Implementing Collocation Instruction in Vocational High School English Classes in Taiwan
This empirical study aims to examine the effects of explicit and long-term collocation instruction on the development of English proficiency of vocational high school students in Taiwan. Vocational high school students are generally low proficiency English learners, yet they have to learn tourism English, nursing English, and technology English, in addition to regular English courses. Without sufficient collocation competence, they often have difficulties learning the formulaic expressions or language chunks in ESP courses. Based on the theoretical framework of Lewis (2000) lexical approach and Van Liers (1996) 3A curriculum design, the author designed six lessons of collocation insturction. She then implemented the explicit collocation instruction in two third-grade vocational high school classes for one semester. The experimental class received explicit and systematic collocation instruction along with their regular English class for one semester, while the control class only received regular English instruction without special emphasis and practices on collocation. The results showed that the experimental class made significant progress in their English reading proficiency. Though the control class also made progress in the end of the semester, their improvement did not reach the significance level. Statistical analysis also indicated that a significant positive correlation exist between the students collocation competence and their English reading proficiency. Those who scored higher in the collocation competence test, also performed better in the English proficiency tests. The pedagogical implications of this study include adding explicit collocation instruction to English curriculum, providing longitudinal and repetitive practice of collocation techniques, raising students awareness of L1-noncongruent collocations, etc. It is suggested that future studies lengthen die instructional time, recruit learners of more proficiency levels, or look into the effects of various collocation techniques on the acquisition of different types of collocations.
collocation instruction reading proficiency vocational high school English
Yuping Lin
高雄市立三民家商
国际会议
2009 International Conference on Applied Linguistics & Language Teaching(2009应用语言学暨语言教学国际研讨会)
台湾
英文
393-402
2009-04-01（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）