A STUDY ON ENGLISH LEXICAL COLLOCATION AND PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS FOR BUSINESS ENGLISH

Part A INTRODUCTION PAGE English Lexical Collocation and Pedagogical Implications for Business English University of Languages and International studies Vietnam National University of Hanoi Post Graduate Department A STUDY ON ENGLISH LEXICAL COLLOCATION AND PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS FOR BUSINESS ENGLISH SEMANTICS Final Assignment Student Phạm Thị Nguyệt Cohort K18 Instructor Dr Ha Cam Tam Deadline 28062010 Hanoi, June 2010 TABLE OF CONTENTS Part A INTRODUCTION 3 31 Rationale 32 Aims of the stud.

Post Graduate Department

A STUDY ON ENGLISH LEXICAL COLLOCATION

AND PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS

FOR BUSINESS ENGLISH

SEMANTICS Final Assignment

Student: Phạm Thị Nguyệt

Cohort: K18 Instructor: Dr Ha Cam Tam

Deadline: 28/06/2010

Hanoi, June 2010

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part A: INTRODUCTION 3

1 Rationale 3

2 Aims of the study 3

3 Scope of the study 4

4 Design of the study 4

Part B: DEVELOPMENT 4

1 Theoretical Background and Review of Related Literature 4

1.1 Definitions of Collocation 4

1.2 Related studies of Collocation 6

1.3 Related Terms of Collocation 6

1.4 Classification of Collocation 7

1.5 The significance of English Lexical Collocation 9

2 Implications in learning and teaching Business English 9

2.1 The significance of Lexical Collocation in Business English 9

2.2 Pedagogical implications 10

2.3.1 For non-native teachers 11

2.3.2 For learners 11

Part C: CONCLUSION 12

1 Limitations of the study 12

2 Recommendations for further study 12

REFERENCES 14

APPENDIX 17

Part A: INTRODUCTION

1 Rationale

Vocabulary and grammar are two basic elements of a language, but traditionally most EFL teachers often emphasize learning grammar more than vocabulary in their teaching With the approaching new millennium, pioneer scholars and researchers have started to direct people’s attention to EFL vocabulary acquisition and began to emphasize the instruction of vocabulary in classroom practices (Channel, 1981; McCarthy, 1984; Nation, 1990) Collocations, as a central aspect of vocabulary, have started to gain increasing attention in the past two decades

Business English is an individualized learning program which “represents a radial new approach to the provision of in-service business English course (Wilberg & Lewis, 1990:8) This program depends on the lexical approach emphasizing the collocation and word grammar

In the business world, there are a huge number of collocations which express specific ideas very succinctly, for example, 'customer service’, ‘quality control' If learners are not familiar with these collocations, they will be forced to explain the concept, which is likely to lead to errors and puts a strain on the listeners Therefore, learning and teaching business collocations can be particularly problematic for learners and non-native teachers

2 Aims of the study

The purposes of this study are to focus on giving brief understanding of Collocation, the significance of Collocation and its implications for Business English The current study has attempted to explore the relation between English collocations and business English, more specifically, the role lexical collocations play in learning and teaching business English

Collocation is not really a new semantics area It is the fact that there are many studies

on this from 1990s However, I explore this topic with the hope that I could gain more knowledge about collocation; obtain more examples involved in lexical collocations for my better teaching

3 Scope of the study

Due to the limited time and knowledge, this study just has brief understanding of collocations in general and lexical collocations in particular More importantly, some implications for teaching and learning business English are explored basing on previous studies and drawn from the author’s own teaching experience

4 Design of the study

There are three main parts of this study Part A: Introduction deals with rationale, aims, scope and design of the study Part B: Development can be broken into Theoretical background and Implications in learning and teaching business English In order to have an overview of collocation, different definitions, relates studies, related terms, classifications and significance are briefly stated Pedagogical implications of collocation for both non-native teachers and learners are clearly stated Part C: Conclusion involves some limitations and recommendations for further studies

Part B: DEVELOPMENT

1 Theoretical Background and Review of Related Literature.

1.1 Definitions of Collocation

In the actual fact, words are rarely used alone They live with each other and depend much on each other Word meaning is also governed by the meanings of other words

which tend to occur in its environment, for example, capital in loan capital and

capital in Hanoi capital It is clearly that capital in these examples acquires different

meanings when combining with different words We, therefore, should look at the relations between words when describing meanings of words

Below are some definitions of Collocation by linguists

1990 Aghbar A collocation, in its simplest definition, consists

of two words which are linked together in the memory of native speakers and occur together with some frequency in both written and oral discourse

1990:158 McCarthy The likelihood of co-occurrence between words 1990:32 Nation Collocations are words that often occur together

and the collocations of a word are the company

it keeps

1991:302 Malmkjaer Collocation and set, as terms in a lexical

descriptions, are analogous to structure and system in grammatical theory The difference is that collocation is a relation of probable co-occurrence of items, and sets are open-ended 1997:8 Lewis, M Collocation is the readily observable

phenomenon whereby certain words co- occur in natural text with greater than random frequency” 1998:85 Dudley Evans &

St John

Collocation describes the company that a word keeps

2002 Oxford

Collocations Dictionary

Collocation is the way words combine in a language to produce natural- sounding speech and writing

In its broadest sense, collocation is the way in which words co- occur in natural texts in statically significant ways, as Lewis (2000.132) stated In other words, collocation is about the way words naturally co- occurs It means although many word combinations

are possible, we tend to use common and regular combinations of words collocation Moreover, collocation is not determined by logic or frequency, but it is arbitrary,

decided only by linguistic convention Some collocations are fully fixed, such as do the

photocopying, or low-key competition while others more or less fixed and can be

completed in a relatively small numbers of ways, for example, enter/ abandon/

dominate/ corner/ drive another market

1.2 Related studies of Collocation:

It has been 27 years since the appearance of Lewis’ (1993) book, The Lexical

Approach, directing language teachers’ attention to the systematic re-examination of

the importance of collocations in EFL/ESL education Along with Lewis, scholars of second language vocabulary acquisition (Bahns & Eldaw, 1993; Howarth, 1998), EFL/ ESL materials and curriculum design (Coady & Huckin, 1997; McCarthy, 2004a, 2004b; Richards & Rogers, 2001), pedagogy (Ellis, 1996, 2001; Nation, 2001), and lexicography (Benson, Benson & Ilson, 1986, 1997), have also advanced arguments advocating the necessity of studying English collocations

First brought up by Palmer (1933) and later introduced to the field of theoretical linguistics by Firth (1957), the most commonly shared definition of collocations is: the tendency of one word to co-occur with one or more other words in a particular domain (Aghbar, 1990; Al-Bahrain, 1998; Gitsaki, 1999; Nation, 2001; Nesselhauf, 2003) In

his monograph Second Interim Report on English Collocations, the father of

collocation studies, linguist Palmer (1933) simply states, “Each [collocation] … must

or should be learnt, or is best or most conveniently learnt as an integral whole or independent entity, rather than by the process of piecing together their component parts” (Palmer, 1933, p 4) The notion, collocation, however, is far from thoroughly described or understood as to whether it should be approached from a semantic, syntactic, or idiomatic, perspective (Hsu, 2005)

1.3 Related Terms of Collocation

Lexical chunk 'Lexical chunk' is an umbrella term which includes all the

other terms We define a lexical chunk as any pair or group of words which are commonly found together, or in close proximity

A collocate A collocate of a particular word is another word which often

occurs with that word If two or more words collocate, they

often occur together Ex: company is an allocate of run

A marked collocation A marked collocation is an unusual combination of words that

challenges hearers or readers’ expectations

Collocation range Collocation range is a list of the other words with which a

word may occur (Larson, 1984:145) In other words, collocation range refers to a set of possible collocates It is the collocation range that restricts the meaningful usage of each word since it varies from word to word No two words have exactly the same collocation possibilities even the equivalent words between languages Some words have a limited one

For instance, the English adjective bandy has a very limited collocation range It may allocate with legs, and it is unlikely

to occur with any other words On the contrary, the noun

“appointment” has a large list of collocates such as have,

make, arrange, fix

Collocation meaning Collocation meaning refers to the associations that a word

acquires in its collocation For example, pretty girl/ flower/

garden/ color/ village A word can gain different collocation

meaning in different context e.g white man/ wine/ noise/

1.4 Classification of Collocation

Collocations can be divided into lexical collocations and grammatical collocations In this much narrower terminology, lexical collocations combine two equal lexical components ( open class words) while grammatical collocations combine a lexical word, typical a noun, a verb or an adjective, with a grammatical word ( one open class word and one closed class word) In other words, lexical collocations can be understood as a pair of content words commonly found together

Examples of grammatical collocations:

Noun+ Preposition: relationship with

Noun + to infinitive/that clause: a pleasure to, an agreement that

Preposition + Noun: in advance

Adjective + preposition: responsible for

Adjective + to infinitive/ that clause: ready to/ aware that

Verb + preposition: start up

Six subtypes of lexical collocations were suggested by the BBI Dictionary of English

Word Combinations (Benson et al., 1997) and the seventh ‘noun + noun’ subtype were

recognized by Hausmann (1999) and Kimmes (2004) Altogether, seven subtypes of lexical collocations were investigated in this study

L1 verb + noun impose taxes, do business, launch a new product, lay offstaff, go into partnership, cease trading L2 adjective + noun a rough design, tough competition, intended recipient,

limited company, annual turnover

L3 noun + verb naming an

action Shares are issued

L4 Noun 1 of noun

2 balance of trade

L5

adverb + adjective poorly paid, closely related, highly skilled

L6 verb + adverb appreciate sincerely, argue heatedly, complain bitterly,

affect deeply

L7 noun + noun company uniform, market research, household goods,

consumer durables, sales figures

1.5 The significance of English Lexical Collocation

Lexical Collocations are more problematic for non-native teachers and learners, also more difficult to find in dictionaries No reasonable explanation would be readily

available for native speakers using such natural-sounding word combinations as reach

an agreement There are often no rules about how to put words together in such ways.

They can be a potential source of mother tongue interference for non-native speakers of English as the collocation patterning is just typical in its nature

Lexical collocations run through the whole of the English language It is obvious that they better serve to reflect the world’s states of affairs than grammatical collocations based on the fact that lexical collocations are basically made up of open class words which are lexical content words in direct connection with external reality

Given the fact that up to 80% of the words in both spoken and written discourse are chosen according to the lexical co- selection principle rather than to purely grammatical factors (Sinclair, 2000: 197), this study just focuses on analyzing lexical collocations

2 Implications in learning and teaching Business English

2.1 The significance of Lexical Collocation in Business English

According to Hammer (1991:157), knowing how to use a word includes knowing what words can occur with it Another linguist, Nation (1990:31-32) believes that knowing a word involves knowing its collocations as well as its grammatical patterns and other features of the word Hill and Lewis (1997:i) argue that knowing strong and frequent combinations is essential for accurate, natural English For short, it can be said that collocation is a fundamental aspect of vocabulary It is an important organizing principle in English vocabulary in particular For example, to understand the word

“bankrupt”, we should know the word “go” which always goes with “bankrupt”

In order to learn Business English, the teachers and learners have to know the key role

of vocabulary proficiency It is fact that one of the most difficulties the learners of business English usually encounter is memorizing collocations and using them properly It means that they should have a high awareness of the significance of collocations in business English

English for business obtains a group of important keywords, therefore, learners has the task of finding and recording important word partnerships Those keywords are the core business vocabulary with higher frequency Students while learning business English have to choose their own keywords and find out the lexical collocations For

instance, some keywords such as market, personnel, sales, product, debt, and projects,

are occurred with high frequency

The learners also have to divide background words provided basically into verb-noun, adjective-noun, and verb-adjective-noun groups and then make sentences with them The learning of word partnerships can give learners a quick way to master the proficiency required Usually business students have a large vocabulary, but they don’t know how to combine the words together When they need to express in English, they can come up with many words in mind, while they are difficult to make meaningful phrases or sentences that are well organized For example, when they have the word

“campaign”, they often confuse to choose a word preceding “campaign”, whether it is