HUE UNIVERSITY UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES --------------- TRAN NGOC QUYNH PHUONG EFL VIETNAMESE LEARNERS’ USE OF LEXICAL COLLOCATIONS IN ESSAY WRITING MA THESIS IN THEORY AND METHODOLOGY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, University of Foreign Languages and International Studies, Hue University THUA THIEN HUE, 2022 HUE UNIVERSITY UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES --------------- TRAN NGOC QUYNH PHUONG EFL VIETNAMESE LEARNERS’ USE OF LEXICAL COLLOCATIONS IN ESSAY WRITING MA THESIS IN THEORY AND METHODOLOGY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING CODE: 8140111 SUPERVISOR: DR. NGUYEN THI BAO TRANG THUA THIEN HUE, 2022 ĐẠI HỌC HUẾ TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC NGOẠI NGỮ --------------- TRẦN NGỌC QUỲNH PHƯƠNG NGHIÊN CỨU VỀ VIỆC SỬ DỤNG CÁC CỤM TỪ VỰNG TRONG BÀI VIẾT CỦA SINH VIÊN VIỆT NAM HỌC NGOẠI NGỮ TIẾNG ANH LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ LÝ LUẬN VÀ PHƯƠNG PHÁP DẠY HỌC BỘ MÔN TIẾNG ANH MÃ SỐ: 8140111 NGƯỜI HƯỚNG DẪN KHOA HỌC: TS. NGUYỄN THỊ BẢO TRANG THUA THIEN HUE, 2022 STATEMENT OF ORIGINAL AUTHORSHIP The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted for a degree in any university. I certify that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, my thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made in the thesis itself.
Signed: ………………………… Tran Ngoc Quynh Phuong Date: ……/ ……/……… i ABSTRACT This study investigated the use of lexical collocations and related collocational errors in opinion essays written by Vietnamese English as a foreign language (EFL) students. In two separate 50-minute writing tests, each of the fifty second-year English majors at a Vietnamese university wrote two essays on two topics. The data was analyzed by using AntConc (Anthony, 2021), the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the British National Corpus (BNC), and Oxford Collocations Dictionary (OCD). The findings found that adjective-noun collocations were the most common, followed by noun-noun, verb-noun, noun-of-noun, adverb-verb, verb-adverb, and verb-adjective.
Meanwhile, adverb-adjective collocations were the least frequent type. Students both repeated exact wordings from task prompts and developed alternative phrases for prompt-derived collocations, albeit the exact repetition occurred more frequently. To produce paraphrases, students tended to replace prompt-based collocations’ components with their synonyms or near synonymous words, resulting in both accurate and incorrect lexical collocations. The study also revealed three broad error categories: wrong word combinations, incorrect forms of collocational elements, and mixed errors.
While the most common error committed by students in the first category was incorrect adjective choice, the omission of the plurality marker occurred most frequently in the second error category, and the number of mixed errors was insignificant. Finally, pedagogical implications for enhancing collocational use are discussed to assist both students and teachers in their classroom learning and teaching. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to express my deepest and most sincere gratitude to my supervisor Mrs. Nguyen Thi Bao Trang, Ph.D, who devoted her time and effort to guide me and correct my thesis.
Not only did she provide me with guidelines for developing my thesis, but she also offered me a wealth of materials and references, as well as invaluable feedback throughout the research process. Her kindness, enthusiasm, dynamism, and expertise have inspired me to overcome the challenges during the process of conducting this research. It was a great privilege and honor to work and study under her guidance. I am extremely grateful for what she has offered me.
Next, I would like to express my appreciation to my beloved friends, Nguyen Thi Nhat Ly and Wade Rutherford, who had spent their time helping me in the procedure of data collection and analysis. Besides, my special thank goes to Nguyen Dac Quynh Anh who was always ready to offer help when necessary and more importantly, offered me spiritual assistance. Finally, I must express my very profound gratitude to my parents for all the unconditional support and continuous encouragement in this very intense academic year. Without their understanding and love, it would be impossible for me to complete my study.
iii List of Tables Table 1. Grammatical collocations (Benson et al. Lexical collocations (Benson et al. Types of errors in verb-noun collocations (Nesselhauf, 2003, p.
Types of errors in verb-noun collocations (adapted from Dukali, 2018). Types of collocational errors (Rodríguez-Fernández et al. Types of errors in lexical collocations (Mahmoud, 2005, p. Vietnamese collocational types (Trinh, 2001).
Previous studies utilizing the frequency of occurrence to assess the appropriateness of lexical collocations. TagAnt’s indicators for parts of speech. Lexical collocations types (adapted from Benson et al. Formulas for lexical collocation types.
Coded collocational error types and examples from students’ essays. Agreement percentage of lexical collocation types in Online learning. Agreement percentage of lexical collocational errors in Online learning. Agreement percentage of lexical collocation types in Volunteer work.
Agreement percentage of lexical collocational errors in Volunteer work. The distribution of different lexical collocation types on two topics. Use of the prompt-based lexical collocations. Paraphrasing of the prompt-derived adjective-noun collocations in Online learning.
Paraphrasing of the prompt-derived verb-noun collocation in Online learning. Paraphrasing of the prompt-derived adjective-noun collocations in Volunteer work. Paraphrasing of the prompt-derived verb-noun collocation in Volunteer work. The distribution of lexical collocation errors in students’ essays on two topics.
Error types of students’ paraphrases for prompt-derived lexical collocations. Error types of exact wordings from the two task prompts. 72 iv List of Figures Figure 1. The process of identifying types of lexical collocations.
The process of identifying students’ recycled and alternative lexical collocations. The process of identifying incorrect lexical collocation committed by students. The distribution of lexical collocation types in EFL students’ essays. 59 v List of Abbreviations L1……………first language L2……………second language EFL………… English as a foreign language ESL………… English as a second language CEFR……….
The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages HUFLIS……. University of Foreign Languages and International Studies, Hue University COCA……… Corpus of Contemporary American English BNC…………British National Corpus OCD…………Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Statement of original authorship.iii List of tables. iv List of figures. v List of abbreviations.
vi Table of contents. vii Chapter 1: Introduction. Background of the study. Objectives of the research.
Scope of the study. Structure of the thesis. Theoretical background of collocational studies. Definition of collocations.
Features of collocations. Collocations versus idioms and free combinations. Classifications of collocations. Lexical and grammatical collocations.
Open and restricted collocations. Weak and strong collocations. Classifications of collocational errors. Sources of collocational errors.
Characteristic of opinion essays. The role of collocations in opinion essays. Vietnamese collocational patterns. Previous studies on lexical collocations in writing.
Previous studies on ESL/EFL learners’ lexical collocational knowledge. Previous studies on specific types of lexical collocations in writing. Previous studies on lexical collocational errors and factors affecting learners’ collocation production. Evaluation of the collocations’ appropriateness in corpus-based studies.
Previous studies on lexical collocations in the Vietnamese EFL context. Corpus and corpus-based studies. Corpus-based studies. Participants and writing tasks.
Tag Ant and AntConc. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English (OCD). Data collection and analysis procedure.
Data collection and corpus-building procedure. Data analysis procedure. Identifying and classifying lexical collocations. Analyzing recycled and alternative lexical collocations in learner essay corpus.
Analyzing lexical collocational errors committed by learners. Reliability and validity. Findings and Discussion. Lexical collocation types in EFL students’ essays.
Students’ use of prompt-derived lexical collocations. Identical lexical collocations taken from the task prompts. Paraphrasing of prompt-based lexical collocations. Lexical collocation errors in EFL students’ essays.
Lexical collocation errors in EFL students’ essays on two topics. Errors found in prompt-based lexical collocations. Error types of students’ paraphrases for prompt-derived lexical collocations. Error types of exact wordings from the two task prompts.
Types of lexical collocations in EFL students’ essays on different topics. Students’ use of prompt-derived lexical collocations from the two writing tasks. Lexical collocation errors. Incorrect word combinations.
Incorrect forms of collocational elements. Conclusion and Implication. Summary of main findings and conclusions. Implications, limitations, and recommendations for future research.
112 x Chapter 1: Introduction This chapter presents the rationale, states the research problems, and specifies the scope and significance of the study. Background of the study It is commonly believed that to master the English language, students of English as a foreign language (EFL) and English as a second language (ESL) should be able to use the language in chunks to express their ideas naturally in different contexts rather than simply memorizing individual words. This is because in English, “words seldom occur in isolation” (Wallace, 1982, as cited in Duan & Qin, 2012, p.1891), they always go together as groups, hence, to learn English successfully, learners should pay attention to multiword units, including collocations. According to Granger and Bestgen (2014), one quality that distinguishes native speakers from L2 learners, even those with an advanced proficiency level, is the ability to utilize multiword units appropriately.
English native speakers, for example, say ‘make a mistake’ or ‘commit a mistake’ rather than ‘do a mistake’ as many EFL/ESL students might. These multiple-word expressions, also known as ‘phraseological items’, ‘preassembled units’, ‘prefabricated chunks’, or ‘ready-made utterances’ are considered a crucial component of lexical competence in English language learning and teaching (Laufer & Waldman, 2011). In previous literature on collocations, academics and linguists all agreed on the importance of collocations. Firth (1957) who first used the term collocation stated “You shall know a word by the company it keeps.179), indicating the significant role of collocations in identifying “the sense of a lexical item and its functional value through its use and the relationships it forms with other words in a specific situational context” (Vasiljevic, 2014, p.
Many other scholars believed that collocations assist learners in understanding the English language comprehensively, aid them in better vocabulary memorization, more efficient word use and help learners be able to produce 1 language that sounds more like those of a native speaker (Duan & Qin, 2012; Durrant & Schmitt, 2010; Gao et al. Inversely, learners' language acquisition process may be hampered if there is a lack of awareness and inadequate attention to the collocational language (Vasiljevic, 2014). However, in reality, EFL/ESL students worldwide have been struggling to acquire collocations for a variety of reasons (Youmei & Yun, 2005; Vasiljevic, 2014). Similarly, in the Vietnamese context, recent studies analyzing different dimensions of vocabulary knowledge have shown that Vietnamese EFL learners generally have poor understanding and insufficient knowledge of collocations (Vu & Peters, 2021).
This can result from multiple factors such as native language interference, overgeneralization, a lack of collocation awareness, and insufficient exposure to collocations, among many others (Ang et al., 2011; Boonyasaquan, 2009; Yamashita & Jiang, 2010; Youmei & Yun, 2005). Given the importance of collocational competence, previous studies worldwide have been investigating EFL and ESL learners’ knowledge of collocations through various approaches such as examining students’ collocational patterns of use, their native language influences on collocation production, different collocation types, and sources of collocational errors in diverse settings (e., Ang et al., 2011; Durrant & Schmitt, 2010; Tsai, 2015; Yamashita & Jiang, 2010). However, in the Vietnamese context, there appears to be an insufficient number of research analyzing the distribution of all lexical collocation types to identify which collocation type is more widespread and least frequent in the academic works of Vietnamese EFL learners. Similarly, despite extensive research on collocation errors in EFL teaching and learning worldwide, this topic has received relatively little attention in Vietnam, particularly at the university level.