The Effects Of Prior Vocabulary Size And Structure Type On L2 Learners' Collocation Acquisition

Collocation is one of the important parts in second language acquisition and it plays a vital role in vocabulary learning.Thus,it has aroused researchers' interests at home and abroad.Researchers have studied collocation from different perspectives.But little attention has been given to factors affecting L2 learners' collocation acquisition,such as learners' vocabulary knowledge and the internal structure type of collocation.Based on the spreading activation model of mental lexicon and the cognitive load theory,the present study investigated the effects of learners' vocabulary size and the internal structure type of collocation on their collocation acquisition.The participants of the study were 60 postgraduate students majoring in math and physics.The study aims to address the following three questions.(1)How will L2 learners' prior vocabulary size affect their collocation acquisition?(2)How will collocation structure type affect L2 learners' collocation acquisition?(3)Is there an interaction between L2 learners' prior vocabulary size and structure type of collocation?Prior vocabulary size refers to the learners' previous receptive vocabulary size in the present study.Collocation refers to lexical combinations of two or more English words.The structure type of collocation consists of adjective-noun collocations and verb-noun collocations.The results revealed that both learners' prior vocabulary size and structural types of collocation affected their collocation acquisition.The large-vocabulary-size group performed better than the small-vocabulary-size group in the collocation tests;Verb-noun collocations tended to be more difficult to recognize and recall than adj-noun collocations in the collocation tests;The findings also indicated that there seemed to be no interaction between these two independent variables of learners' vocabulary size and the structure type of collocation.The findings suggest that the spreading activation model and the cognitive load theory can also serve as theoretical foundations for second vocabulary acquisition and the results also provide some guidelines for collocation teaching: teachers should take the structure type of collocation into consideration when designing collocation teaching tasks.