Utjecaj poučavanja strategija učenja kolokacija na razvoj kolokacijske kompetencije u engleskome jeziku struke
Authors:   , Tabak Mihaela 
Published: March 2022

The effect of collocation learning strategies instruction on collocational competence development in English for specific purposes. The topic of collocations in English has been extensively researched in linguistics. Collocation studies are mainly distributional or corpus-based (Sinclair, 1991, 2004; Nesselhauf, 2003, 2005). The focus of these studies is the statistical analysis of the syntagmatic relationship between the components of collocations. In contrast, phraseological studies examine the characteristics of collocations and their lexical environment (Benson et al., 1986; Hausmann, 1989; Lewis, 2000). In applied linguistics, collocations have been extensively researched in vocabulary acquisition studies as an important part of lexical competence since collocational competence contributes to speech efficiency and fluency. Most of the previous studies (Gitsaki, 1999; Wray, 2002; Nesselhauf, 2003, 2005) suggest that second language (L2) and foreign language (FL) learners often experience difficulties with collocation recognition and production, which, in turn, becomes a source of many language errors. Many studies have attempted to identify the reasons for this challenge. Some of the factors that might impact collocational knowledge are intralinguistic while others refer to the learner and the learning environment. Intralinguistic factors mainly refer to collocation-specific features such as frequency of occurrence and co-occurrence, morphosyntactic structure, span, or transparency. Some of the more prominent external factors include characteristics such as the age of onset and cutoff for collocation acquisition, L2/FL input and output, instruction, L2 proficiency, first language (L1) influence, learning strategies, and motivation. To be more successful in their vocabulary acquisition, learners use various vocabulary learning strategies (VLS). These strategies can be task-specific and related to language skills. In this aspect, there are various types of strategies, such as reading strategies or grammar strategies. Collocation learning strategies (CLS) can be defined as specific vocabulary learning strategies for the acquisition of collocations, or more specifically, the actions learners use consciously to assist them in collocation learning. Since collocational competence is the most salient feature of the depth of vocabulary knowledge, this study aims to examine the learners’ self-directed approaches to L2 collocation learning. The use of language learning strategies can be spontaneous or instructed, and it has been associated with higher proficiency in SL/FL contexts (Oxford, 1990; Cohen, 1998; Macaro, 2001; Wong & Nunan, 2001). Strategy instruction has also been linked with better learning outcomes (Plonsky, 2011). This study also examines the effect of motivation on strategy use and collocational competence. Motivation is another variable that has been identified as influential for successful language learning (Gardner, 1985; Ely, 1986; Dörnyei & Csizér, 2002; Csizér & Dörnyei, 2005), and it has been strongly supported by the researchers as a determinant of success in vocabulary acquisition as well (Tseng & Schmitt, 2008; Han, 2014; Zhang et al., 2017). However, few studies have examined the effect of CLS-based instruction on collocational competence, so this study may offer some new insights in this area. Strategy research has embraced self-regulation in language learning as a complementary notion to the existing paradigms of strategies (Gao, 2007; Oxford, 2011). In this view, the qualitative part of the study examined the study logs of the learners of English for specific purposes (ESP) and explored their collocation learning behaviour through the three phases of self-regulation (Zimmerman, 2000). This study is divided into two parts: the first refers to the theoretical framework and the relevant studies related to the research variables. The second part describes the experimental study that was conducted and the qualitative data on the effect of CLS instruction on the development of collocational competence in English for specific purposes (ESP).