Effects Of Translational Congruency And Collocational Frequency On Senior High School Students’ English Collocational Processing

Collocation is crucial in the learning of a second language.Recognizing the significance of collocation,the General Senior High School Curriculum Standards: English advocates that senior high school students should acquire knowledge concerning the definition and formation rules of collocation.Many researchers conducted studies exploring effects of translational congruency and collocational frequency on collocational processing.However,they obtained mix results.Some confirmed the effect of consistency and frequency,while others found no evidence.Some considered the effect of frequency on collocational processing was significant while others disagreed.In addition to research results,previous studies also differed in subjects.Many focused on adult learners,senior high school students have received little attention.This study aims to investigate effects of translational congruency and collocational frequency on senior high school students’ English collocational processing.Therefore,the following two research questions are addressed:1)Is there a translational congruency effect on senior high school students’ English collocational processing?2)Is there a frequency effect on senior high school students’ English collocational processing?With the help of E-prime 3.0,the present study employed an online acceptability judgement test to explore effects of translational congruency and collocational frequency on senior high school students’ collocational processing.Thirty Grade One students from a senior high school in Jiangsu province were recruited for this study.Twenty-four collocations,including 6 high-frequency congruent,6 high-frequency incongruent,6 lowfrequency congruent,and 6 low-frequency incongruent collocations,were selected as the test items.Subjects’ reaction time and error rate for making the judgement were recorded by E-prime version 3.0.Then SPSS version 23.0 has been applied for data analysis.Rested on the analysis of the data,two major findings are summarized below.First,there is a translational congruency effect on senior high school students’ English collocational processing.The difference in reaction times to congruent collocations and incongruent ones was not significant while the difference in error rates for congruent collocations and incongruent ones was significant.To be more specific,translational congruency had an impact on learners’ error rates for low-frequency verb-noun collocations.Second,there is a frequency effect on senior high school students’ collocational processing.There was a significant difference in error for high-frequency collocations and low-frequency ones while no significant difference in reaction times to high-frequency collocations and low-frequency ones.In particular,collocational frequency had a more pronounced effect on error rates for incongruent verb-noun collocations.Based on the findings,this study put forward some suggestions for teachers and students,facilitating collocational teaching and learning.