Abstract:
Collocations have the potential to differentiate native speakers from non-native ones clearly (Nation, 2001). Many studies have explored the effect of different teaching techniques on collocations in the context of concordancing. The present study investigated the influence of concordancing and scaffolding on Iranian intermediate English learners’ use of high CV and low CV collocations. Three experimental groups received a 10-session treatment during which the participants had access to concordancing under symmetrical, asymmetrical, and no-scaffolding conditions. The control group, however, received neither concordancing nor scaffolding. Two parallel sets of story writing and paraphrasing tasks were given in the immediate and delayed posttests to measure the influence of the treatments. Results indicated that the experimental groups outperformed the control group significantly in producing high CV and low CV collocations. However, no statistically significant difference was observed between high CV and low CV collocations as a result of concordancing and scaffolding.
Machine summary:
The present study investigated the influence of concordancing and scaffolding on Iranian intermediate English learners’ use of high CV and low CV collocations.
g. , Chang & Sun, 2009; Le, 2010) have applied hard scaffolding to moderate teaching L2 collocations in concordancing.
We intend to examine the effect of this type of scaffolding on learning HCV and LCV collocations in concordancing.
A concordancer is defined as "a sophisticated computer retrieval program with a large amount of information in the form of computer language corpora accessible to encourage data-based inductive learning" (Chan & Liou, 2005: 233).
When peers are involved in social interaction, they scaffold each other and are pushed towards languaging (Swain, Lapkin, Knouzi, Suzuki, & Brooks, 2009).
Le (2010), informed by Chang and Sun (2009), investigated the influence of concordancing and hard scaffolding on receptive HCV collocation of 20 Vietnamese learners of English.
The present study investigates the role of soft scaffolding in learning both HCV and LCV collocations in the context of concordancing.
Results of the current study are in line with those of Chang and Sun (2009) who reported the positive role of concordancing and scaffolding in learning LCV collocations.
Through resorting to the novelty effect (Clark & Sugrue, 1988), it can be acknowledged that all the experimental groups found not only concordancing as a modern and interesting way of learning but also collocations as a new area of interest.
The present study exposed learners of each group to both HCV and LCV collocations at the same time.