| More than six decades has passed since Firth (1957) first brought the notioncollocation to prominence in lexical studies. Linguists have reached agreement on theimportance of collocation study, indicating that knowing a word is not as simple asrecognizing, recalling, or providing definition, or synonym, it is also important to knowwhich words it will collocate with. Collocation is viewed by many linguists(Nattinger,1988; Cowie,1992; Hill,2000; Hoey,2005; Faghih and Sharafi,2006) as theimportant key to fluency because it shifts learners’ concentration from individual words tolarger structures of the discourse and to the social aspects of the interaction. To speaknatively and idiomatically, learners have to acquire collocations. During the past severaldecades, a great number of research has been focused on this important linguisticphenomenon. We see various kinds of studies on collocation: some focused on measuringL2Learners’ knowledge of collocations, some on collocation instruction. However, veryfew studies (Laufer,2010) have addressed the issue of how collocations could be mosteffectively gained and retained with the help of dictionary.In hope of shedding some light on this issue, this study focuses on the contribution ofdictionary use to learner’s acquisition of collocations, mainly addressing three questions:(1) How many correct collocations will learners gain if they can consult dictionaries (twotypes: one bilingual and one monolingual)?(2) How many of the correctly looked upcollocations will be retained after a week?(3) How do different types of dictionaries farein terms of the number of correct collocations that learners can find and that of correctcollocations that can be retained? Seventy-one English learners participated in this study,divided into three groups. The first group containing seventeen students is designed for a“collocation choosing†task, while the other fifty-four students are equally divided intotwo groups with twenty-seven each for the formal test. All the seventy-one participants aresecond-year non-English major students who entered Huazhong University of Science andTechnology in2012, with an average age of nineteen. To ensure that the participants hadno significant difference in their English proficiency so as to get better and more scientificresult, a test on their reading comprehension is given, results showing that there was no significant difference in the English proficiency of students among three classes. Thestudy consists of a “collocation choosing†task and three stages of the formal test. The“collocation choosing†task is designed to pick out the examined collocations for theformal test. The formal test was conducted by three stages: Stage One---examine learners’knowledge of collocations without any dictionary support; Stage Two---examine thecontribution of different dictionaries to the production of collocations; StageThree---examine the contribution of different dictionaries to the retention of collocations.Results showed that:(1) With the help of English-Chinese dictionary, learners gained13.33correct collocations on average. With the help of English-English dictionary,learners gained11.96correct collocations on average. So it can be safely concluded thatthe use of dictionary (no matter monolingual or bilingual) can make a great contributionon collocation acquisition.(2) In the post-test,4.93collocations were retained averagely inminds of students using English-Chinese dictionary and5.15were retained with studentsusing English-English dictionary. The accuracy showed a little higher than that of StageOne, but much lower than that in the exercise (Stage Two).(3) Significant differencebetween using bilingual dictionary and monolingual dictionary only exists in theproduction of collocations in Stage Two.Research on the contribution of dictionary use to the production and retention ofcollocations can encourage teachers to consciously combine the dictionary use with theregular classroom instruction, pay attention to cultivate students’ awareness of dictionaryuse, bring the role of the dictionary into full play and make dictionary use education be anessential and important aspect in language teaching. On the other hand, it can not onlyhelp to improve students’ learning efficiency, but also contribute to the formation of theirindependent learning ability and lay the foundation for their lifelong learning. |
