Publication Summary
Collocation is the phenomenon by which certain words tend to co-occur with others; for example, complain tends to be modified by bitterly rather than fiercely or strongly and has been observed through corpus descriptions of language. Collocations may be problematic for any language learner, for instance somebody learning a specialised genre of their L1, but are particularly challenging in L2 (Bahns 1991; Lewis & Conzett 2000; Nesselhauf 2003). Collocations have been found to be troublesome to learners from a number of different language backgrounds, e.g. German (Bahns & Eldaw 1993), Thai (Phoocharoensil 2012), Japanese (Koya 2003) and Taiwanese (Huang 2001), as well as at different language levels (Laufer & Waldman 2011; Nesselhauf 2003). ‘The difficulties for language learners are not to understand what weak tea is but to actively produce weak tea and not feeble tea or light tea’ (Herbst 2010: 226). Laufer and Waldman (2011) point out that learners’ productive knowledge of collocations is typically
CAER Authors
Prof. Alice Deignan
University of Leeds - Professor of Applied Linguistics