How much collocation knowledge do L2 learners have?: the effects of frequency and amount of exposure

By B. Fernández, N. Schmitt. 2015

161 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many scholars believe that collocations are difficult to learn and use by L2 learners. However, some research suggests that learners often know more collocations than commonly thought. This study tested 108 Spanish learners of English to measure their productive knowledge of 50 collocations, which varied according to corpus frequency, t-score, and MI score. The participants produced a mean score of 56.6% correct, suggesting that our learners knew a substantial number of collocations. Knowledge of the collocations correlated moderately with corpus frequency (.45), but also with everyday engagement with English outside the classroom, in activities like reading, watching movies/TV, and social networking (composite correlation = .56). Everyday engagement also had a stronger relationship with collocation knowledge than years of English study (.45).

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/462ab01b391a9b45630d503b6a670f28dea33f47

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Citations in the corpus

Picking up polysemous phrasal verbs: How many do learners know and what facilitates this knowledge? (2016, background): “…that personal leisure exposure relates to formulaic sequence learning, but this has been shown only with a small group (68) of intermediate/upper intermediate English learners for PV learning (Schmitt & Redwood, 2011) and for the learning of collocations (Gonz alez Fern andez & Schmitt, 2015).”
Not just ‘small potatoes’: Knowledge of the idiomatic meanings of collocations (2017, background): “Moreover, Schmitt and Redwood (2011) and González Fernández and Schmitt (2015) found a positive relationship between the amount of L2 engagement (e.g. reading, watching TV, and social networking in English) and knowledge of target phrasal verbs and the collocations respectively.”
Learning L2 vocabulary from audiovisual input: an exploratory study into incidental learning of single words and formulaic sequences (2019, background): “Because previous research has found that both distributional (González Fernández and Schmitt 2015) and phraseological (Peters 2016) properties may affect the learning burden of FS, we combine both approaches in our methodology and loosely define FS as conventionalised, recurring word combinations.”
Understanding vocabulary acquisition, instruction, and assessment: A research agenda (2019, background): “…English games (e.g. Kuppens, 2010; Sylvén & Sundqvist, 2012; Jensen, 2016), and particularly for older learners, consuming English-language reading material, whether on paper or on the internet (e.g. González-Fernández & Schmitt, 2015; Garnier & Schmitt, 2016; Macis & Schmitt, 2017).”