Optimizing the Lexical Approach to Develop EFL Learners’ Collocational Accuracy and the Acquisition of the Idiom Principle in Writing: The Case of First Year University Students

الموضوعات

علوم اللغة

الملخص

The habitual co-occurrence of two or more items in language is technically termed ascollocation. The pervasiveness of collocations in native speakers‟ use of language hashighlighted their vital importance in achieving native-like fluency. Any underuse, overuse ormisuse of collocations is viewed as a common source of inaccuracy and foreign sounding chieflyin one' writing. To say the least, knowledge of how words combine appropriately has often beena missing part in many EFL classes in Algeria. To this end, the present study aims to assess theextent to which the use of the Lexical Approach can help Algerian EFL intermediate learnersimprove their collocational accuracy and, in turn, operate on the Idiom Principle in their writing.To carry out this research, we recruited a sample of 62 first year university students at theDepartment of English in Chedli Benjdid University of El Tarf, Algeria. Those EFL majorswere assigned to an experimental group and a control group. The former was taught collocationsexplicitly through the Observe Hypothesis Experiment (OHE) practices of the Lexical Approach,while the latter was taught with no focus on collocations. To gather the required data, three toolswere used: a questionnaire was administered in order to identify the participants' pre-existingawareness of collocations, pre and post-tests were given to measure the participants' receptiveand productive collocational knowledge and, lastly, an interview was conducted to explore theskills that the subjects have acquired to process collocations. Analysis of the findings indicatesthat there is a correlation between training the participants to chunk language successfully andthe increase of collocational strength with high mutual information (MI) scores in thoseparticipants‟ writing. Besides, the results of the current study confirmed that a period of fivemonths of adopting the OHE practices inside the classroom has proven to be effective indeveloping EFL intermediate learners‟ collocational competence .The latter reflects aconsiderable increase in collocational accuracy which, in turn, proved to correlate with learners‟acquisition of the ability to operate on the Idiom Principle. In the light of those findings, thepresent study presents a number of pedagogical implications as it also highlights certain issuesfor related future research.

روابط وملفات

التعريف والنوع

رقم الوثيقة

fcdaa236-0f36-4686-8c7d-6c62210f973d

رقم العقد

0

نوع الوسائط

Crawler

نوع المحتوى

الرسائل العلمية

صيغة المصدر

رسائل دكتوراة

نوع الملف

pdf text

أسماء الملفات

2058878_1.pdf

بيانات النشر

ألقاب المؤلفين

[{"name_ar":" Noureddine Guerroudj","title_ar":"اشراف","title_en":"Supervision"},{"name_ar":"Mohammed Debabi","title_ar":"اعداد","title_en":"Preparation"}]

اللغة

English

المصدر والدورية

اسم المصدر

Optimizing the Lexical Approach to Develop EFL Learners’ Collocational Accuracy and the Acquisition of the Idiom Principle in Writing: The Case of First Year University Students

المحتوى والصفحات

عدد الصفحات

0

إشراف وإعداد

الإشراف

Noureddine Guerroudj

الإعداد

Mohammed Debabi

الاقتباسات الببليوغرافية