Collocation studies from Chinese English learner's perspective

Abstract

Collocation is such a language phenomenon that a sequence of words or terms which co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. It is different from frozen idioms or free word combinations in a continuum ranging from field of morphology and syntax. Collocation has been studied thoroughly in corpus and computational linguistics. A mastery of good collocation is vital for second language or foreign language learners to be able to produce natural and authentic language. Inspired by the research findings from (theoretical) linguistics, and based on the contrastive analysis between source and target languages, we propose a new practical approach to identify collocations following the parallelism principle in Chinese-English parallel corpora, and an applicable measure for evaluating the difficulty scale based on entropy calculation. The proposed methods will contribute to second language learning in its predictability to collocation and curriculum design and teaching practicum. © 2010 IEEE.