The English used in Malaysia is one of the varieties of New Englishes and this variety has emerged due to the spread of English around the world (Platt, et al., 1983; Pillai, 2006). In the case of Malaysia, Malay is the national language and standard English exists to be the language of an elite (Bao, 2006), also as a language of interaction. Over years of playing its various roles as a language of interaction, there has emerged a variety of English that is distinctively Malaysian (Asmah, 1992). Baskaran (2002) points out that English is now adopted and adapted in the linguistic ecology of Malaysia, and all Malaysians should be proud of it with all its local ‘nuances and innuendos’. Malaysian English today is ‘a rich tapestry of a typical transplanted variety of English’. Malaysian English (ME) is one of the new varieties of English, with some distinct features include the localized vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar as well as pragmatic features (Pillai, 2006; Pillai and Fauziah, 2006, p.39). The present study has embarked on a specialised study of vocabulary. In particular, it examined the English collocations produced by non-native speaker English users in Malaysia. The study provided insight into the nature of the internal norms of English used in Malaysia to see how these English restricted collocations being used by this group of learners. The investigation focused on the learners’ productive knowledge of Verb-Noun collocations of their written English with the impact of exposure and frequency. Nesselhauf (2003) has the opinion that verb-noun combinations are the most frequently mistaken so they should perceive particular attention of learners. Investigating collocation in English language learning is paramount as such study may inform us on the use of restricted collocations in English language teaching and learning in Malaysian context. The findings in Chapter 4 and 5 suggest that the frequency of the cloze verb does have an effect as predicted by Kuiper, Columbus and Schmitt (2009). This is so because frequency is a measure of likely exposure. The more frequent an item is in corpora, the more likely a learner is to be exposed to it. What is needed is a much more nuanced notion of exposure. The findings in Chapter 6 proves that the malformed collocations make sense could be a way of making the World English perspective relevant after all. A new testing approach is proposed; semantic plausibility metric, which is used as a tool for this study, can be useful used as a measure of vocabulary acquisition as well as looking at learners’ test taking strategies. The findings of the present research on Malaysian English collocations contribute new knowledge to the existing understanding and literature on the acquisition of collocations.

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Multiword Expressions (MWEs) are crucial aspects of language use. Second language (L2) learners need to master these MWEs to be able to communicate effectively. In addition, mastering these MWEs helps L2 learners improve their cognitive processing of language input. In this study, my primary objectives were to explore the effectiveness of using Textual Enhancement (TE) to assist L2 speakers’ comprehension of MWEs, to explore whether there is a difference in comprehension between collocations and idioms, and finally, to explore how L2 speakers transact the MWEs’ meanings as presented in texts. While several researchers have explored how input enhancement in general helps L2 learners to learn collocations and idioms for productive use (e.g., Boers et al., 2017; Pam & Karimi, 2016), my focus in this study was to understand and explain in depth how the technique of TE helps L2 learners comprehend MWEs. I included in this study two types of MWEs: collocations and idioms. I also studied the differences in the comprehension between these two types to further understand the transparency factors in the comprehension process. I employed an explanatory sequential mixed methods design in which I used experimental quantitative methods and qualitative methods in one study. In phase one, I started with the experimental part and followed with the qualitative analysis to explain in depth the outcomes of the experimental part. In the qualitative section, I followed an explanatory descriptive case study approach to obtain a deeper understanding of how the participants transacted the meanings of the MWEs. A total of 26 adult Arabic-speaking students in a major Southeastern university in the United States of America volunteered to take part in this study. I collected data through: (1) a reading proficiency test, and (2) a brief survey to gather background information, self-evaluation of language proficiency, and previous experiences with MWEs. In the experimental part, I presented 20 paragraphs derived from online newspaper and magazine articles. Each paragraph contained a collocation or an idiom. Following each paragraph, I presented multiple-choice questions to measure the comprehension of the MWE in the paragraph and an open-ended question for the participants to describe how they had comprehended the MWE. I divided the participants into control and experimental groups in which the MWEs were textually enhanced in the experimental group using bolding, italicization, and highlighting. The results of the study demonstrated TE was effective in assisting the participants to comprehend idioms. In contrast, TE did not show a significant effect in leading the participants to comprehend the collocations. The qualitative data analysis showed the participants used contextual factors, guessing, constituents of the MWEs, and similarities of the MWEs with the first language (L1) as the major strategies to comprehend the MWEs meanings with different degrees between both groups.

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<p>This paper is a study of the use of the prepositions to/with after the verb to talk in British and American English. The research is based on the material from the COBUILDDirect corpus, Longman American Spoken Corpus and New York Times CD-ROM. The common and different features of the use of talk to/with in different genres of American and British English as well as in written and spoken English were studied; special attention was paid to the factors which influence the choice of the prepositions. The research has shown that generally talk with is used much less than talk to and probably is undergoing the process of narrowing of meaning. With after talk seems to be used most often to refer to two-way communication while talk to is used to refer to both one- and two-way communication and is, therefore, more universal than talk with.</p>

This study aims to investigate the acquisition of verb-noun collocations in Chinese by learners who study Chinese as a foreign language. By conducting a survey, this research attempt to discuss the following issues. 1) Does learners’ acquisition of verb-noun collocations increase with years of learning? 2) Is learners’ acquisition of verb-noun collocations related to the usage frequency of the verbs? 3) Are there any differences between patient objects and non-patient objects in verb-noun collocation acquisitions? 4) Does natural L2 exposure have an impact on collocational competence? Seven verbs are selected in this study, 看 kan, 开 kai, 做 zuo, 走 zou, 放 fang, 打 da, 带 dai. In order to answer the research questions, a survey which consisted of four parts was conducted. This survey was done in a public university in Massachusetts, USA. In total, 82 Chinese learners have participated in this study, and they were grouped into three instructional levels: Second-Year Chinese learners, Third-Year Chinese learners, and Fourth-Year Chinese learners. The data in this research show that the use of collocations is related to learners’ language proficiency, and this study has identified a hook-shaped learning curve in the acquisition of verb-noun collocations. In addition, the frequency is significant to the verb-noun acquisition, and the usage frequency of verbs plays a vital role compared to nouns. Furthermore, at all three proficiency levels, learners had a higher accuracy rate with regard to patient objects in verb-noun collocations. Collocations are problematic for learners who study Chinese as their foreign language; thus, it is essential for instructors to discuss effective teaching methodology for collocations. In this paper, some implications for teaching Chinese verb-noun collocations are provided by the researcher.

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.