Proposal For Collocation Essay

Research Proposal

Name: Miss Kaewkarn Noonpakdee Date: 27th July 2014

E-mail: [e-mail] Telephone: [phone]

Number of credit: 3 credits Supervisor: Dr. Punyapa Saengsri

Research Title: A study of collocation error types in students’ writing

Research questions: 1.What collocation error types are made by the participants?

2. What are sources of collocation error?

Rationale of the study:

Collocation is significant knowledge for EFL learners to acquire. As many researchers (Brown, 1974; Bahn&Eldaw, 1993; Howarth, 1998) have found that collocational knowledge benefits second language learners in their language competence, communicative competence and native-like fluency. Learners who have collocational knowledge will shift

Baker (1997), one of the linguists who tried to give definition for collocation, defines collocations as a tendency of certain words to co-occur regularly. Similarly, Lewis (2000) defines collocation as a subcategory of multi-word items, made up of individual words that usually co- occur. In addition, Nation (2001) labels the term collocation as a group of words that usually come together, either because they commonly occur together like make a decision, or because the meaning of the group is not obvious from the meaning of the parts, as with by the way or to take someone in.

Frameworks of collocational error types in this study To classify the types of collocational errors appeared in students writing, the researcher uses categorization of collocations by Benson et al (1986a). According to Benson et al., there are two major groups of collocation: Lexical and grammatical collocations. Lexical collocation can contain nouns, adjective, verbs, or adverbs, like adjective+verb in “best regards” or adverb+verb on “strictly accurate” There are seven types of lexical collocation, listed from L1-L7, as shown in table 1.1 below.

Table 1.1 Lexical Collocation Adopted from Benson et al.

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Stage 2: Data Collection After having the permission from the class teacher, the data will be collected from the Facebook group, Academic writing. Each essay writing will be labeled by code the first code is students’ number from 1-23 and the second code is the number of diary listed from A-J. This way will make it easy to refer to in the excel sheet and data presentation.

After getting all the essay writing, the researcher will read each essay twice to understand what the students wanted to express. Then, the suspicious items will be circle. Next, the researcher will check the suspicious collocation with COCA and provide the possible corrections from to students. Identifying the collocation errors is not an easy job for a non-native speaker, so the researcher has to get a native speaker teacher to help in confirming the errors.

Stage 3: Data Analysis

After the errors collected from students’ work are verified, the researcher will categorize them by using Benson et al. (1986)’s framework. Types of collocational errors appeared in students’ essay writing will be counted, categorized and calculated as percentage to find the frequencies for quantitative data. Later, the errors will be sorted by 7 sources of collocation errors as in Liu(1999)’s study. At the end, both the classification of errors and the sources of error will be checked again by the interrater. The sources of errors will be analyzed to find out which source causes students difficulty in their collocation