Commentary on Part II: Exploring Materials for the Study of L2 Collocations

Abstract

These three chapters are all concerned with the design of materials to help learners recognize and reproduce appropriate collocations. All identify problems with existing materials, all tentatively suggest improvements, and, in support of their conclusions, all report on findings from a variety of sources, such as corpus analysis, materials analysis, test scores, and learner feedback. The chapters are multi-faceted, and bring to bear both knowledge of collocational theory and a practical understanding of learners’ wants and needs. Of particular interest is the attention paid to current constraints on publishers and classroom teachers, which make it difficult to provide students with the full range of collocational information that corpus evidence reveals. In the case of dictionaries, the greatest limitation seems to be that of space. Print dictionaries have to be small enough to carry around, but restricted entry length can lead to the loss of useful information, or the condensing of information to such an extent that it is difficult for the user to interpret. In the classroom lack of time is the biggest problem; teachers have to focus on the syllabus and prepare students for achievement tests, and tertiary English course materials such as those Jiang describes provide little opportunity to examine vocabulary in context. This commentary chapter will reflect on the three researchers’ responses to these constraints, as revealed through their choices of corpora, their presentation of corpus data, and their suggestions for materials design.