive, but it takes much time.
Carter (1992:59) explains, “Language production consists of piecing
together such ready-made “pre-fabricated” units appropriate to a situation and
that lexical acquisition may involve the learning of complete collocation chunks
of language”. Therefore, learning collocation may be carried out through

Supervisor: Truong Thi Ngoc Diep

22


Constraints on acquiring colloccations of CTU bachelor seniors

Vu Thi Ngoc Bich

chunking (learning collocation as a big word) rather than learning individual

ones, then combining them together.

2.4.

The inadequacy in the acquisition of collocations resulting from

lacking the awareness of the importance of collocations:
Ellis (1997:133) claims, “The acquisition can be hastened as a result of
explicit instruction or consciousness-raising”. The most useful role of the
teacher, therefore, is in consciousness-raising, in encouraging the notice on the
part of the learners. In other words, the teacher becomes more of a learning
manager, giving students strategies to use outside the classroom while at the
same time providing exposure to as much appropriate, quality language as

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

possible. The author concludes that teachers must raise learners’ awareness of
collocation as early as possible. Students who meets words initially with their
common collocates use them far more naturally and pronounce them better.

Hatch and Brown in “Vocabulary, Semantics and Language Education”
believe that the awareness of the importance of what people do has a great
contribution to their success, as a result, learning collocation also requires the
learners’ awareness of the importance of collocation. Especially, when learners
study English at a high level, it is more necessary because collocation can help
learners communicate more effectively. In other words, the higher level they
get, the more attention to collocation they must pay.
Supervisor: Truong Thi Ngoc Diep

23

Constraints on acquiring colloccations of CTU bachelor seniors

Vu Thi Ngoc Bich

Considering the above studies, the researcher has seen that the results are
different and, to some extent, are contrastive to one another. In a nutshell, with
these inconsistent results, it is necessary to carry out further research to find out
whether or not teaching, learning strategies and the lack of the awareness of the
importance of collocations constrain the acquisition of collocations of CTU
Bachelor seniors. Therefore, seeing the importance and necessity of a further
research on the acquisition of English collocations in the case of Vietnamese,
the researcher conducts a study that is designed to answer the following
questions:

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu
1. Is collocation a problem for CTU Bachelor seniors?
2. Does the problem lie in teaching?
3. Does the problem lie in learning strategy?
4. Does the problem lie in the lack of the awareness of the
importance of collocation?

Supervisor: Truong Thi Ngoc Diep

24


Constraints on acquiring colloccations of CTU bachelor seniors

Vu Thi Ngoc Bich

CHAPTER 3:
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

3.1. Participants:
Schmitt (2000:86) says that “collocation can probably be considered a
more advanced type of word knowledge, and so may be best left to higher-level
students who are enhancing and consolidating vocabulary that has already been
partially learned”. That was the reason the researcher wants to choose 68
students who majored in Letters of English course 29 at Can Tho University.
They were attending Translation 4 and Theory of Translation 3 Courses. It
meant that they learnt and knew collocations. Besides, collocation was not a

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

simple matter, but played an important role in the seniors’ job search in a near
future. As Sonaiya (1988) stated that lexical errors were more serious because
effective communication depends on the choice of words. Furthermore, all of
them studied the same English program in the university. They were all seniors
whose age varied from 21 to 25. 19.1 percent of them was male. In other words,
they acquired most of linguistic knowledge, so were suitable participants to the
research.

3.2. Instruments:
3.2.1. Translation test:

Supervisor: Truong Thi Ngoc Diep

25

Constraints on acquiring colloccations of CTU bachelor seniors

Vu Thi Ngoc Bich

As Alan Duff in “Translation” (1989,6) states, “Translation helps us
understand better the influence of the one language on the other, and to correct
errors of habit that creep in unnoticed (such as the misuse of particular words
or structures)”. Therefore, translation task is an effective tool to obtain
information on a speaker’s competence in the receptor language. As a result, the
translation test was delivered to the participants in class in which they had to
translate the text immediately. There were totally 20 sentences, which were
ranked in suitable space so that the participants could write down their
translations after each sentence. All of these sentences were translated from
Vietnamese into English. These sentences contained one of two kinds of
collocations: the open choice and idiom collocation. These kinds were arranged

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

randomly in order that participants cannot discover what the researcher wanted
to check. The time allotted was 45 minutes. The aim of using translation test
was to discover and categorize mistakes. It meant that the tests were gathered
and analyzed for the purpose of finding out whether collocation was a problem
for CTU Bachelor seniors as well as which category of mistakes was more
common.

3.2.2. Questionnaire:
To investigate learners’ English collocation use and to find out reasons
for the inadequacy in the acquisition of collocation of CTU Bachelor seniors, a

questionnaire of fifteen questions was designed. It was segmented into two main
Supervisor: Truong Thi Ngoc Diep

26


Constraints on acquiring colloccations of CTU bachelor seniors

Vu Thi Ngoc Bich

parts: The first one was about real state of collocation learning and use as well
as teaching; the second one asked for the personal information of the
participants. All of the questions were multiple choices to save time for the
participants and were typed in English. In the first part of each questionnaire,
the focus of interest was on the real state of English collocation use, learners’
evaluations or ideas about collocation teaching, strategies used for learning
collocations and attitudes of learners towards collocation learning in learning
English. This part included 15 questions that were also ranked randomly. The
second part was mainly about age, gender and the duration of learning
Translation and Theory of Translation to make sure that the participants
acquired most linguistic knowledge. To ensure the confidentiality, the

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

questionnaires did not require the participants to provide their names.
Furthermore, participants would find it more comfortable to give responses to
the questions when the questionnaire assured that no one could know who they
were.

3.3.

Research procedure:
Research procedure consists of two stages:

Collecting translation tests: The tests were distributed to four Bachelor
of English classes of course 29. They were collected after 45 minutes. To make
sure the test-takers had enough serious-mindedness, the researcher administrated
the class. After 1 week, most of the data done by four classes had been
Supervisor: Truong Thi Ngoc Diep

27