A Critical Review of Lexical Collocations: a Contrastive View
A Critical Review of Lexical Collocations: a Contrastive View
By Jens Bahns Introduction Lexical Collocations is a paper written by Jens Bahns, the subtitle of which is a contrastive view. The paper was published in ELT journal in 1993. It mainly tells us that lexical collocations are an essential part in the field of EFL teaching, and showed us a more effective way to teach the students---- by using contrastive analysis of lexical collocations. The paper aimed to reduce the burdens for both the students and the teachers. It is a well-organized paper with clear points and strong evidences. With the help of some other ways, the teacher can mainly adopt this method in classroom to get a better result. Ⅰ. Summary of the paper Jens Bahns, a scholar in second language acquisition, vocabulary learning and teaching in German, is the author of this paper. The paper can be divided into seven parts. Jens Bahns pointed out in the first part that there was a neglected aspect of vocabulary teaching in the field of EFL teaching—word combinability or word collocation. And he made it more convincing by means of quoting the statements of Rudzka, B., one of the authors of The Words You Need. And he supported his point with a few examples. Such as: feeble tea, laugh broadly and so on. In the second part, he made it clear what (lexical) collocations are. In one of the useful collocation dictionaries — The BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English: A Guide to Word Combinations (1986) — the word collocation was defined as follows: ‘In English, as in other languages, there are many fixed, identifiable, non-idiomatic phrases and constructions. Such groups of words are called recurrent combinations, fixed combinations, or collocations’.[i] Then he sorted collocation into two groups: grammatical collocation and lexical collocation. With the help of some examples, we got to know them respectively. In the third part, Jens Bahns distinguished three terms
By Jens Bahns Introduction Lexical Collocations is a paper written by Jens Bahns, the subtitle of which is a contrastive view. The paper was published in ELT journal in 1993. It mainly tells us that lexical collocations are an essential part in the field of EFL teaching, and showed us a more effective way to teach the students---- by using contrastive analysis of lexical collocations. The paper aimed to reduce the burdens for both the students and the teachers. It is a well-organized paper with clear points and strong evidences. With the help of some other ways, the teacher can mainly adopt this method in classroom to get a better result. Ⅰ. Summary of the paper Jens Bahns, a scholar in second language acquisition, vocabulary learning and teaching in German, is the author of this paper. The paper can be divided into seven parts. Jens Bahns pointed out in the first part that there was a neglected aspect of vocabulary teaching in the field of EFL teaching—word combinability or word collocation. And he made it more convincing by means of quoting the statements of Rudzka, B., one of the authors of The Words You Need. And he supported his point with a few examples. Such as: feeble tea, laugh broadly and so on. In the second part, he made it clear what (lexical) collocations are. In one of the useful collocation dictionaries — The BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English: A Guide to Word Combinations (1986) — the word collocation was defined as follows: ‘In English, as in other languages, there are many fixed, identifiable, non-idiomatic phrases and constructions. Such groups of words are called recurrent combinations, fixed combinations, or collocations’.[i] Then he sorted collocation into two groups: grammatical collocation and lexical collocation. With the help of some examples, we got to know them respectively. In the third part, Jens Bahns distinguished three terms
References: Bahns, J. 1993. ‘Lexical collocations: a contrastive view.’ ELT Journal 47:56-63. Benson, M., Benson, E. and Ilson, R. 1986a. Lexicographic Description of English. Amesterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Benson, M., Benson, E. and Ilson, R. 1986b. The BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English: A Guide to Word Combinations. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. (abbrev. as BBI) Ellis, N Halliday, M.A.K. ＆ R. Hasan. 1976. Cohesion in English. London: Longman. Hill, J. 2000. Revising priorities: From grammatical failure to collocational success. In: M. Lewis. (Eds.), Teaching collocation. Hove: Language Teaching Publications, 47-70. Lado,R. 1957. Linguistics Across Cultures: Applied Linguistics for Language Teachers. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan. Mackin, R. 1978. On collocations: Words shall be known by the company they keep. In: Strevens. (Ed.), In Honour of A. S. Hornby .Oxford: Oxford University Press, 149-165. SHEN Ying. 2009. Study on collocations in English writing by Chinese students. Sino-US English Teaching. Volume 6, No.3 (Serial No.63)