A Correctional Study on the Use of Lexical Collocations and Taiwanese College Students Writing Fluency
Many studies in the recent years have investigated lexical collocations but few of them directly measured learners production of lexical collocations and seldom concentrate on the relationship between learners ability to use lexical collocations appropriately and their writing fluency. The present study intends to explore college EFL students actual use of lexical collocations in terms of frequency and variety in their English writing (i.e., online writing and process writing) and further, to find out the connection between the use (i.e., frequency and variety) of lexical collocations and writing fluency. The participants were 28 undergraduate juniors of Department of English. They completed 3 online writing essays with different topics and 3 process writing essays of different modes in the experimental semester. Totally, 168 essays (i.e., 84 essays of online writing and 84 essays for process writing) were collected as the data for tallying lexical collocations in this study. The findings of the study show that: 1. In terms of frequency and variety, the use of lexical collocations in the subjects online writing and process writing both displayed a 3-level pattern: (a) LC1 (verb + noun) and LC2 (adjective + noun) represented the most tokens and types of lexical collocations; (b) the number of LC4 (noun 1 of noun 2), LC6 (adverb + verb) and LC7 (noun 1 + noun 2) came closely and thus these 3 categories were grouped together in the second place; (c) LC3 (noun + verb) and LC5 (adverb + adjective) accounted for the least frequently-used lexical collocations in the students writing. 2. The students us of lexical collocations showed no obvious difference between online writing and process writing; however, the 3-level distribution of lexical collocations remained distinct. Additionally, the students employed more lexical collocations in process writing, which they wrote without time strain and had more chances to revise. 3. As for correlational measurement, in the part of online writing, the relationship between total tokens and types of lexical collocations and the writing scores achieved a significant level. Regarding the process writing, only total types of lexical collocations was significantly correlated with the students writing scores.
lexical collocations EFL writing correlation study
You-yin Lin Jeng-yih Hsu
Department of English,National Kaohsiung First University of Science & Technology
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
380-392
2009-04-01（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）