Collocations and Second Language Acquisition: the Acquisition of English Adjectival Constructions

Abstract

In recent years, vocabulary has gained a more prominent status in the study of second language acquisition, prompted by various corpus studies and awareness of the role of lexical units in learning and communication. Although vocabulary is often dealt with only incidentally by language teachers, lexical knowledge is central to communicative competence and to the acquisition of a second language (Schmitt 2000). An experiment was conducted to examine the effect of text frequency in the acquisition of two grammatical collocations by Japanese learners of English: predicate adjectival constructions involving an expletive it plus either (1) a for + NP prepositional phrase followed by an infinitival clause; or (2) a that clause. It was found that, as compared with the performance of low-to-intermediate learners, advanced learners show a stronger sensitivity to text frequency in three tasks: Japanese-to-English translation, grammaticality judgments, and familiarity ratings. It was also concluded that L2 learners, especially low-to-intermediate learners, need to receive a greater variety of input in order to achieve native-like proficiency in such adjectival constructions. Results of this study support claims that L2 learners are poor in knowledge of formulaic sequences (Wray 2002). These results also suggest that a greater variety of input must be given to L2 learners and that the use of corpora can supplement L2 learning.