A Study Of The Effects Of Continuation Task On Acquisition Of English Collocations By Senior High School Students

The importance of collocation acquisition for the development of second language acquisition ability has long been widely recognized by the academic community,collocation knowledge is an important part of the vocabulary knowledge,and it is the key and difficult point of developing lexical ability.Besides,collocational competence is often regarded as an important indicator to evaluate second language learners' competence.Therefore,collocation acquisition is very important in foreign language learning and it is also an important guarantee of communication fluency and accuracy.However,the present situation of collocations of second language learners is not optimistic,so it is very meaningful to find a good way to effectively promote their collocation acquisition.Wang Chuming(2015)proposed that the continuation task is one of the most effective ways to promote foreign language learning,and he also proved its promotion effect.This study aims to probe whether and to what extent continuation task can enhance and promote the collocation acquisition.The study chooses 200 students from four classes of senior high school in Dezhou City,Shandong Province as the research objects,and each class has 50 students.The author performs pretesting and determines the target collocations.There are three types of collocation in the target collocation and each type of collocation has the same proportion in each article.Learners are divided into two continuation groups and two reading groups,and the two different genres of reading material are set in two continuation groups,also in two reading groups,and conducts immediate and delayed(one week and one month later)tests.This study intends to explore three questions:(1)Can the continuation task promote the collocation acquisition of high school students? If it can,compared with the ordinary reading task,how about its promoting and maintaining effect?(2)What is the influence of reading materials of different genres in continuation task on high school students' collocation acquisition?(3)If the promotion effect is verified,then what is the acquisition effect of different collocation types?This study lasted for seven weeks.From the analysis of three test scores of fourgroups,it may be concluded that:(1)The continuation task can promote the collocation learning of high school students,the learning promotion effect can be delayed and maintained,and better than ordinary reading tasks.(2)The reading materials of different genres in the reading task has no effect on high school students' acquisition of collocations;However,it has a significant effect in continuation task,narrative is better than argumentation in the acquisition of collocation,while argumentation is better than narration in maintaining.(3)There is significant difference in the learning effects of different collocation types in continuation task,the effect of verb-noun collocation is the best in acquisition and maintenance.The findings of the study provides some suggestions for English collocation teaching.(1)High school English teachers should attach importance to the teaching of collocation,and adopt effective ways to improve high school students' collocation acquisition and maintenance effect,such as the continuation task.(2)Teachers should reasonably choose the genre and content of reading materials in the continuation task so as to achieve better acquisition effect.(3)Teachers should pay attention to the teaching of various types of collocation,and guide students to be familiar with more different collocation types to construct the corresponding schema.Besides,teachers should pay attention to the discrimination and practice of collocation.(4)Teachers should guide students to review the collocations frequently and do more exercises.