Corpus Evidence on English Collocational Patterns in Scientific Writing : Implications for Effective Writing Development
Corpus Evidence on English Collocational Patterns in Scientific Writing : Implications for Effective Writing Development
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科学写作中英语搭配模式的语料库证据：对有效写作发展的启示
DOI：
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发表时间：
2003
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
B. Morren
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Hiroshi Ohtake;B. Morren
How may learners be helped to write acceptable academic articles? What type of assistance do they require in becoming more competent and effective writers? These are questions that language teachers have long been struggling to address. In this connection, the present study focuses on how to make Japanese learners more aware of word collocations in English, since such awareness has tended to be largely neglected in English teaching in Japan. When native speakers learn their own language in a natural setting, they can quickly pick up common word patterns through being immersed in the language and by relying on their intuitions. This type of implicit knowledge is acquired unconsciously through frequent exposure to the strings of words and set phrases encountered in everyday communicative interaction (Kirsner, 1994). In the case of non-native learners, however, exposure to the target language is not so readily available and opportunities for implicit learning are greatly reduced. They therefore do not have access to the significant store of core words and collocations that form the basis of native speaker fluency. Consequently, when second language learners are required to write in the target language, they usually try to use their grammar with imperfect understanding of vocabulary, which often results in skewed or awkward English such as a high possibility. They may also be hampered by the constraints of cognitive capacity in that they do not have ready-made language patterns at their disposal that can be automatically retrieved from long-term memory. In particular, they lack the ability for native-like selection (Pawley & Syder, 1983) in that they are less able to choose the preferred linguistic sequence from a number of grammatically acceptable alternatives. They therefore do not have the same level of fluency and pragmatic competence that they possess in their first language. In this regard, it has been found that learners consider vocabulary as most important in relation to writing needs followed by grammatical accuracy (Gosden, 1996; Leki & Carson, 1994; Muncie, 2002). In particular, learners are frustrated by their inability to quickly retrieve or access relevant lexical/grammatical forms (Snellings et al., 2002).
