Classification of Collocations and Collocational Errors

The criteria and steps used in this analytical phase of classification will be introduced and explained in the two following sections. A sample of illustrative examples will then be given to show how these criteria were applied to the participants‟ collocational patterns.

The assessment of the participants‟ collocations was executed in relation to native speakers‟ production and use (naturalness), particularly in an academic context as this study was mainly focused on analysing the participants‟ (Libyan EFL learners) collocations in academic written English. In addition, the term erroneous collocation refers not only to the wrong production of collocation i.e. where the two components of collocation do not go together (which can be comprehensible, yet, still not comply with native speaker convention), but also refers to the

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inappropriate usage of collocation in this particular context (i.e. academic register) as some of the participants‟ collocational patterns were deemed fairly acceptable in spoken language. In this vein, McCarthy and O‟Dell (2005:4) point out that learners can sound strange to the native speaker when they say, for instance, “„making your homework‟ or „my uncle is a very high man‟”. Both of these phrases can be partially understood in context but they represent the kind of language which sounds “unnatural and might perhaps confuse”.

1. Methods and Criteria Used to Judge the Acceptability of Learners' Collocational Patterns

it is important to highlight that the analysis was restricted to the academic register on the basis of native speaker (NS) production and use (naturalness) in this particular context, thus, some of the collocation patterns which were rated as academically unacceptable (i.e. too informal) might be viewed as acceptable in spoken language.

Four methods were used to evaluate and determine the acceptability of the collocations: a) the online British National Corpus (BNC), b) the Oxford Collocations Dictionary (2009)17, c) consultations with two native speakers (a senior English Language teacher18 and an ordinary native speaker - for detailed information about the use of these methods, see point 3 below concerning the sample of the analysis and applying the criteria to the learners‟ collocational

17 _{For more information on the BNC and the Oxford Collocations Dictionary please see glossary.} 18

The teacher was a senior language tutor at the University of Manchester. He had more than 40 years teaching experience in the fields of TEFL and TESL. He possessed a Masters degree in Applied Linguistics from the University of Wales and also an RSA Diploma in TESL. He has taught in Malaysia at both secondary and tertiary levels and in the UAE (Zayed University). At Manchester, he currently works on various programmes such as teacher training (Trinity Certificate), Erasmus, Gateway (General English), and pre-Sessional courses (EAP).

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patterns), and d) the acceptability-of-collocations survey which was administered to native speakers of English in order to triangulate the judgements made according to the three methods.

The BNC was used in this study as a reference source for a number of reasons: The BNC is a wide-ranging and representative reference corpus of modern British English (Hoffmann et al., 2008: 27-45). Additionally, it is “the best corpus of general English currently freely accessible to researchers” (Siyanova and Schmitt, 2008:235). However, for the purposes of this study, the BNC harbours a particular weakness as it poses difficulties when searching for collocations in terms of extracting variations in inflections, changes in the organisation of some constituents, as well as in types of determiner, or in terms of inserting modifiers (Wang and Shaw, 2000:209). Therefore, this weakness was overcome by employing the above-mentioned methods (i.e. the OCD [2009], consultations with two native speakers and the acceptability survey). Furthermore, the choice of using the Oxford Collocational Dictionary was based on the fact that it is a prominent collocational dictionary which consists of 250,000 collocations of 9000 headwords (nouns, verbs and adjectives) (Francis and Poole, 2009). However, a drawback of collocational dictionaries is that they are incomprehensive in the sense that they do not list every possible collocate of a certain word. Finally, the decision to consult native speakers was based on their ability to analyse and assess contemporary language structure and to evaluate any collocations which might have escaped detection by means of the other two methods. Furthermore, native speakers‟ intuition is the only up-to-date source, which can evaluate the acceptability of learners‟ collocations according to the conventions of their contemporary speech community. The native speakers‟

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intuition refers to conventionality as a component in defining collocations in this study (for further details on these components, see section 2.5).

The use of the OCD (2009) and the BNC was as follows: the learners‟ collocational patterns were first sought in the OCD by looking up the entries for each investigated verb and adjective. This was done in order to examine whether the collocating word appearing in the participants‟ collocational pattern was listed among the options combined with this specific verb / adjective in the dictionary. If this search failed, then I looked up the entries for the noun used in the learners‟ collocation to search the options listed in the verb / adjective entries; this was done in order to check whether the investigated verb / adjective was included. In addition, the search in the BNC was confined to the academic prose (written restrictions). Again, this was done by going through the concordance lines and exploring the collocations and collocates of every searched verb / adjective in order to check whether the learners‟ used collocational patterns or similar collocations (i.e. considering the use of different determiners or modifiers) were listed.

Nesselhauf (2003:230) uses the following ratings “C (correct), W (wrong), or CW for „not sure‟ or „ok‟, but not the best way to say it”, when asking the native speakers to judge the acceptability of learners‟ combination. This stage of analysis has two weaknesses: First, by constructing a scale based on correct and wrong concepts, this application clearly disregards interpreting collocations according to their „degree of likelihood‟ (Lewis, 1997) which means that native speaker intuition is key in judging whether a certain collocation is likely to be common in English. According to Lewis, there exists “a spectrum between pairs of words which we expect to find together and words which we are surprised to find together” (1997:29). In short, collocation is not a logical or

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rule-based phenomenon but occurs through „linguistic convention‟ (for a detailed discussion on this see Chapter 2). Second, she does not define clear criteria for each option on her scale to place and classify learners‟ collocational patterns accordingly. The “C (correct)” clearly refers to native speaker usage, however, for the scale rating “W (wrong)” and “CW for „not sure‟ or „ok‟” the criteria are not defined and distinguished for the collocations to be classified. In addition, “CW for „not sure‟ or „ok‟” is vague; that is to say, no clear distinction is found in CW as the expression „not sure‟ cannot be equated with „OK‟. Finally and most importantly, since the scope of the investigation is English written production by advanced learners of English, clear and rigid criteria should be set for judgment in terms of academic Standard English. Therefore, I devised an improved version of the scale with clearly defined criteria for each degree of acceptability. This will be discussed and explained in great detail in the following part.

I further decided to classify verb-noun collocations and adjective-noun collocations according to certain criteria which were based on native-like use of language and in particular academic written English, which I have devised and subsumed under what I term the „scale of acceptability‟19_{. On this note, Lewis (1997:29) indicates that collocation is „arbitrary‟ as indicated} in Chapter 2. The following table illustrates the criteria which represent three degrees of acceptability:

19 _{According to Howarth (1998) and Nesselhauf (2003), the term acceptability was adopted to indicate the degree to which a}

collocation conforms to native speaker usage, taking into account the context in which it occurs. In my view, this term is more suitable than others used in earlier research (e.g. commonness) to illustrate EFL learners‟ production which is often relatively uncommon in English language.

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Table 4-8 The scale of acceptability

Degree of acceptability Example Error type

Acceptable make a big difference N/A

partially acceptable make big difference grammatical error: determiner (a) Unacceptable do a difference lexical errors: verb (do)

As can be seen from the above table, acceptable refers to native-like use. Native-like use was assessed by using the above-mentioned methods to judge the acceptability of collocations extracted from the learner corpus in context, taking into consideration the four components, i.e. grammaticality, substitutability, semantics and conventionality, which join to form collocations (see section 2.5 for detailed information). The decision is based on whether a given collocation is a) acceptable, b) partially acceptable or c) unacceptable (for further information on how those terms are used in the current research please see section 1.8). In addition, judgments of degrees of acceptability of collocations were based on viewing them as a whole, i.e. by examining the complementation pattern of the noun or the ways in which it was pre-modified (Nesselhauf, 2003:230) (see section 2.5 for detailed information). The collocations were evaluated as acceptable if they were found in the OCD dictionary and / or if they occurred not less than five times in different texts in the BNC, and if they were identical (including articles and prepositions) to native speakers‟ use as assessed by the two consulted native speakers. Lyons (1968:137) asserts that they are “[acceptable if] produced by a native speaker in some appropriate context and is or would be accepted by other native speakers as belonging to the language in question”. „Partially acceptable‟ means that the components of a given collocation (i.e. node and collocate) are acceptable and collocate within a span which is deemed acceptable, but the grammatical structure in which it is encased is incorrect. The partially acceptable scale option ignores the

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possibility of perfect grammar yet the combination is still unusual according to the acceptable scale option. For example, *take a part in something is only partially acceptable as there is a grammatical error, which is a superfluous determiner. Another example would be *my general

knowing is poor, which shows that the correct root word has been selected (know) but the wrong

word form is used which also constitutes a grammatical error (use of participle instead of noun). Unacceptable means non-native-like use such as *high man. It is worth mentioning that this area is different from partially acceptable in that the conventions of combining the words in a certain way are not used, e.g. *strong smoker instead of heavy smoker. The native speaker may understand it but would not use it.

It is worth mentioning that the collocations which were judged as not acceptable on the basis of the first two criteria were introduced with enough context (i.e. co-text, and paragraph) in which they occurred to native speakers. Providing enough contexts for learners‟ collocational patterns for native-speakers was actually important in the analysis for many reasons: 1) to ascertain the intended meaning which the learners wanted to express, 2) to help provide the suggested acceptable combinations, and 3) to enable identification of the types of errors within the erroneous collocation. On this note, Corder (1973a:273) explains that “[a]ny identification of error ... necessarily involves interpretation in the context”.

The area of partial acceptability is related to grammar deviation, whereas the area of acceptability and unacceptability is related mainly to lexical accuracy where the learner can show whether or not s/he has learned the collocation as a semantic unit which contains the acceptable combination

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of words. This was done in an effort to gain a better understanding of the learners‟ verb-noun and adjective-noun collocational patterns.

2. Criteria for Classifying Learners’ Collocational Errors

According to Brown (2000:222), a way to describe errors would be “errors of addition, omission, substitution and ordering, following standard mathematical categories”. Thus, I used the following criteria to classify each error type:

1. missing entity, which refers to the absence of an item that must appear in a well-formed utterance;

2. superfluous word (addition), as in the presence of an item that does not appear to be needed in a well-formed utterance;

3. wrong word (substitution), which refers to the use of a wrong item where another one should be used; or

4. wrong word order, as is the case when items are put in the wrong sequence.

In addition, it is necessary to distinguish between these error types and further classify them as lexical errors in terms of wrong choice of the verb, e.g, *got awareness instead of have an

awareness of, or grammatical errors as in missing qualifier, e.g, *get rain instead of get enough rain respectively. On this note, Brown (2000:222) explains that “within each category, levels of

language can be considered: phonology, orthography, the lexicon, grammar and discourse”. The error-type classification framework was originally adopted from Nesselhauf‟s study (2003) to be used as a guide for analysing the collocational errors and also to familiarize myself with the

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nature of the collocational errors committed by EFL learners. The following table (4.9) presents Nesselhauf‟s error analysis framework.

Table 4-9 Nesselhauf’s error analysis framework (2003) Type of mistake

Verb: Wrong choice of verb (or non-existent verb) Noun: Wrong choice of noun (or non-existent noun)

Preposition (verb): Preposition of a prepositional verb missing, or present albeit unacceptable, or

wrong

Preposition (noun): Preposition of a noun missing, present albeit unacceptable, or wrong Determiner: Article or pronoun missing, present albeit unacceptable or wrong

Number: Noun used in the singular instead of the plural or vice versa Structure: Syntactic structure wrong

Usage1: Combination exists but is not used correctly

Usage2: Combination does not exist and cannot be corrected by exchanging single elements

In addition, regarding stylistic error (register), Balhouq (1982:132-133) argues that in terms of register, we may treat lexical words which do not suit “the criteria of field of discourse, mode of discourse and style of discourse as inappropriate”. Therefore, collocations which did not comply with the formal register of academic writing were classified as partially acceptable. Although they are acceptable in the sense that they do collocate, they are erroneous as they “… are not appropriate in the context in which they occur” (Corder, 1973a: 272-273).

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3. Sample Analysis Applying the Above-mentioned Criteria to the Learners’ Collocational Patterns

Here, examples are introduced that demonstrate how I applied the above-mentioned criteria to classifying and judging the acceptability of collocations and classifying the collocational errors occurring in the LLC.

The verb-noun collocational pattern acquire knowledge and skills was judged as acceptable since the verb „acquire‟ was said to be acceptable when combining with „knowledge‟ and „skills‟ in the Oxford Collocational Dictionary and also in the BNC.

ds can make teachers‟ job easier to make students acquire knowledge and skills. The importance of educatio

In the collocational pattern gets a good marks, „get‟ and „marks‟ do collocate, however, in this instance there was a grammatical error which was classified as superfluous determiner (indefinite article). Accordingly, this collocation was judged as partially acceptable.

rtant role and gives a higher rank when a learner gets a good marks and in which gives hints on how much

The collocation take information in the following concordance line was judged as unacceptable, because no indication was found in the two searched sources that „take‟ goes with „information‟. In addition, the collocation appeared not to express the intended meaning in this context. Thus the suggested acceptable collocation which would have conveyed the precise meaning was obtain

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information. Therefore, the collocational error in this pattern was classified as lexical error:

wrong choice of verb.

work because students study in the university to take information help them in their works in the futur

After finishing this stage, the native speakers were consulted. They were asked to evaluate the acceptability of all the combinations in the LLC. They were provided with enough context to aid their deliberations, according to the scale of acceptability above. In addition, they were also asked to double check the work done on the basis of the collocational dictionary and BNC. They were asked if they agreed with the judgement to put „yes‟ and in the case of disagreement to write their suggestions. The next phase of examination entailed comparing the similarity and differences between native speakers‟ judgements and the work done on the basis of the two searched sources and making some modifications accordingly.