This study examines the development of collocational knowledge in learners of ESL. A number of previous studies have underscored the importance of collocations for L2 acquisition, and the problems that learners face with learning and using collocations. However, there have been few attempts to systematically study how the development of collocational knowledge relates to the overall development of language proficiency with a particular intention in identifying possible stages in the development of L2 collocational knowledge. This study adopts a structure-based framework for the study of collocations based on previous studies (Zhang 1993; Biscup 1992) and the BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English, and attempts to describe how collocational knowledge develops across different language proficiency levels with respect to 37 collocation types. Data were collected from 275 Greek learners of ESL at three proficiency levels (post-beginners, intermediate, and post-intermediate) using three tasks: essay writing, translation test, and blank-filling. The essay writing provided evidence of accurate free production of collocations, while the translation and blank-filling tests measured accuracy in the subjects’ knowledge of collocations in cued production tasks. The data were examined with respect to the between- and within-group differences in accuracy on all three dependent measures. Statistical measures were employed to determine the significance of the observed between-group and within-group differences, and implicational scaling analyses was used to reveal accuracy orders in the acquisition of collocations. Results show that there are patterns of development of collocational knowledge across and within the different proficiency groups for both the free and the cued production data. Collocational knowledge was shown to increase steadily as the level of proficiency increased, and there were group-specific accuracy orders showing that grammatical collocations are easier to acquire than lexical collocations. The development of collocational knowledge was found to be influenced by the syntactic complexity of the collocation types, and also by exposure and maturation. Finally, three stages for the development of collocational knowledge are proposed. In the first stage learners acquire collocations as unanalysed lexical items, and hence the learners are more accurate with lexical collocations than complex grammatical ones. At the second stage the learners' grammatical knowledge develops enabling learners to use complex grammatical collocations with greater accuracy than in stage one. At the third stage of collocational development, learners are able to use both grammatical and lexical collocations with greater accuracy than in the other two stages, and they are on their way to a more advanced level of collocational knowledge. Pedagogical implications and directions for future research are provided in light of the research findings.

CoordenaÃÃo de AperfeÃoamento de Pessoal de NÃvel Superior / A pesquisa aqui descrita à produto de uma empreitada que concatena trÃs grandes Ãreas dentro dos estudos em LinguÃstica: Fraseologia, CompetÃncia Comunicativa e InterlÃngua. Tendo em vista que as unidades fraseolÃgicas sÃo itens lexicais de difÃcil aquisiÃÃo em contexto de segunda lÃngua, adotamos as colocaÃÃes como objeto de estudo por serem altamente produtivas e recorrentes na produÃÃo oral e escrita de falantes nativos. Intencionamos averiguar como os aprendizes de PortuguÃs como LÃngua adicional utilizam as colocaÃÃes em textos escritos e de que forma esse uso delata o que decidimos chamar de CompetÃncia Colocacional. Optamos por trabalhar com sujeitos norte-americanos pertencentes ao programa FLTA, ligado à ComissÃo Fulbright, que promoveram a lÃngua inglesa no Brasil por nove meses no perÃodo de 2015. Os sujeitos que tiveram interesse em participar desta pesquisa foram agrupados conforme nÃvel de proficiÃncia e escreveram textos, em lÃngua portuguesa, cujo tema versava sobre suas impressÃes sobre a cultura brasileira. Depois de escritos, os textos foram analisados e as colocaÃÃes categorizadas de acordo com a equivalÃncia existente entre lÃngua alvo/materna e conforme suas estruturas morfossintÃticas. ApÃs cruzarmos os dados, encontramos que o sistema linguÃstico do nÃvel de proficiÃncia B1/B2 ainda à dependente da lÃngua materna, apresentando colocaÃÃes de âEquivalÃncia Totalâ em todos os tipos de estruturas morfossintÃticas. A anÃlise do grupo de nÃvel de proficiÃncia C1/C2 mostrou que este conhece e utiliza uma quantidade maior de tipos de estruturas, embora produzindo colocaÃÃes pautadas em uma relaÃÃo direta com a lÃngua materna. AlÃm disso, realizamos uma anÃlise dos erros colocacionais, cujos resultados apontam para o fato de a transferÃncia linguÃstica nÃo se constituir como fator principal para o processo de fossilizaÃÃo e percebeu-se tambÃm que os nÃveis mais avanÃados cometem mais erros colocacionais por ainda estarem testando hipÃteses sobre a lÃngua em aquisiÃÃo. ConcluÃmos lanÃando perspectivas de continuidade e possÃveis contribuiÃÃes que este trabalho oferece para Ãreas como LinguÃstica Aplicada, por exemplo. / The research described here is the product of a work that concatenates three major areas within the studies in Linguistics: Phraseology, Communicative Competence and Interlanguage. Given the fact that phraseological units are lexical items of difficult acquisition in a second language context, we adopted the collocations as an object of study to be highly productive and recurrent in oral and written production of native speakers. We intended to find out how the learners of Portuguese as an additional language use collocations in written texts and how this use betrays what we decided to call collocational competence. We chose to work with American subjects belonging to the FLTA program, linked to the Fulbright Commission, who promoted the English language in Brazil for a nine-month period in 2015. The subjects who were interested in participating in this study were grouped according to the level of proficiency and were asked to write texts in Portuguese, whose theme questionnaire was about their impressions of the Brazilian culture. Once written, the texts were analyzed and the collocations categorized according to the existing equivalence between target / mother language and according to their morphosyntactic structures. After we crossed the data, we found out that the B1 / B2 language system proficiency level is still dependent on the mother tongue, with "Total Equity" collocations presented in all types of morphosyntactic structures. The analysis of the C1 / C2 proficiency level group showed that they know and use a larger number of types of structures, while producing guided collocations in a direct relationship with the mother tongue. In addition, we conducted an analysis of collocational errors, whose results point to the fact that the linguistic transfer does not constitute the main factor to the process of fossilization. Besides, we also realized that the most advanced levels make more collocational errors as they were still testing hypotheses on language acquisition. We concluded by launching perspectives of continuity and possible contributions that this work offers to areas such as Applied Linguistics.

This study explored the influence of four features of collocations- frequency of occurrence, syntactic structure, semantic transparency, and congruency with L1- on the collocational knowledge and development of 252 Kurdish high school learners of English as a foreign language. The importance of collocations in learning English as a second or foreign language and the difficulties that challenge learners at different levels of language proficiency have been well established. However, few studies have adopted a longitudinal research design or a hybrid definition of collocations, incorporating both frequency-based and phraseological views. The present study took this approach to explore learners’ collocational knowledge and development and the influence of features of collocations on their collocational knowledge and development at the high school level of learning English as a foreign language. The study employed two tests: an appropriateness judgement test to measure learners’ receptive knowledge and a gap-filling test to measure their productive knowledge of collocations. The data were collected in two waves, one at the beginning of their school year and the other at the end. Data analyses were conducted to determine the relationship between features of collocations and learners’ collocational knowledge and development. The results revealed frequency of occurrence as the most influential factor affecting learners’ knowledge and development. Influence of the syntactic structure of collocations on the learners’ knowledge and development came second whereas congruency with L1 occupied the third position. Semantic transparency seemed to have the least influence on their collocational knowledge and development. Gender appeared as an influential factor in the individual tests. However, its influence was not significant in terms of overall knowledge development. In general, the results indicated that learners’ productive collocational knowledge lagged behind their receptive. However, receptive and productive collocational knowledge did not increase at the same rate over the study period. While learners’ receptive collocational knowledge did not show an increase in knowledge, their productive knowledge increased significantly over the school year. The results also revealed that grammatical collocations were less challenging than lexical collocations at this level of language learning. Finally, according to the study results, some pedagogical implications and suggestions for further studies are presented.

L2 (second or foreign language) research indicates that vocabulary knowledge is not only the “single best predictor of text comprehension,” but also a strong indicator of listening, speaking, and writing proficiency (Alderson, 2000, p. 35). Understanding the development of vocabulary knowledge, including both vocabulary size and vocabulary depth, or quality of vocabulary knowledge—is therefore essential to the building of an overall insight into L2 proficiency. This study aims to explore the developmental status of vocabulary depth among postsecondary CFL (Chinese as a foreign language) learners of higher proficiency levels who have studied Chinese for over four years. In particular, it focuses on these learners' identification of two types of word association—synonym and collocational associations and how factors such as association type and target-word frequency impact association identification. The process and strategy use that are involved in the inference of word association are also explored. For these purposes, this study employs a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods. Cross-sectional data were collected through a paper-and-pencil test of Chinese word associates from seventeen learners within five postsecondary CFL programs in the U.S. Each participant worked on two test booklets assessing synonym and collocational associates respectively for the same 44 adjectives selected from the three word frequency levels of below 1000, between 1000 and 5000, and above 5000. A two-factor within-subjects ANOVA revealed both significant main effects for association type and word frequency on association identification and a significant interaction between the two. Simple effect analysis and pair-wise comparisons further revealed that association identification became increasingly stronger with the increase of word frequency for collocational association, yet remained non-impacted by frequency before reaching the mid- to high-frequency transition for synonym association. Meanwhile, CFL learners' collocational knowledge was significantly higher than synonym knowledge at mainly the medium- and high-frequency levels. These reslts indicate that synonym knowledge seemed to lag behind in development as familiarity with words increased, but began to catch up at higher-frequency levels. Interview data collected from six CFL learners show that they employed a wide variety of knowledge sources, such as radical knowledge, morphological knowledge, contextual clues, sound information, or L1 in inferring word association. Inference success seemed to be influenced not only by their preexisting word knowledge, but also an integrated and flexible use of linguistic and contextual information in the inference process. Implications of these findings are discussed in relevance to curriculum and pedagogical development of CFL teaching and the understanding and definition of CFL proficiency in general. This study fills a gap in CFL vocabulary research by building a tentative measure of vocabulary depth and bringing greater insights into the developmental status of higher-level CFL learners in synonym and collocational association as well as the process that is involved in inference of word association.

SILVA NETTO, José William da. Desenvolvimento da competência colocacional na produção escrita dos assistentes de professores de inglês em universidades brasileiras. 2016. 142f. – Dissertação (Mestrado) – Universidade Federal do Ceará, Programa de Pós-graduação em Linguística, Fortaleza (CE), 2016. / Submitted by Márcia Araújo (marcia_m_bezerra@yahoo.com.br) on 2016-09-08T14:53:27Z No. of bitstreams: 1 2016_dis_jwsilvanetto.pdf: 1749051 bytes, checksum: ef2df09e52a14e12e438195626d2b36b (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Márcia Araújo (marcia_m_bezerra@yahoo.com.br) on 2016-09-08T14:54:17Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 2016_dis_jwsilvanetto.pdf: 1749051 bytes, checksum: ef2df09e52a14e12e438195626d2b36b (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-09-08T14:54:17Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 2016_dis_jwsilvanetto.pdf: 1749051 bytes, checksum: ef2df09e52a14e12e438195626d2b36b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016 / The research described here is the product of a work that concatenates three major areas within the studies in Linguistics: Phraseology, Communicative Competence and Interlanguage. Given the fact that phraseological units are lexical items of difficult acquisition in a second language context, we adopted the collocations as an object of study to be highly productive and recurrent in oral and written production of native speakers. We intended to find out how the learners of Portuguese as an additional language use collocations in written texts and how this use betrays what we decided to call collocational competence. We chose to work with American subjects belonging to the FLTA program, linked to the Fulbright Commission, who promoted the English language in Brazil for a nine-month period in 2015. The subjects who were interested in participating in this study were grouped according to the level of proficiency and were asked to write texts in Portuguese, whose theme questionnaire was about their impressions of the Brazilian culture. Once written, the texts were analyzed and the collocations categorized according to the existing equivalence between target / mother language and according to their morphosyntactic structures. After we crossed the data, we found out that the B1 / B2 language system proficiency level is still dependent on the mother tongue, with "Total Equity" collocations presented in all types of morphosyntactic structures. The analysis of the C1 / C2 proficiency level group showed that they know and use a larger number of types of structures, while producing guided collocations in a direct relationship with the mother tongue. In addition, we conducted an analysis of collocational errors, whose results point to the fact that the linguistic transfer does not constitute the main factor to the process of fossilization. Besides, we also realized that the most advanced levels make more collocational errors as they were still testing hypotheses on language acquisition. We concluded by launching perspectives of continuity and possible contributions that this work offers to areas such as Applied Linguistics. / A pesquisa aqui descrita é produto de uma empreitada que concatena três grandes áreas dentro dos estudos em Linguística: Fraseologia, Competência Comunicativa e Interlíngua. Tendo em vista que as unidades fraseológicas são itens lexicais de difícil aquisição em contexto de segunda língua, adotamos as colocações como objeto de estudo por serem altamente produtivas e recorrentes na produção oral e escrita de falantes nativos. Intencionamos averiguar como os aprendizes de Português como Língua adicional utilizam as colocações em textos escritos e de que forma esse uso delata o que decidimos chamar de Competência Colocacional. Optamos por trabalhar com sujeitos norte-americanos pertencentes ao programa FLTA, ligado à Comissão Fulbright, que promoveram a língua inglesa no Brasil por nove meses no período de 2015. Os sujeitos que tiveram interesse em participar desta pesquisa foram agrupados conforme nível de proficiência e escreveram textos, em língua portuguesa, cujo tema versava sobre suas impressões sobre a cultura brasileira. Depois de escritos, os textos foram analisados e as colocações categorizadas de acordo com a equivalência existente entre língua alvo/materna e conforme suas estruturas morfossintáticas. Após cruzarmos os dados, encontramos que o sistema linguístico do nível de proficiência B1/B2 ainda é dependente da língua materna, apresentando colocações de “Equivalência Total” em todos os tipos de estruturas morfossintáticas. A análise do grupo de nível de proficiência C1/C2 mostrou que este conhece e utiliza uma quantidade maior de tipos de estruturas, embora produzindo colocações pautadas em uma relação direta com a língua materna. Além disso, realizamos uma análise dos erros colocacionais, cujos resultados apontam para o fato de a transferência linguística não se constituir como fator principal para o processo de fossilização e percebeu-se também que os níveis mais avançados cometem mais erros colocacionais por ainda estarem testando hipóteses sobre a língua em aquisição. Concluímos lançando perspectivas de continuidade e possíveis contribuições que este trabalho oferece para áreas como Linguística Aplicada, por exemplo.

For this project I sought to find a more effective means of evaluating academic listening comprehension. This involved doing an in-depth investigation of academic listening, the constructs involved in listening comprehension, and of methods of assessing listening comprehension. It also included a study of the concept of test usefulness (Bachman and Palmer, 1996), which consists of reliability, construct validity, authenticity, interactiveness, impact, and practicality, and is used to help select the most effective methods of assessing language abilities. Based on my review of listening comprehension testing methods, I created a method of assessing academic listening comprehension, Aural Gapped Listening Summaries (AGLS), produced a short version of the AGLS for piloting through BYU's English Language Center and credit exam for matriculated students, and then analyzed the results of this piloting to determine whether future investigation was merited. This project write-up includes a description of the development of the AGLS, the methods of administration, and students' cursory perceptions of the AGLS, as well as the results of the pilot test. The AGLS involved students listening to an excerpt of a lecture followed by an aural summary of that lecture with every 8th word replaced by low-volume static. Then they were asked to type a word or phrase in a box on their computer screens that would best fill in the gap where the static was. Ranks on the AGLS were correlated with a standard listening test, which is administered every semester at Brigham Young University, and with students' individual perceptions of their listening abilities. Results showed that AGLS correlates moderately well with traditional measures of academic listening (r=0.7731) while giving testers interesting information about student interlanguage in very little time. Results further showed that AGLS has a much higher reliability coefficient (r=0.9223) in comparison to the other listening test. Therefore, although traditionally testers have had to write lengthy tests in order to get an adequate representation of students' listening abilities, it may be possible to obtain the necessary information about students' abilities with this more time-efficient measurement tool.

In Norstedts Comprehensive English-Swedish Dictionary (2000) it is said that the numbered list of senses under each headword is frequency ordered. Thus, the aim of this study is to see whether this frequency order of senses agrees with the frequencies appearing in the British National Corpus (BNC). Five English, polysemous verbs were studied. For each verb, a simple search in the corpus was carried out, displaying 50 random occurrences. Each collocate was encoded with the most compatible sense from the numbered list of senses in the dictionary. The encoded tokens were compiled and listed in frequency order. This list was compared to the dictionary's list of senses. Only two of the verbs reached agreement between the highest ranked dictionary sense and the most frequent sense in the BNC simple search. None of the verbs' dictionary orders agreed completely with the emerged frequency order of the corpus occurrences, why complementary collocational learning is advocated.

Previous comparative studies of usage of contrast markers have found that Swedish non-native speakers of English underuse and overuse different individual items compared to native speakers. This paper compares the use of the contrast markers however, nevertheless/nonetheless, yet and still in essays in linguistics to determine how and why they might be used differently. Essays are taken from the Stockholm University Student English Corpus and are equally represented by examples from King’s College and Stockholm University. Random samples are analyzed for type of contrast signalled and repeated collocational patterns. The findings show that the Swedish students underuse however and overuse nevertheless/nonetheless, yet and still in signalling concessive relationships. The research suggests that the Swedish students have a weaker grasp of prototypical frequency of usage than native speakers, which may result from native language transfer. It is argued that it would be beneficial for Swedish learners of English, and by extension other L2 learners, to improve awareness of constructing effective contrastive relationships.

Pervasive in spontaneous informal conversation, general extenders (GEs) are vague multiword expressions (e.g. or something (like that), and stuff (like that) vs. nebo něco (takovýho), a tak(ový věci)) that have been shown to fulfil a number of communicative functions, ranging from propositional to expressive. But while the English extenders have received a lot of meticulous attention in nearly four decades of research, the corresponding Czech constructions remain largely overlooked (perhaps with the exception of Tárnyiková 2009 and Novotný & Malá 2018). The current study aims to (1) present a wide range of English and Czech GE forms (collected using the method of collocational frames (Aijmer 2015) and then categorised according to structural similarities, thus suggesting possible GE patterns); and (2) examine their communicative functions in contemporary English and Czech as represented in comparable corpora of informal spoken discourse (Spoken BNC2014 and ORAL2013, respectively). Relying extensively on functional frameworks introduced in previous research (e.g. Overstreet 1999, 2014), this study confirms what has been known about English GEs and investigates the degree of applicability to the respective Czech constructions. A close qualitative analysis of some of the collected GE forms (in total,...