The Effects Of Context And L2 Input On Chinese EFL Learners' Use Of V-N Collocations

How to improve the efficiency of L2 learning and teaching has been a major issue in the SLA.Many scholars and experts have made plenty of suggestions and methods.Among them,Wang(2011)contended that the efficient way to increase L2 learning is to make comprehension interact with production in a learning task.Based on this,Wang(2012)advanced the reading-writing continuation task,which has been proved to be effective for improving L2 learning.Also,Wang & Wang(2015)found that learners who performed a writing task on a topic related to L1-based context committed more errors than those performing the writing task on a topic related to L2-based context because of the L1 transfer.That is,context may have a strong effect on L2 learning.Meanwhile,many studies have demonstrated that V-N collocation is a difficulty for Chinese EFL learners(Wang & Li 2018),however,studies on improving learners' use of V-N collocations effectively are still rare.To fill in this gap,the present study intends to investigate the effect of context and input on Chinese senior high school students' use of V-N collocations by analyzing and comparing their V-N collocations produced in the continuation task and topic writing task.To be more specific,this study attempts to answer the following questions:(1)What is the effect of L1-based context and L2-based context on Chinese EFL learners' use of V-N collocations?(2)How does L2 input affect Chinese EFL learners' use of V-N collocations?(3)What is the interactive effect of context and input on Chinese EFL learners' use of V-N collocations?Participants of the present study are 72 students from two classes of a senior high school in Shenzhen,Guangdong province.Students of class A performed the continuation task while those of class B performed the topic writing task.Then,the two classes were divided into two groups respectively,namely,group A1,group A2,group B1 and group B2.The whole experiment was held in two weeks,and each group was required to write a composition per week.Group A1 and group A2 were asked to continue two texts with their endings removed.One text tells a story happening on Mid-Autumn Festival to activate their L1 contextual knowledge;the other narrates a story about Christmas with the intention of activating their L2 contextual knowledge.Similarly,group B1 and group B2 were required to write,without an input text,on two topics meant to activate their L1 contextual knowledge and L2 contextual knowledge respectively.One topic was related to a Chinese festival,Mid-Autumn Festival,and the other to a Western festival,Christmas.After the experiment,all compositions were collected to build four corpora(C1,C2,C3,C4).C1 contains compositions produced by learners who performed the continuation task after reading a text related to L1-based context;C2 collected compositions written by learners who completed the continuation task after reading a text relevant to L2-based context;C3 includes compositions completed by learners who performed topic writing task on the topic related to L1-based context;C4 covers compositions produced by learners who wrote without input provided on a topic related to L2-based context.Then the total 1676 V-N collocations extracted from the four corpora were analyzed and discussed to evaluate the effect of context and L2 input on Chinese EFL learners' use of V-N collocations.The results were obtained 1)with respect to the effect of context on EFL learners' use of V-N collocations,it was found that the effect of context on learners' use of V-N collocations is not significant.Specifically,in the condition with input provided or without input provided,no significant difference was obtained in the error rate between L1-based group and L2-based group.And no significant difference between the distribution of error when input text was provided;however,significantly more errors of verb were committed by the L1-based group and more errors of preposition were made by L2-based group when no input text was provided;2)in terms of how L2 input affect EFL learners' use of V-N collocations,the results show that L2 input provided during the writing process had a significantly positive effect on learners' use of V-N collocations.In particular,whether writing on a topic associated with L1-based context or with L2-based context,students who wrote without input provided produced significantly more errors than those completing the continuation task.But when writing on L1-based context,significantly more errors of preposition were made by learners who wrote with input provided than those writing without input provided;3)with regard to the interactive effect of context and input on EFL learners' use of V-N collocations,the results show that no significant difference existed in the correctness of V-N collocations and distribution of errors between students who performed the continuation task with a text associated with L1-based context provided and those completing the topic writing task on a topic related to L2-based context.Differently,students who wrote on L2-based context with input text provided made significantly less V-N collocational errors,especially errors of number than those writing without input text provided on a topic related to the L1-based context.Therefore,the interactive effect of context and L2 input on EFL learners' use of V-N collocations has been demonstrated.Based on the findings described above,some pedagogical implications are provided for L2 teachers.Firstly,L2 teachers can try to teach V-N collocations by means of the continuation task,with a text full of V-N collocations provided,students can learn the collocations in a more interesting and effective way.Secondly,students performing different writing tasks have similar difficulty in verb errors and determiner errors in their use of V-N collocations,therefore,L2 teachers should pay more attention to these aspects in the process of teaching.