Enhancing Treatment Of Phrase Frames In College English Textbooks

Phrase frame,first applied in a stand-alone piece of language software — KfNgram — as a concordancing target,refers to a set of variants of an n-gram which are identical except for one word.Previous researches about phrase and collocation mainly focused on the semantic or pragmatic functions,few touching upon the value of phrase frames.Though a few phrase frames have been studied in specific corpora to reveal the semantic or textual function,phrase frames in textbooks have not been sufficiently investigated yet.This thesis aims at concordancing the recurrent phrase frames,and then leading second language learners to acquire phrase frames efficiently and effectively and employ them appropriately and creatively in their output.Based on the objectives,three research questions are put forward: first,what are the phrase frames most frequently used in native English corpora? Second,what phrase frames from native English corpora occur in college English textbook? Third,what input enhancement treatments could be applied to college English textbooks to facilitate students' mastery of the phrase frames?After the review of related researches on phraseology and phrase frames,the theories,noticing hypothesis,automaticity and input enhancement,are introduced as the theoretical foundation.Three corpora are employed in this research,native corpora — CLOB and Crown and a self-built textbook corpus by the author — NOCE.Utilizing KfNgram and AntConc,the paper extracts meaningful and highly frequent phrase frames and presents them in the form of tables.Then the same process is applied to the textbook corpus to pick up all the meaningful ones.It is these phrase frames which occur both in the native corpora and textbook corpus that are selected to be treated in enhancing ways,exposing the learners to authentic English phrase frames and encouraging creative use.It is observed that(1)the type of highly frequent phrase frames and their frequencies in the two native corpora are roughly the same,including the three-,four-and five-phrase frames;(2)most of the phrase frames in the textbook corpus are also the recurrent ones in native corpus.At last,taking one book as an illustration,the thesis discusses how enhancing treatments could be given to the phrase frames and phrases after a certain unit or a passage,including the process of presentation,practice and the ultimate output.The illustrative sentences are all from native corpora.