Cooperative corpus consultation for acquisition of adjective + preposition collocations

Abstract

Teaching collocations through corpus consultation can highlight not only linguistic patterns but also association between meaning and patterns. However, previous studies have reported learners’ problems during corpus consultation. Corpus consultation refers to learning activities in which a group of learners explore concordance lines in a corpus as to observe language patterns. It is assumed that the integration of group work into corpus consultation tends to facilitate the learning process. The study therefore investigated the effects of cooperative corpus consultation on the acquisition of L2 English adjective + preposition collocations. The participants were 74 first-year Thai undergraduate students divided into a control and an experimental group with 38 and 36 learners, respectively. The instruments were corpus-based materials and activities covering both paper-based and online activities, a pre-test and a post-test. While the control group consulted the corpus individually, the experimental group employed the cooperative corpus consultation approach before both groups took the post-test. The statistical results showed a significant difference in the pre-test and the post-test results of the experimental group, in both production and perception of the targeted collocations. The findings suggested that cooperative corpus consultation could promote discussion and cooperation in the experimental group, resulting in the acquisition of the adjective + preposition collocations.