论文总字数：31163字

摘 要

中学英语的词汇教学是教学的重要环节。然而，教师和学生认为词汇难而烦，因此他们在词汇的教学和学习上花费很少的时间和精力。英语词汇具有很强的搭配能力,利用英语词汇搭配,可以扩大词汇量,掌握单词的正确用法。但是,中国英语学习者在词汇搭配使用过程中,却存在很多问题。在英语教学中，教师需要深入分析影响学生学习词汇搭配的因素，帮助英语学习者更迅捷，更高效地掌握英语词汇搭配。本文分析了词汇学习中存在的主要问题,并建议如何引导和帮助学生正确地掌握词汇搭配的方法,提高词汇教学质量。

关键词:词汇搭配；词汇教学；中学

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 1

2.1 Definition and Classification 1

2.2 Previous Studies on English Collocations 3

3. Problems and Causes of Vocabulary Learning 3

3.1 Problems in Vocabulary Learning 3

3.2 Causes of Learning Difficulty 4

4. Pedagogical Inspiration and Application 6

4.1 Inspiration 6

4.2 Application 9

5. Conclusion 12

Works Cited 13

1. Introduction

“Without grammar we can convey a little, but without words we can convey nothing”. (Wilkins, 2002:25) Vocabulary teaching is an essential part of English teaching. But, English teachers sometimes have tendency to overlook the importance of vocabulary teaching and students devote much time and energy to the learning of vocabulary, while they still complain that they cannot remember the words. This is particularly evident in junior middle schools. Thus, it is important for the teacher to know the significance of vocabulary in the middle school.

Collocation is an important part of the comprehensive ability of a language. Most of the time, with the right combinations of words, appropriate and proper language expressions, people convey the main ideas and fully reflect the objective world, thus to reach the aim of successful expression. However, although some English learners have plenty of vocabulary, yet they can not appropriately express the exact meaning that they want to express. In speaking and writing, it is common that they often misuse the words. Thus, vocabulary collocation remains still one of the most intractable problems in English teaching. This paper first analyses and summarizes the main problems that exist in vocabulary collocations, finds out the root of these problems and proposes some teaching methods to reduce the misuse of collocations, thus to enhance the quality of teaching vocabulary.

2. Literature Review

2.1 Definition and Classification

Firth was the first to put forward the notion “collocation" in 1950s. (Qianyuan，1997:43) He refers to collocation as a relation of “company", which means that the meaning of a word manifests in the word or words that accompany it in a context. The relation between “actual words in habitual company" is referred to by some linguists as syntagmatic relations . The mutual expectancy and dependency of collocations verifies Firth’s thought that language is by nature “on- going".

Halliday and Hason"s definition of collocation stresses the relation between vocabulary and discourse .（Halliday, Hason, 2001:3） Being one of the two aspects of lexical cohesion words in a collocation reflect syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations the latter shown in the co-occurrence of opposites and in unordered series cohesion can also be achieved by semantically unrelated words co-occurring in a given context.

Sinclare defines collocation as “the co-occurrence of two Or more words within a short space of each other in a text”. ( Sinclare, J. 2000: 170) By means of computer concordance corpus linguistics studies. The collocation of a given node within a certain span. Lexical co-occurrence is more or less independent of grammatical patterns and positional relationship.

J.R Firth defines collocation as the company words keep their relationships with other words. (Qianyuan，1997:105) Another definition might be the way words combine in predictable ways. When we think of the number of words in English, the number of potential combinations runs into many millions. Each word has its own meaning which is not only defined in dictionary but also the meaning in a phrase. We need know both meanings of a word. We know many expressions of the words which are heard frequently in our daily life. So we just keep them in mind as “one word”. For example, “Crystal clear”, and also some “compound noun”, like “riding boots” or “motor cyclist”. These expressions that are one kind of collocated pairs of words are used everyday by us which have already been fixed like “one word”. In language teaching, collocation is a very interesting area, because they can be found in many parts of the language studying, such as in a syntactic relation, lexical relation, or they can be in no linguistically defined relation. Knowing collocations well is a key point to use well of a language. Sometimes, we can not just judge a sentence only though whether its grammar is right or not.

Lewis classified vocabulary collocations into the following types:

(1) Strong: The combinations of many collocations are very strict or fixed, for example,“a white lie”.

(2) Weak: Some things can be long or short, can be cheap or expensive and also can be good or bad, but some things can be predicted previously, for example,“white coffee“ and “black coffee”.So they are called collocations.

(3) Medium Strength: It is between the two above. For example, “hold a meeting” and “carry out a project”.(Lewis, 1997:37)

Vocabulary acquisition has always been penetrating into the whole process of English teaching. Mastering the collocational relationships of a variety of words takes a crucial role in improving the pragmatic level of the students. English collocation focus on the use of words, And by the use of words to deepen the memory of words.

2.2 Previous Studies on English Collocations

Some scholars had done research on the importance of word collocations in building up students’ vocabulary, including: McCarthy believes that “in vocabulary teaching there is a high importance of collocation” and he describes that "collocation is fundamental in the study of vocabulary, and collocation is an important organizing principle in the vocabulary of any language. (McCarthy, 1990: 20) And Firth holds that in order to understand a word, we should first look at the relationship with other words. Meaning exits in the language, and it depends on the word.(Firth, 2000:12)

Chinese researchers are also interested in the study of word collocations. Scholars like Liu Shuming holds that collocation is a common linguistics phenomenon in English，she introduced the concept of collocation and analyzed the causes of misuses in collocations. She discussed some effective teaching approaches to collocations. (Liu Shuming ,2010:128); Wu Shujing holds that collocations being an important and difficult point in learners’ development of vocabulary, English teachers should analyze the factors that affect the learners’ awareness, connect collocation teaching to grammar and text teaching, help learners to grasp the collocations quickly and effectively so that the learners can learn idiomatic English.(Wu Shujing, 2007:11 )

From these studies, we notice that collocation is indispensable to vocabulary learning. So when it comes to vocabulary teaching, teachers should not just associate a word with its conceptual meaning. Instead, they should notice that what a word occurs with.

3. Problems and Causes of Vocabulary Learning

3.1 Problems in Vocabulary Learning

Learning English is necessary that students should do during their school life, and learning English vocabulary is the most importance thing for students to accomplish. With the development of China, we get more and more access to English and advanced foreign culture. Vocabulary learning is the most important thing for language learners. So the students need expend their vocabulary if they want to express their thoughts clearly and exactly. While, many students may face such a situation: although they have spent a lot of time in learning vocabulary, they yield poor results. The following are some problems that exist in middle school vocabulary learning. First, there isn’t a good way for students to accumulate enough vocabulary. Second, there are some rules about English spelling and reading but most teachers ignore to use these rules when they teach. Third, Lacking of recognition to vocabulary collocations, which makes students difficult to use words correctly. Those problems they met made lots of students give up vocabulary learning. So it is necessary and important to make vocabulary teaching interesting and effective.

The ability of vocabulary collocations is related to the efficiency of second language acquisition. However, English and Chinese belong to different languages, and the word combinations are also often different, so problems of collocations usually occur for the Chinese English language learners.

3.2 Causes of Learning Difficulty

The ability of vocabulary collocations is related to the efficiency of second language acquisition. However, English and Chinese belong to different languages, and the word combinations are also often different, so problems of collocations usually occur for the Chinese English language learners. Specific causes can be summarized as the following categories:

3.2.1 Confusion of Appreciative and Derogatory Words

In English, some words have affective meanings, which convey the user’s attitude towards the referents of the words. These words fall into two types: appreciative and derogatory. Some words in English are often collocated with other words to express positive meanings, for example “superbly, perfectly, wonderfully”. While such words as “terribly, seriously” are often used with negative words. You can only say “perfectly good” or “seriously bad”. For example,” They have all utterly recommended the boy, but the mayor denied his opportunity.” In this sentence," utterly recommend" is a wrong collocation.

3.2.2 Confusions of Parts of Speech

There are millions of English words. Numerous as they are, they can be divided into ten general parts of speech. It must be pointed out that some words can fall into more than one word class since they may play different roles in the sentence structure. In English vocabulary collocations, parts of speech confusion often occurs for students, because there are many words that have similar spelling forms and the same word classes, such as respective, respectable and respectful; exciting and excited. And also there are many words that have different parts of speech but have similar spelling forms, for example, affect and effect; intent and intend. In addition, some verbs in English can be used as both transitive verbs, followed by object, and as intransitive verbs can not be followed by object. Under the circumstances, they also have different meanings accordingly. For example, “smell”, when used as a intransitive verb, it means “有味道”，but when used as a transitive verb, it means “闻”. Parts of speech confusion is also reflected on the misuse of the singular or plural forms of nouns. Mistakes can be seen everywhere because of not being able to distinguish countable nouns, uncountable nouns and collective nouns, for example, “a furniture , an equipment, evidences”.

3.2.3Negative Transfer of Mother Tongue

Many scholars believe that the general English learners can not escape themselves from the influence of their mother language thinking. It is a common phenomenon for them to organize English sentences with the grammar of their mother tongue. Even a learner who have learned or used a foreign language for many years has the same problem. And the more difficult of the foreign language task, the more dependent on the mother tongue. Affected by Chinese language, many second language learners often adopt Chinese mode of thinking to equivalently translate some of the Chinese words into English. For example, in the eyes of the Chinese people, rats are very timid animals, so when the Chinese say someone is timid, they will use "像老鼠一样胆小".Accordingly, some students just translate it into:” He is as timid as a rat.” But this does not correspond with the expression English. The correct expression should be: “He is as timid as a chicken.” Also, it is noteworthy that Chinese learners sometimes have trouble figuring out why some notionally countable nouns are uncountable. For instance, words like “evidence”, “furniture” and “equipment” are generally uncountable in English although their Chinese equivalents are perfectly countable. This explains why Chinese learners frequently misuse these words.

People often repeat the part they want to emphasize to strengthen the tone in Chinese. For example, “大家都”, “多少钱”,“他的名字叫”,but they don’t work in English. Some students ignore this phenomenon, resulting in repetition of meaning, for example "everybody all, how much is the price, his name is called ", and “We ran to the playground, only to find it covered with white snow.” In English, the concept of "snow" itself has already contained a meaning of "white", and the collocation of "white" and "snow" is a absolute wrong repetition.

English teachers need to remind their students that literal translation should be used with great caution. Therefore English teachers may try to encourage learners to translate collocations to collocations and seek parallel equivalents in Chinese and English. In addition English teachers should spend extra time working on collocations without direct translation or introduce collocations that cannot be translated directly from Chinese such as “develop films”. Students may translate it into “发展电影”，while it means“冲洗胶卷”

.

4. Pedagogical Inspiration and Application

4.1 Inspiration

In practice, the collocations approach emphasizes teaching of word collocations to build up students’ vocabulary, and teachers would make full use of various methods: through comparisons, promoting teaching with concept of semantics, teaching vocabulary based on the context and language database.

4.1.1 Teaching Vocabulary by Comparisons

English teachers should adopt the methods of comparisons to teach vocabulary. By comparisons, students could have a better understanding of collocations between Chinese and English.

In English learning process, the students are often harassed by the side effect of their mother tongue, namely, language transfer. Positive transfer is conducive to English learning, while negative transfer affects English learning. In English, a large number of words can be translated equivalently into Chinese, whose teaching is not needed. But when met with the English words that can not be translated equivalently, it is the teacher’s task to select them to teach specifically, so as to reduce the mistakes brought by the influence of Chinese. For example, such mistakes as学习知识learn knowledge;提出问题raise a request;公费医疗the public medical care are interferences caused by mother tongue, thus the teacher should adopt the methods of comparisons to teach vocabulary. By comparisons, students could have a better understanding of collocations between Chinese and English.

Also, the teacher should compare the cultural connotations of both English and Chinese words. Although some words have the same or similar meanings or concepts, but their connotations are rather different. For example, in Chinese, “rat” means timidity, while in English, “chicken” is the symbol of timidity. Results of this phenomenon have something to do with the cultural background. So when we learn a vocabulary, we should pay special attention to the connotational meanings between different cultures.

4.1.2 Teaching Collocations in the Context

Vocabulary has different meanings in different context, thus, to understand and use vocabulary correctly, teachers should teach collocations based on context.

The teaching of vocabulary must be emphasized along with their understanding at the level of discourse. Teachers" explanation of new words should be done as naturally as possible. Teachers should avoid giving a definition or isolated examples of the word irrelevant to the context. It is better to provide a situation and associate the new words with the contexts or with familiar situations of the students" life.

Vocabulary has different meanings in different context, students should figure out the meaning of some words in context. The meanings of words depend on the relationships or collocations of each other. Thus, to understand and use vocabulary correctly, students should pay attention to the word combinations and the context. In English, there are some words which have both positive and negative meanings. For example, “ learn” not only means “学习”, but also means “教训” The English sentence “He is my despair” also have two entirely different meanings . We can only figure out the meanings through the collocations of the specific context.

4.1.3 Applying Knowledge of Semantics to Vocabulary Teaching

As we look up the meaning of a word in the dictionary, it is not difficult to find a chain of meanings listed under that word. A word which has a set of related meanings is regarded as polysemous word. Polysemy is an important feature of English vocabulary. For example, the verb fix can mean fasten, e.g. fix the box .It can also means direct, e.g. fix one’s attention on. Again, In the sentence “Jenny enjoys figure skating very well, and she dreams to be a professional athlete”, many students may misunderstand “figure skating” as “身体滑冰”,but what it really means is “花样滑冰”.The word “figure” here means “a particular kind of skating”. The teacher can design tongue twisters or riddles to help the students to grasp such kinds of collocations. For example, in the sentence “Tom drive the car, which drives his mother afraid”, two “drive” appear, but they have different meanings. The first one means “operate or control a vehicle”, the second one means “make” . The teacher can use this way to help the students to remember all usages of the word “drive”, by doing this, the students will naturally know the different meanings of these collocations when they see them again.

4.1.4 Teaching Vocabulary with Language Database

Recently, language database have had a major impact on vocabulary teaching, which not only helps teachers to select the teaching contents, arrange the teaching order and find out the teaching focus, but also helps teachers avoid choosing outdated expressions. For example, the collocation “rain cats and dogs” has not yet been used in Modern English(at least in British English). This collocation even never appeared once. Also in the ninety million written language database, this collocation only appeared once. But this collocation is collected by almost all dictionaries and most English teachers have known this collocation before, so they have to face a problem of choosing the teaching contents. Because of the language database, the teacher will know what words and collocations they should let the students master, so to devote more time to the teaching. Nowadays, it is generally believed that high frequency words should be the core in the preliminary and intermediate stages of English vocabulary learning. With the most commonly used words provided by database, teachers will be able to establish priorities in teaching rather than spending too much time and energy on rarely used words.

McCarthy argues that “in vocabulary teaching there is a high importance of collocation” and he describes that "collocation is fundamental in the study of vocabulary, and collocation is an important organizing principle in the vocabulary of any language” ( McCarthy, 1990:200 ) . From his words we notice that collocation is indispensable to vocabulary learning. So when it comes to vocabulary teaching, teachers shouldn"t just associate a word with its conceptual meaning. Instead they should notice that what a word occurs with, i. e. collocation is just as important as any other statement about its meaning. Teachers should explore an effective way in teaching vocabulary by means of specific collocation patterns. For example, when teachers teach "heavy" to their students they may as well teach “heavy fog， heavy food，heavy drink and heavy traffic” to the students. Through explaining the meanings of these collocations teachers can show the students the various meanings of “heavy”.

In English, there are many common vocabulary collocations, such as “get, take, make”. In order to master these common collocations, teachers should classify them one by one to make students have a much clearer understanding of all the common collocations of these words.

4.2 Application

4.2.1 Identifying New Collocations in the Text

For Middle School students whose English is in the low level, I think that the teacher should let them find out all the collocations while explaining the text in class. In view of their English level, the teacher should choose the collocations that suit the students.

First, teachers should introduce the basic classifications of word collocations. The word Collocations can be classified as different types:

(1)adjective noun: heavy traffic

(2)noun noun: a diary book

(3)verb adjective noun: speak a foreign language

(4)verb adverb: apologize sincerely

(5)adverb verb: Half understand

(6)adverb adjective: perfectly good

(7)verb preposition noun: Tremble with fear

With knowledge of the basic categories of word collocations, teachers then could lead their students to the identification and collection of word collocations in the text. After reading the text, students would be required to pick out word combinations and phrases based on their own understanding of the collocation definition and classification. And then to write down the new collocations and to categorize them following the above category. After that, teachers would justify and confirm the right word collocations and teach them one by one. By dong this, students may have a better understanding of how collocations occur in passage and how to put to use of the newly acquired word collocations.

4.2.2 Simulation Exercises with Collocations from the Text

After students have read the text for the first time, and have some basic understanding of the collocations in the text. The teacher can choose some phrases from the text to let students do some simulation exercises. First, teachers could let students to make sentences by the newly learned collocations. Lets take the following case as an example: collocations which are composed by the structures of verb preposition (adverb) noun. Teachers could make a list of gap filling, for example:

deal (with) a problem;

work (out) a solution;

sort (out) his letters;

break (down) the barrier;

go (about) one’s work;

look (into) the cause of the accident.

For the common word collocations in text, such as “get, take, make”. In order to master these common collocations more efficiently, teachers should classify them one by one to make students have a much clearer understanding of all the common collocations of these words. Take “make” as an example, the teacher could list this for students:

make up

make sure

make friends with

make full use of

make out, etc.

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