Building a customised Google‐based collocation collector to enhance language learning

Abstract

A collocation is defined as an arrangement or juxtaposition of words or other elements, especially those that commonly co-occur, as rancid butter, bosom buddy or dead serious (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 2004), the association between two words that are typically or frequently used together (Encarta World English Dictionary, 2006), a habitual combination of words that sounds natural (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, 1992). There is no doubt that such definitions are intuitively correct when we encounter co-occurrences of words in text and speech. As a component of vocabulary and language learning and as an interesting area for linguistic investigation, collocation study and building of collocation dictionary or corpus have been given considerable emphasis since Cruden identified the repeated co-occurrences of certain words such as 'dry' and 'ground' in the Bible more than 250 years ago (Cruden, 1954;Kennedy, 2000).Clearly, collocation collection and research for language learning is based on empiricism-an approach dominated by the observation of really and naturally occurring data. Noam Chomsky (1959) specifically challenged such language enquiry by stating We constantly read and hear new sentences of words, recognize them as sentences and understand them. It is easy to show that the new events that we accept and understand as sentences are not related to those with which we are familiar by any simple notion of formal (or semantic or statistical) similarity or identity of grammatical frame.He was actually implying that the sequencing of words-characteristics of collocation, is infinite. According to his innatism, such infiniteness or externalised language performance is determined by language competence or internalised knowledge of language due to genetic inheritance. It is therefore not possible and not useful to enumerate all sentences, all collocations for language investigation.However, none would agree that syntactically generated correct sentence will ensure freedom from awkwardness, inappropriateness and ambiguity. What we accept is call it a day rather than name it a day . Language learning is the result not only of surface structural and phonological imitation but also of deeper structural or semantic imitation, and practice plays a key role in this process. (Brown, 2002). Altenberg (1991)

Internet tools for language learning: University students taking control of their writing

“…The Internet is a vast database of language: millions of documents, billions of words. In 2006, Google indexed 25 billion web pages (Guo & Zhang, 2007). Surely here is a resource ripe for exploitation by language learners.…”

“…More recently, the Internet and search engines such as Google have also been considered as resources for independent language learning for advanced L2 learners (Chinnery 2008;Guo & Zhang, 2007;Hafner & Candlin, 2007;Milton, 2006;Shei, 2008aShei, , 2008bYoon and Hirvela, 2004). The Internet is a vast database of language: millions of documents, billions of words.…”

“…Guo and Zhang (2007) have attempted to 'clean up' the output of a Google search so that language students might more easily make sense of it. Similarly, WebCorp (http://www.webcorp.org.uk/), an Internet search tool, developed in association with Birmingham City University, which assembles concordances from the Internet, also attempts to provide relatively userfriendly output which could be used by second language learners.…”

How EFL students can use Google to correct their “untreatable” written errors

“…Substantial research on Google as a tool for second-language learners has since then been carried out (e.g. Guo & Zhang 2007;Milton 2006;Shei 2008aShei , 2008bWu, Franken, & Witten 2009) suggesting that it plays an important role in fostering language awareness and learner autonomy. According to Bathia and Richie (2009: 547), "the application of Google for language learning has just begun to be tapped."…”

Refining the use of the web (and web search) as a language teaching and learning resource

“…Guo and Zhang (2007) demonstrate how search capacity can be enhanced to generate collocation and concordance data from the snapshot lines returned in search results. They combine advanced options like phrase and wildcard search into a simple interface that retrieves concordance entries live from the Web and presents them to users.…”