Building Blocks of Fluent Speech: The Development of a General Spoken Collocation List

抄録

It is worthwhile for learners to master collocations, two or more words that often go together, because they can help enhance speaking fluency and save one’s memory resources. Their high pedagogical value has inspired researchers to create collocation lists and dictionaries. However, most of them are geared toward academic contexts and generally have an overwhelming number of collocations, making it difficult to determine which collocations learners, especially novices, should study first. This research thus seeks to develop a list of basic collocations for spoken contexts, intended for learners with limited collocational knowledge. To this end, collocations were compiled that consisted solely of words in the New General Service List-Spoken 1.2, a list of the most frequent 721 words in general spoken English, providing up to 90% coverage of general spoken texts. Collocations were extracted using three statistical parameters: frequency of occurrence, strength of word association, and directionality, a parameter for judging which of a collocation’s components is the node word. The Online OXFORD Collocation Dictionary of English was consulted to ensure that the collocation list contained only those whose components were semantically and lexically connected; any that did not appear in this publication were removed. The completed list comprised 1,138 different collocations. Results showed that frequently-used collocations were consistently those with prevalent word class patterns, while strongly connected components were not necessarily prevalent. Analyzing the collocations quantitatively revealed that verb-preposition and noun-preposition collocations were more prevalent across spoken than written contexts, while verb-noun and adjective-noun collocations were prevalent across all contexts. The list is smaller and more manageable than existing collocation lists, possibly making it a suitable resource for novice learners with only a basic spoken vocabulary. Future research should investigate the validity of the collocation list and how to teach collocations effectively to learners.