Martina BredenbröckerA Corpus-Based Approach to English as a Foreign Language at Primary School Level
Collocations for Early Beginners
LINGUA – Fremdsprachenunterricht in Forschung und Praxis, volume 41
Hamburg 2018, 404 pages
ISBN 978-3-8300-9935-2 (print) |ISBN 978-3-339-09935-8 (eBook)
About this book deutschenglish
The importance of collocations and other phraseological units for native speakers as well as for language learners has long been recognized by English linguistics and English language pedagogy. Naturally occurring language consists to a very large extent of recurring phrases that are language-specific and thus difficult for the learner. Findings from cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics show that memorizing such chunks is easier than learning isolated lexical units. Another strong argument is that using the right collocation contributes to a higher degree of nativeness and language competence in the target language.
In order to provide a solid basis for lifelong language learning as proposed by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, it is necessary to begin before secondary education. Therefore, the present study focuses explicitly on young learners at primary school level and investigates the use of collocations (as well as other phraseological units where appropriate) of selected high-frequency nouns and verbs by British children of that age level. In a second step, the possibility of transferring these findings to the EFL primary school classroom are explored.
The basis for the present analysis is a large corpus containing children’s language which was compiled from a variety of texts of various genres for the development of children's dictionaries. The version this study is based on contains approximately 107 million words, most of which are short stories written by children. This makes it an extremely valuable resource to analyse authentic language use of English children.
The aim of the present project is to show how a corpus linguistic analysis of individual nouns and verbs can provide a sound basis for the compilation of a basic vocabulary set, which is not based on single words and their German equivalents like traditional lists, but on collocations and other frequent multi-word units.
Keywords
Authentic language useAuthentischer SprachgebrauchChildrens languageCollocationsCorpus linguisticsEnglischunterrichtEnglishFachdidaktikForeign LanguageGrundschuleKinderspracheKollokationenKorpuslinguistikMuttersprachlerPhraseologiePhraseologyPrimary SchoolVocabularyWortschatzIhr Werk im Verlag Dr. Kovač
Möchten Sie Ihre wissenschaftliche Arbeit publizieren? Erfahren Sie mehr über unsere günstigen Konditionen und unseren Service für Autorinnen und Autoren.