VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY – HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES FACULTY OF ENGLISH LINGUISTICS & LITERATURE
AN ANALYSIS OF ERRORS RELATED TO ADJECTIVE–NOUN COLLOCATIONS MADE BY 3rd YEAR ENGLISH MAJORED STUDENTS AT USSH AND IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING TRANSLATION
A thesis submitted to the Faculty of English Linguistics & Literature in partial fulfillment of the Master’s degree in TESOL
By NGUYỄN LÊ BÁ TÒNG
Supervised by
LÊ HOÀNG DŨNG, PhD
HO CHI MINH CITY, FEBRUARY 2017
STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP
I hereby certify my authorship of the thesis submitted today entitled:
AN ANALYSIS OF ERRORS RELATED TO ADJECTIVE–NOUN COLLOCATIONS MADE BY 3rd YEAR ENGLISH MAJORED STUDENTS AT USSH AND IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING TRANSLATION in terms of the statement of Requirements for the Thesis in Master’s Program issued by the Higher Degree Committee. The thesis has not been submitted for the award of any degree or diploma in any other situation.
Ho Chi Minh City, _____ 2017
Nguyễn Lê Bá Tòng
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RETENTION AND USE OF THE THESIS
I hereby state that I, Nguyễn Lê Bá Tòng, being the candidate for the degree of Master in TESOL, accept the requirements of the University relating to the retention and use of Master’s Theses deposited in the Library. In terms of these conditions, I agree that the original of my thesis deposited in the Library should be accessible for the purpose of study and research in accordance with the normal conditions established by the library for the care, loan or reproduction of the thesis. Ho Chi Minh City, _____ 2017
Nguyễn Lê Bá Tòng
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First and foremost, I would like to express my gratefulness to my teacher and supervisor, Dr. Lê Hoàng Dũng, for all of his invaluable guidance, encouragement and dedication. Without his wholehearted support and valuable advice, the completion of this thesis would have been impossible. I am greatly indebted to all teachers who taught me invaluable knowledge, which was essential for the fulfilment of this thesis. Specially, I would like to extend my gratitude to Assoc. Prof. Dr. Tô Minh Thanh, who inspired me to choose the thesis topic and helped me form the very first ideas to carry out the study. My sincerest thanks also go to the Board of Administrators and other members of the Faculty of English Linguistics and Literature, who directly or indirectly contributed to the implementation of this thesis. I am deeply thankful to my colleagues and friends, especially Ms. Vân Di, Mr. Thiên Lộc, Mr. Khôi Nguyên and Ms. Bảo Ngọc, whose constant support and valuable experience have led me through times of difficulty. Last but not least, my deepest gratitude goes to my family, my loving mother, my dedicated father, my aunts and uncles, and my beloved one, whose unconditional love and care have been the very reason for every achievement I have had. Without them, this thesis would have never been completed.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP ....................................................................................................... i RETENTION AND USE OF THE THESIS ........................................................................................ ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................ iii TABLE OF CONTENTS .................................................................................................................... iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ............................................................................................................ vii LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................................ viii LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................................................. ix ABSTRACT ......................................................................................................................................... x CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 1 1.1. Background to the study ........................................................................................................... 1 1.2. Rationale for the study .............................................................................................................. 3 1.3. Aim of the study........................................................................................................................ 4 1.4. Research questions .................................................................................................................... 4 1.5. Significance of the study ........................................................................................................... 4 1.6. Scope of the study ..................................................................................................................... 5 1.7. Overall structure of the study .................................................................................................... 6 CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW ............................................................................................... 7 2.1. Collocation ................................................................................................................................ 7 2.1.1. Definition of collocation ................................................................................................. 7 2.1.2. Categorization of collocations ....................................................................................... 11 2.1.3. Components of collocations .......................................................................................... 13 2.2. Collocations and translation .................................................................................................... 14 2.2.1. The significance of collocations in translation .............................................................. 14 2.2.2. Difficulties in translating collocations .......................................................................... 15 2.2.3. Influences of L1 on learners’ use of collocations.......................................................... 17 2.2.3.1. English collocations vs. Vietnamese counterparts.............................................. 17 2.2.3.2. Congruent and incongruent collocations ............................................................ 19 2.2.4. Strategies in translating collocations ............................................................................. 20 2.3. Error analysis .......................................................................................................................... 21 2.3.1. Theory of error analysis ................................................................................................ 21 2.3.2. Types of errors related to adjective-noun collocations ................................................. 23 2.3.3. Causes of collocational errors ....................................................................................... 25 2.4. Collocation and language teaching ......................................................................................... 28 2.5. Methods for testing collocational knowledge ......................................................................... 33 iv
2.6. Conceptual framework ............................................................................................................ 35 CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY ....................................................................................................... 39 3.1. Research questions .................................................................................................................. 39 3.2. Research design ...................................................................................................................... 39 3.2.1. Context of the study ...................................................................................................... 39 3.2.2. Participants .................................................................................................................... 40 3.2.2.1. Student participants ............................................................................................ 41 3.2.2.2. Teacher participants............................................................................................ 42 3.2.3. COCA ............................................................................................................................ 42 3.2.4. Research instruments .................................................................................................... 44 3.2.4.1. Students’ midterm exam papers in Basic Translation ........................................ 44 3.2.4.2. Translation test ................................................................................................... 45 3.2.4.3. COLLEX test ...................................................................................................... 48 3.2.4.4. Interview ............................................................................................................. 49 3.2.4.5. Questionnaire ...................................................................................................... 50 3.2.5. Pilot study...................................................................................................................... 53 3.3. Data collection procedure ....................................................................................................... 54 3.3.1. Collection of adjective-noun collocational errors ......................................................... 54 3.3.1.1. Collection of errors from students’ midterm exam papers ................................. 55 3.3.1.2. Collection of errors from the translation test ...................................................... 57 3.3.2. Collection of additional data ......................................................................................... 58 3.3.2.1. Questionnaire ...................................................................................................... 58 3.3.2.2. COLLEX test ...................................................................................................... 58 3.3.2.3. Interviews to the teachers ................................................................................... 59 3.4. Data analysis procedure .......................................................................................................... 59 3.4.1. Analysis of adjective-noun collocational errors ............................................................ 59 3.4.2. Questionnaire ................................................................................................................ 60 3.4.3. COLLEX test ................................................................................................................ 60 3.4.4. Interview ....................................................................................................................... 61 3.5. Summary ................................................................................................................................. 61 CHAPTER 4 FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION ................................................................................. 62 4.1. Data analysis and discussion ................................................................................................... 62 4.1.1. Analysis of collocational errors from students’ exam papers ....................................... 62 4.1.1.1. Types of errors .................................................................................................... 64 4.1.1.2. Causes of errors .................................................................................................. 66 4.1.2. Analysis of collocational errors from the translation test .............................................. 73 4.1.2.1. Types of errors .................................................................................................... 75 v
4.1.2.1. Causes of errors .................................................................................................. 77 4.1.3. Summary of the error analyses ...................................................................................... 84 4.1.4. Learners’ receptive knowledge of collocations ............................................................. 86 4.1.5. The teaching and learning of collocations in Basic Translation.................................... 89 4.1.5.1. The teaching of collocations ............................................................................... 90 4.1.5.2. The learning of collocations ............................................................................... 93 4.2. Major findings ....................................................................................................................... 100 CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS ....................................................... 108 5.1. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 108 5.2. Suggestions and recommendations ....................................................................................... 110 5.2.1. Suggestions to teachers ............................................................................................... 110 5.2.2. Suggestions to students ............................................................................................... 116 5.2.3. Recommendations for future research......................................................................... 118 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................................. 119 APPENDIX 1 ................................................................................................................................... 126 APPENDIX 2 ................................................................................................................................... 129 APPENDIX 3 ................................................................................................................................... 130 APPENDIX 4 ................................................................................................................................... 131 APPENDIX 5 ................................................................................................................................... 134 APPENDIX 6 ................................................................................................................................... 135
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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
BNC
the British National Corpus
COCA
the Corpus of Contemporary American English
EF
the Faculty of English Linguistics and Literature
EFL/ESL
English as a Second/Foreign Language
FREQ
Frequency
LA
the Lexical Approach
L1
First Language
L2
Second Language
MI
Mutual Information
Ss’
Students’
SV
Subject – Verb
SVO
Subject – Verb – Object
TESOL
Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages
Ts’
Teachers’
USSH
University of Social Sciences and Humanities – Ho Chi Minh City
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LIST OF TABLES Table 2.1: Seven types of lexical collocations (Farrokh, 2012) ................................ 12 Table 2.2: The revised six types of lexical collocations ............................................ 12 Table 2.3: Types of collocational errors (Nesselhauf, 2003) ..................................... 23 Table 2.4: Useful collocations to teach students (Hodne, 2009) ............................... 30 Table 3.1: Description of the questionnaire items ..................................................... 52 Table 3.2: Summary of the research instruments....................................................... 52 Table 3.3: Reliability statistics of the translation test ................................................ 53 Table 4.1: Lexical combinations from the midterm-exam papers ............................. 63 Table 4.2: Types of collocational errors from the midterm-exam papers ................. 65 Table 4.3: Causes of collocational errors from the midterm-exam papers ................ 66 Table 4.4: Summary of students’ responses to the translation test ............................ 74 Table 4.5: Types of collocational errors from the translation test ............................. 75 Table 4.6: Causes of collocational errors from the translation test ........................... 77 Table 4.7: Comparison between productive test and receptive test ........................... 87 Table 4.8: Students’ performance on each item of the two tests ............................... 88 Table 4.9: Student’s statement about the teaching of collocations in basic translation ................................................................................................................... 91 Table 4.10: Strategies used by the teachers to teach collocations ............................. 92 Table 4.11: Sources of students’ knowledge about collocations ............................... 94 Table 4.12: Students’ opinions on the roles of collocations in translation ................ 94 Table 4.13: Students’ strategies to broaden knowledge about collocations .............. 95 Table 4.14: Students’ strategies to deal with difficulties in translating collocations 97 viii
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 2.1: Conceptual framework of the study ........................................................ 38 Figure 3.1: The COCA search interface .................................................................... 55 Figure 3.2: The COCA result interface ...................................................................... 56 Figure 4.1: Summary of types of collocational errors ............................................... 85 Figure 4.2: Summary of causes of collocational errors ............................................. 85 Figure 4.3: Students’ responses to Q6, Q7 and Q8 .................................................... 96 Figure 4.4: Summary of the major findings ............................................................. 106
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ABSTRACT Collocation is an important concept in language teaching. Learning and using collocations are believed to boost learners’ communicative competence. However, collocations also bring many problems to learners due to their arbitrariness as well as linguistic and cultural differences. Although quite a few studies on collocations have been conducted, there are still gaps for further research when certain types of collocations and other influential factors such as translation are taken into account. In order to fill some of these gaps, the present study was conducted, which focused on adjective-noun collocational errors in translation. Multiple research methods and tools, including (1) error analysis, (2) questionnaire and (3) interview, were employed to thoroughly investigate the errors, their possible causes and to find out appropriate solutions to the addressed issues. The study revealed that the student participants, in spite of their high level of proficiency as English-majored juniors, still made a considerable number of collocational errors. The majority of the said errors were caused by incorrect choices of adjectives, which could be explained by the fact that the choices of adjective, as the collocate, in a collocation is restricted by the noun – the node. Regarding the causes of errors, approximation and L1 transfer were the two major ones. The study also directed attention to some other causes, which had been usually neglected in previous studies, such as formal confusion and inappropriate use of dictionaries. Upon further investigation, it was pointed out that the learners’ lack of knowledge about collocation was the major implying factor accounting for most of the observed errors. This was probably resulted from the fact that the teaching of collocations was mostly integrated in other tasks. Such implicit instruction, though useful, may not be effective enough to attract their attention. Based on the findings of the study, recommendations on the teaching and learning of collocations in translation were presented. Firstly, it is necessary to raise learners’ awareness of the concept of collocations. Secondly, the teaching of collocations in translation should be more explicit to attract their attention. Finally, it is advised that students should put more effort in improving their knowledge of collocations.
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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION This chapter provides an introduction to the study, including (1) background to the study, (2) rationale for the study, (3) aim and objectives of the study, (4) research questions, (5) significance of the study, (6) scope of the study and (7) its overall structure.
1.1. Background to the study Among recently developed approaches to language teaching, the Lexical Approach (LA) is one that lays emphasis on teaching prefabricated chunks instead of separate words. LA was built from the belief that acquiring and using lexical units as chunks can effectively improve learners’ communicative competence, an idea which has been supported by a number of scholars. Pawley & Syder (1983), for example, have remarked that a large part of human speech is “multiword units” which function as “chunks” or memorized patterns. Harmer (2001), sharing the same view, wrote that oral fluency requires a spontaneous process of language and information, which “is marked by the use of a number of common lexical phrases” (p. 269). These ideas were, again, affirmed by Jiang & Nekrasova (2007) who have recently found that formulaic sequences are processed more quickly and more accurately than non-formulaic sequences. One important concept in LA is collocation, which can be understood as the regular co-occurrence of words in a language. Since it shows how words in a language work together, or that is to say how formulaic sequences (or chunks) are formed, the use of the aforementioned approach is hardly possible without thorough understanding of the concept. Collocation, therefore, “is thought to play a central role in learning and in communication” (Richards & Rodgers, 2001, p. 133). While collocation is important, it is also problematic for EFL/ESL learners due to several factors. Firstly, while native speakers can produce these prefabricated chunks, including collocations, quite effortlessly, most learners cannot acquire them without a great amount of time and effort. As a matter of fact, they are not exposed to L2 as
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much as native speakers do, and thus the chances for them to practice using these chunks are quite limited. As a result, they usually resort to rote-learning, which seems to be an ineffective method to memorize a huge amount of lexical items. Especially with collocations, the memorizing process is even more challenging due to their arbitrary combination rules. One cannot explain, for instance, why tea has to go with strong as in strong tea but not with powerful – a synonym of strong. Being confused by such rules, learners may find it difficult to remember and use collocations correctly. Another factor making the acquisition of collocations even more difficult is the influence of learners’ L1. In many circumstances, learners usually resort to their mother tongue and try to express their ideas through word-for-word translation from their L1. Nevertheless, this strategy does not assure the efficiency and accuracy in communication, since even if two words in a language are collocations of each other, their equivalents in the other language do not necessarily have the same relationship. Word-for-word translation may, therefore, lead to the violation of collocational rules in L2, and thus make the speakers sound awkward, not to mention the negative influence on their fluency caused by such a process. Given the difficulties above, it seems inevitable for learners to make errors in using collocations. Indeed, it is a proven fact that even students of high level of English still make collocational errors due to large amount of complicated lexical items they have to memorize and produce, not to mention the arbitrariness of collocations and differences between languages. However, collocational errors, according to researchers such as Bahns & Eldaw (1993), Li (2005), Darvishi (2011), can be reduced by improving learners’ knowledge of collocations through multiple teaching methods including identification and correction of collocational errors, introduction of certain target collocations, etc. Although these methods have proved their effectiveness, it is an undeniable fact that collocation is still a constant challenge to EFL learners, which emphasizes the necessity to have more research into the issue. Along with the increasing popularity of LA, collocation and teaching of collocations have attracted much attention from scholars and researchers, such as Bahns & Eldaw (1993), Fan (2009), Farrokh (2012) and Lubis (2013), etc. Most of these studies have focused either on analyzing learners’ collocational errors to figure out the causes of 2
and remedies for the errors or on looking for new methods for effectively teaching collocations to learners. There were also studies that had both foci, in which the latter was usually done on the basis of the former.
1.2. Rationale for the study Although a great number of studies into collocation have been conducted, most of them focused on one type of collocation, namely verb-noun, since this type collocation occurs very frequently and causes considerable difficulty for learners of English. However, among other types of collocation, adjective-noun also has high frequency of occurrence and high level of difficulty, which have been confirmed in several studies. Trinh (2001) conducted a contrastive analysis between English and Vietnamese collocations to find out “particular lexico-semantic features which are alien, unfamiliar, or unpredictable, from the point of view of a Vietnamese translator of English” (p. 59). The study revealed that, among the categories, adjective-noun collocation was the broadest one with about 1700 instances, accounting for 56.6 percent of the collected data. Other researchers, including Channell (1981), Koya (2005), Shehata (2008) and Kurosaki (2012), have come to the same conclusion that adjective-noun collocation caused great difficulties for learners. In the context of Vietnam, the attention towards collocations has been increased with several studies being conducted in the recent years. Nguyen (2006) studied the importance of collocational knowledge in language use. In 2008, Mai investigated learners’ use of lexical collocation in Vietnamese – English translation. More recently, two studies have been completed by Dang (2014) and Nguyen (2014). The former was a survey into the teaching of lexical collocations in academic writing, whereas the latter investigated learners’ competence in producing and recognizing verb-noun collocations. However, similar to many foreign studies in the field, none of the aforementioned works specifically focused on adjective-noun collocation. Moreover, while most of the studies above aimed to find solutions for problems related to collocations in language teaching in general, few of them had implication specifically for teaching translation although translation is a context where collocation-related difficulties are likely to arise as it requires good command of
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collocations in both source and target languages. Given the fact that translation by its nature is complicated and translating collocation is among the biggest challenges to even professional translators let alone learners of English, it is necessary to have more studies that specifically deal with collocations in translation. The aforementioned issues altogether became the research gap that drove the researcher to conduct the present study that aimed at adjective-noun collocations in translation and sought relevant implications for teaching translation at University of Social Sciences and Humanities (USSH) where translation is a subject being taught to students of the Faculty of English Linguistics and Literature (EF).
1.3. Aim of the study It is apparent that collocational errors are made by even students with high level of proficiency. This fact encouraged the researcher to conduct the present study, which mainly focuses on collocational errors made by 3rd year EF students at USSH. Precisely, the study aims at analyzing errors related to attributive adjective-noun collocations in the students’ translations in order to have a comprehensive and detailed look into (1) the common types of errors and (2) their possible causes. Also, based on the result of the error analysis, some useful and applicable solutions are expected to be found to help the students overcome difficulties in learning and using collocations and particularly in translating collocations.
1.4. Research questions In order to accomplish the aforementioned aims, the two research questions were given as follow: 1. What are the common types of adjective-noun collocational errors made by 3rd year EF students at USSH in their translations? 2. What are the possible causes of adjective-noun collocational errors made by 3rd year EF students at USSH in their translations?
1.5. Significance of the study With those aims accomplished by answering the two research questions, the present study has its own significance as follow. 4
Firstly, in terms of theoretical values, the study provided a thorough review of literature on relevant aspects of collocation and collocational errors. Especially, the review of literature presented a comprehensive list of error types and hypothetical causes of collocational errors, which was later confirmed through the error analysis. In addition to them, the analysis revealed some other causes of errors which were scarcely mentioned in previous studies. Besides, the practical teaching and learning of collocation in translation classes at EF, USSH were also investigated, which revealed possible connections to learners’ deficiency in collocational knowledge. Secondly, the study had some practical contributions to the teaching and learning of collocations, especially in translation. With a detailed analysis of types and causes of errors, the study was expected to provide teachers and learners with valuable information on how collocational errors are made and thus would help learners avoid committing such errors. Moreover, basing on the findings, the study suggested some recommendations for the teaching and learning of collocation in translation at EF, USSH in order to further improve the students’ collocational knowledge and help them overcome difficulties in translating collocations.
1.6. Scope of the study The present study focused on adjective-noun collocational errors in translation of 3rd year EF students at USSH. The scope of the study, however, still needs clarification. First of all, it was mentioned that the present study focused on adjective-noun collocational errors. This type of collocation includes combinations in which the adjective may come either before or after the noun. However, in the present study, adjective-noun collocation strictly refers to combinations in which the adjective precedes the noun. To put it differently, the study took into account only attributive adjective-noun collocations and their related errors. Secondly, the present study was said to deal with collocational errors in translation. It is commonly known that translation involves two directions: either from learners’ L1 to L2 or vice versa. To avoid unnecessary complication, the researcher directed his attention only to Vietnamese – English translation since translating from L1 to L2 seems more challenging and thus collocational errors are more likely to occur. 5
To sum up, the present study focused on errors related to attributive adjective-noun collocations found in Vietnamese – English translations of 3rd year EF students at USSH. Such limited scope might result in the relatively weak generalizability of the study. However, it is expected to have some contributions to translation teaching at EF, USSH and provide theoretical and practical background for further research.
1.7. Overall structure of the study This thesis consists of five main chapters (1) Introduction, (2) Literature Review, (3) Methodology, (4) Findings and Discussion and (5) Conclusion and Recommendations, apart from the Acknowledgements, Abstract, References and Appendixes. The first chapter, namely Introduction, provides the background information of the study and gives the rationale for carrying out the research. The aims, the significance and the scope of the study are also presented in this chapter. The second chapter, Literature Review, can be divided into two major parts. The first one sets up the theoretical background for the study with a detailed review of theories and concepts relevant to collocation and collocational errors. The second one is the review of previous studies in the field. Based on this theoretical background, the conceptual framework is established as a guideline for the research design and the collection and analysis of data. The third chapter, Methodology, describes the methods used to conduct the study. In this chapter, the research questions are further elaborated. In addition, descriptions of research designs and procedures for collecting and analyzing data are also presented. The next chapter, entitled Findings and Discussion, presents the analysis and discussion of the collected data, as well as the major findings of the studies. This chapter not only gives the answers to the aforementioned research questions but also serves as the basis for the recommendations presented in chapter five. The final chapter entitled Conclusion and Recommendations provides a brief summary of the study, pedagogical implications for the teaching and learning of collocations in translation, as well as recommendations for further research.
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CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW This chapter presents and discusses the major theories and literature necessary for constructing the theoretical and conceptual framework of the study. Firstly, the concepts related to collocation, including definition and typology are presented. Secondly, the relationship between collocations and translation is discussed. Thirdly, the literature related to error analysis is considered. Fourthly, as the present study aims to find out some solutions to the learners’ errors, the literature concerning the teaching of collocations is reviewed. Subsequently, some common types of collocation testing method are presented in order to figure out the most appropriate methods for the present study. Finally, based on that theoretical framework, the conceptual framework is established as the guideline for the research.
2.1. Collocation 2.1.1. Definition of collocation The term collocation, according to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, has two different meanings. Collocation, as a countable noun, refers to “a combination of words in a language that happens very often and more frequently than would happen by chance”. As an uncountable noun, it refers to “the fact of two or more words often being used together, in a way that happens more frequently than would happen by chance”. Therefore, collocation in this study may be used to address either the concept of collocation or certain combinations. The term was made popular by Firth (1957) who used it to refer to “the habitual or characteristic associations of words in texts” (cited in Ibrahim, 2003, p. 3). Firth was considered the pioneer of the frequency-based approach – one of the two major schools of thought in studying collocation. Following this approach, several definitions of collocation have been provided. For example, Jones & Sinclair (1974) viewed a collocation as “the co-occurrence of two items in a text within a specified environment” (cited in Ibrahim, 2003, p. 4). Later, Cruse (1986) described collocations as “sequences of lexical items which habitually co-occur”. More recently, Sinclair
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defined collocation as “the occurrence of two or more words within a short space of each other in a text” (1991, p. 70). In general, most of the definitions based on this school of thought have taken frequency of occurrence as the criterion to define collocation. However, a group of frequently co-occurred words is not necessarily a collocation. This was proven by Kjellmer (1982) who studied Brown Corpus and found the frequent occurrences of some adjacent two-word sequences such as “of the”, “although he”, and “but too” (cited in Kurosaki, 2012). Although these words frequently co-occurred in the corpus, most native speakers would probably not consider them as collocations, since they did not make meaningful lexical sequences. To put it differently, frequency of occurrence alone is not sufficient to define collocation. The phraseology approach is another school of thought regarding collocation. Followers of this approach have made efforts to distinguish collocations from other types of formulaic sequence and from free combinations. Howarth (1998), for example, differentiated restricted collocations from free combinations, figurative idioms, and pure idioms using two criteria (1) the degree of restriction on substitution and (2) the meaning of words in a combination (literal or figurative). Howart’s idea was based on Cowie’s (1981), one of the pioneers of the phraseological approach, who suggested that collocations were found in the “fuzzy” area on a continuum between free combinations and idioms. Cowie also proposed two criteria to distinguish them from each other, which are: combinability and transparency. The former refers not only to co-occurrence but also to restriction in combination. The degree of restriction varies from free substitution, which allows one word to combine with an open set of words, to complete restriction, which allows one word to go with only one specific word (or very few options) in a specific combination. The latter refers to the meaning of the words in combinations, whether they have literal meaning [+transparency] or figurative meaning [-transparency]. The two approaches above have provided important criteria to define collocation. However, both of them had their own strengths and weaknesses. The frequency-based approach, with its theory about frequency of occurrence, laid the foundation for 8
defining collocation. However, it failed to provide a comprehensive method to distinguish collocations from other formulaic sequences, not to mention meaningless strings of words that frequently co-occurred. The phraseological approach, with the two concepts “combinability” and “transparency”, gave a solution to the mentioned problem. However, definitions based on this approach would be incomplete without the criterion set by the other one. Therefore, Kurosaki (2012) combined the aforementioned ideas and came up with his own definition as follow: A collocation is a type of word combination in a certain grammatical pattern, and they refer to an abstract unit of language that occurs frequently. Collocations are characterized by two criteria: (1) combinability of words within a collocation; and (2) semantic transparency of word in a collocation. (p. 30). Kurosaki’s definition embraced the essence of the two major approaches. Moreover, by pointing out that collocations follow certain grammatical patterns he also excluded the cases of adjacent two-word sequences described in Kjellmer (1982) as these meaningless strings of words do not adhere to these grammatical patterns. This definition, nevertheless, had certain limitations. Firstly, it did not state the frequency of occurrence, at which a combination could be considered a collocation. Secondly, the use of transparency as a criterion proposed by Cowie (1981) was critiqued by Hodne (2009) for not having a clear-cut boundary between the two extremes literal and figurative. Taking two combinations “constitutional monarchy” and “customs agents” as examples, she argued that it was hard to determine whether they are free combinations or restricted collocations, and to tell which element in each of the combinations is used with its literal sense if they are restricted collocations. Hodne, therefore, proposed a definition of her own: Collocation are arbitrarily restricted lexeme combinations that are syntactically fixed to a certain degree, are included in the collocation dictionary, present an MI score [Mutual Information] higher than 3.0, and have a raw frequency [or FREQ for short] of more than three tokens in COCA [the Corpus of Contemporary American English]. (p. 8)
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Although the definition above provided reliable criteria for identifying collocations, the use of both corpora and dictionaries was unnecessarily complicated. In fact, it is suggested that using corpora alone would suffice as they provide a much larger and more comprehensive database. In addition to the aforementioned issue, there is another point in the definition that need consideration. In fact, Hodne was not the first person to use frequency of occurrence in a corpus as a criterion to determine collocations. Prior to her, Nesselhauf (2005) had applied this to his research. Later on, it was adopted in Hong et al. (2011). Both studies had set the FREQ of at least five tokens in BNC (the British National Corpus) as the standard threshold for a combination to be considered a collocation. Given the fact that COCA has a much bigger database than BNC, the FREQ of more than three tokens set by Hodne (2009) may not be representative enough. Therefore, the present study will adopt the standard FREQ of at least five tokens proposed by Nesselhauf (2005) and Hong et al. (2011). Based on the definition of Hodne (2009) and the aforementioned recommendations, the operational definition for the present study is formed as follow: Collocations are arbitrarily restricted lexeme combinations that are syntactically fixed to a certain degree, present a minimum Mutual Information (MI) score of 3.0, and have a raw frequency (FREQ) of at least five tokens in COCA. According to this definition, the FREQ and the MI score of a combination in COCA are the main criteria to determine whether the combination is a collocation or not. Detailed descriptions of FREQ and MI will be given later in Chapter 3. However, it can be briefly explained here that the former shows how frequently the combination is used by native speakers while the latter indicates how strong the combination is. With these criteria taken into account, there are four possibilities to consider. (1) If both criteria are satisfied (FREQ ≥ 5; MI ≥ 3), meaning that the combination is frequently used and has a strong combination between the words, it is considered a collocation. (2) If neither criterion is satisfied (FREQ < 5; MI < 3), the combination is neither frequently used nor strong enough and thus it is considered an erroneous one. 10
(3) If only the FREQ meets the standard requirement (FREQ ≥ 5; MI < 3), which means that the combination is frequently used by native speakers but is not strong enough to be a collocation, it is considered a free combination. The last possibility – (4) only the MI meets the requirement (FREQ < 5; MI ≥ 3) – is a little complicated. In her study, Dang (2014) considered these as free combinations. However, there are several issues that need consideration. First of all, a low frequency of occurrence means that the combination is not commonly used. In other words, it is possibly not recognized or accepted by the majority of native speakers regardless how high its MI score is. Moreover, according to Clear (1995), the MI score is high and unreliable when the frequency of occurrence is low. Therefore, in the present study, combinations with only the MI meeting the requirement will be also considered as erroneous ones. This operational definition and the four possibilities resulted from it provide important criteria for the data collection and analysis procedures, which will be discussed later in Chapter 3.
2.1.2. Categorization of collocations From different perspectives, collocations can be categorized differently. However, most scholars agreed with the idea of Benson et al. (1986) who categorized collocations into grammatical collocations and lexical ones. The former, according to Fontenelle (1994), “involves one element from an open class and an element from a closed class, typically, but not necessarily, a preposition” (p. 4). The latter, on the contrary, consists of “two items belonging to open (non-finite) classes, for instance a verb and a noun or an adjective and a noun” (ibid.) The present study, however, only focuses on the second type: lexical collocations, since they are more challenging and demanding to learners in a way that they require a more selective and precise use of vocabularies. This type of collocation, again, is classified into different subtypes. Farrokh (2012), basing on Benson et al. (1986), proposed 7 types of lexical collocation, which are shown in Table 2.1 below.
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Table 2.1: Seven types of lexical collocations (Farrokh, 2012, p. 59) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Types verb (creation/activation) + noun verb (eradication/nullification) + noun adjective + noun noun + verb noun1 (+of) + noun2 adjective + adverb/ adverb + adjective verb + adverb
Examples compose music; make an impression revoke a license, demolish a house strong tea, a rough estimate bees buzz, bombs explode pack of dog, a herd of buffalo sound asleep, hopelessly addictive anchor firmly, argue heatedly
However, according to Benson et al. (1986), “in English, nouns are often used as adjectives. Nouns used attributively may enter into … the category of adjective-noun collocations.” To put it differently, the third category may include combinations consisting of two nouns, the first one of which functions as an adjective modifying the second one. This category, therefore, should be renamed: adjective/noun + noun. Moreover, it is noticeable that the first and the second categories are similar in terms of components: verb + noun. Since verb-noun collocation is not the focus of the present study, categorizing verbs into different types is unnecessarily complicated. The two categories, therefore, will be grouped into one, namely verb + noun, resulted in six types of lexical collocation shown in Table 2.2 below Table 2.2: The revised six types of lexical collocations Types
Examples revoke a license, make an impression strong tea, jet engine, aptitude test bees buzz, bombs explode pack of dog, a herd of buffalo sound asleep, hopelessly addictive anchor firmly, argue heatedly
1. verb + noun 2. adjective/noun + noun 3. noun + verb 4. noun1 (+ prep) + noun2 5. adjective + adverb/ adverb + adjective 6. verb + adverb
As mentioned in Chapter 1, the present study only focuses on one type of lexical collocation: adjective-noun, due to the difficulties this type of collocation causes for learners and the small number of studies concerning it. Although this type of collocation involves both adjective + noun and noun + noun combinations, for the sake of simplicity and consistency, both of them will be addressed as adjective-noun collocation since the first noun in the combination plays the role of an adjective.
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2.1.3. Components of collocations Since the present study involves identifying collocations in texts and checking them using a corpus (COCA), it is necessary to have some basic knowledge about the components of a collocation, among which are three important terms that need consideration: “node”, “collocate” and “span” (Ibrahim, 2003). Node was defined by Jones & Sinclair (1974) as “an item whose total pattern of cooccurrence with other words is under examination” (cited in Ibrahim, 2003, p. 20); while collocate was defined as “any item which appears with the node within a specified environment” (ibid.). Jones & Sinclair (1947) have also made clear that “there is no difference in status between node and collocate; if word A is a node and word B is one of its collocates, when word B is studied as a node, word A will be one of its collocates” (ibid.). However, Kurosaki (2012) suggested that for each specific study, node and collocate should be identified at the beginning to ensure accuracy and consistency of the study. Stubbs (2001) also stated that “a node predicts that a preceding or following word also occurs” (cited in Kurosaki, 2012, p.28). That is to say, in a collocation, the node is the one that determines the choice of collocates. Since the present study deals with English adjective-noun collocations which are basically noun phrases, and since in a noun phrase the head noun is the pivotal element, the noun will be considered as the node and the adjective will be considered as the collocate. The last factor to be considered is span. According to Jones & Sinclair (1974), “span is the amount of text within which collocation between items is said to occur” (cited in Ibrahim, 2003, p. 20). Phillips (1985), sharing the same view, remarked that “collocation is recognised within an environment of a number of words preceding and/or succeeding the node, for example, the five preceding and the five following words. This environment is termed the span” (ibid.). Let us consider the following examples: “He is telling the truth” and “He is telling only half of the truth.” Both sentences have tell as the node and truth as the collocate of the collocation; however their spans are obviously different. The span of a collocation, according to Ibrahim, can be even “above phrase level” (2003, p. 21). However, with respect to attributive
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adjective-noun collocations, by nature the adjective usually adjacently precedes the noun, or sometimes it precedes the noun within a span of three or four words when multiple adjectives/nouns pre-modify the same head noun. To sum up, in this study, the node of an adjective-noun collocation is the noun, the collocate is the adjective (or the noun functioning as an attributive adjective in the case of noun + noun) and the span being considered is within five words preceding the node. These components and relevant rules mentioned above play important roles in the data collection and analysis, which will be discussed in detail in Chapter 3.
2.2. Collocations and translation 2.2.1. The significance of collocations in translation This section is dedicated to discussing the relationship between collocations and translation. The former, indeed, has considerable influence upon the latter. One factor determining a translator’s performance is his lexical knowledge; the broader it is, the better his performance is likely to be. A translator, therefore, must always enrich his vocabulary. However, the acquisition and retention of vocabulary prove to be a big challenge for most non-native speakers of any language (McCarten, 2007). Moreover, that learners know a word does not mean that they can use them in communication, let alone in translation. The major cause for this is their inability to determine in which contexts and with which words a lexical item may occur. To put it differently, it is their lack of collocational knowledge that accounts for the issue. Many authors, including Pawley & Syder (1983) and Harmer (2001), have suggested learning vocabulary as chunks as a solution to the aforementioned problem. Instead of learning separate words, learners should put them in specific contexts where they can be learned together with other words that habitually co-occur with them. This learning strategy has certain advantages. First of all, it helps learners memorize words more easily since “collocational association can … act as memory aids” (Rahimi & Sahragard., 2008, p. 15). Moreover, as Firth claimed that one “shall know a word by the company it keeps” (cited in Gyllstad, 2007, p.7), collocations provide learners with better understanding of vocabularies. For example, learners can realize the differences in meaning between two synonyms (e.g. injury and wound) by looking at 14
the words collocating with them. Finally, remembering words as chunks also reduces the processing time in language use since learners do not have to spend much time on choosing words for combinations anymore. With a large and systematic bank of vocabulary, translators can improve their performance in other aspects of language use, including listening, reading, writing, and speaking. In other words, knowledge about collocations indirectly facilitates their translation competence as Nation (2001) remarked “all fluent and appropriate language requires collocational knowledge” (p. 318). McIntosh et al. (2009), sharing the same view, wrote that a learner with knowledge of collocations will be able to express himself clearly. Not only does collocational knowledge promote translators’ fluency, but it also helps improve the quality of their translations in both naturalness and accuracy. One of the factors distinguish native speakers from non-native ones is the naturalness in their language use, marked by the correct use of collocations and other idiomatic expressions. That is to say, having broad knowledge of collocations and being able to use it efficiently are among the important factors making non-native speakers sound native-like. In certain situations, the use of collocations also saves translators from producing lengthy and unnatural expressions. Furthermore, according to Newmark (1988), collocations are an important unit of translation that needs special attention. Some words in certain collocations have meanings that differ from their usual meanings when they stand alone. Thus having broad knowledge of collocations will help translator understand and translate texts more accurately and easily.
2.2.2. Difficulties in translating collocations While collocations play an important role in translation, translating them seems to be a constant challenge to translators. In order to shed more light on the issue, the researcher attempts to put the difficulties related to the translation of collocations into two major categories: intralingual difficulties and interlingual ones. It is important to note that the types of difficulties are intertwined with each other, and thus it is almost impossible to have a clear cut between them. The two categories proposed here are just an ad-hoc solution to discuss the issue more systematically.
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Intralingual difficulties are those caused by the target language itself. Talking about collocation, most researchers have agreed on the fact that its arbitrary nature is a major cause of difficulties for learners and translators. Sughair (2011), for example, wrote that “[while] a native speaker of the language can predict … collocations … a learner of the same language finds it hard to collocate the words” (p. 5). The difficulties also come from a universal phenomenon of languages that a word can have different senses depending on the words in combination with it. For example, a big house, a large house and a great house have the same meaning, but a great man is different from a big man or a large man (Mai, 2010). Another good example is the word dry whose primary meaning denotes the characteristic of not being wet or moist. However, in expression such as dry cow or dry voice, “the meaning has nothing to do with not wet or moist” (Meidasari, 2007, p. 6). The problem is that translators may not know all the possible senses of a word and even if they do, they may still fail to recognize the exact sense in a certain combination. Considering this issue, Meidasari (2007) maintained the importance of context because it is the context in which a word occurs that signals its secondary meaning. However, a throughout understanding of a context may also be another challenge for translators, especially when the context involves languagespecific and culture specific lexical items, which are major factors related to interlingual difficulties. Interlingual difficulties are those caused by the differences between the two languages. Differences in terms of culture and language are great obstacles for translators. And collocations are among the most troublesome language-specific and culture-specific items. Dweik & Shakra (2010) pointed out that “rendering Arabic collocations into English constitutes a major linguistic and cultural hindrance due to … the wide linguistic and cultural gap between Arabic and English, which consequently led to the lack of equivalence of specific-culture, bound collocational patterns”. Similarly, Shammas (2013), cited Emery (1991), wrote that “collocations are language-specific and hence unpredictable” (p. 108). The gaps between cultures and languages are a universal problem for translators and language learners; and thus are also observable in the case of English and Vietnamese. A Vietnamese translator, for example, may find it hard to translate culture-specific collocations such as continental breakfast or tow-away zone (Trinh, 2001, p. 68) which do not have equivalents in Vietnamese. 16
Similarly, Vietnamese culture-specific terms such as mặt rồng (dragon’s face, denoting king) or cửu/hoàng tuyền (nine/golden springs, denoting the afterlife) are difficult to translate into English since translators have to render not only the exact message but also the effect, the mod, etc. of the SL text. For archaic words such as the ones above, they need to find appropriate archaic equivalents to convey as closely the spirit of the source text as possible. Furthermore, when two languages are taken into consideration, the arbitrariness of collocations is even more obvious. For instance, one cannot explain why black horses, black dogs and black cats are referred to as ngựa ô, chó mực and mèo mun respectively in Vietnamese. As a result, a native speaker of English may find it very confusing for having three words which express the same meaning of black and yet cannot be used interchangeably.
2.2.3. Influences of L1 on learners’ use of collocations Differences in terms of culture and language are one of the major causes of difficulties in translating collocations. To have deeper insight into the issue, this section is devoted to presenting a brief contrastive analysis between English and Vietnamese collocations and related factors. 2.2.3.1. English collocations vs. Vietnamese counterparts Although English and Vietnamese belong to different language groups – the former is a member of Indo-European family, the latter belongs to Austroasiatic family – they still share some similarities. Firstly, they both have some common sentence structures such as SV or SVO. Secondly, both languages use Latin writing system. Nonetheless, these similarities are minor compared to the differences. This part, however, only focuses on the points relevant to collocation. The differences will be categorized into two groups: one related to the linguistic aspect of language, the other related to the cultural one. In terms of linguistics, it is obvious that the structure of adjective-noun collocations in English does not have an identical equivalent in Vietnamese due to differences in words’ order. English grammatical rules allow adjectives to precede head nouns in noun phrases. On the contrary, in Vietnamese, the adjectives in a noun phrase always come after the head noun they modify, for example: dense population vs. dân số đông. 17
In other words, the equivalent structure of English adjective-noun collocation in Vietnamese is noun-adjective (Trinh, 2001). However, in English, nouns can have the same attributive function as that of adjectives. The similar phenomenon is also observed in Vietnamese where a noun, like an adjective, can work as a modifier of another noun. As a result, certain adjective-noun collocations in English are translated into Noun-Noun combinations in Vietnamese (e.g. golden age and thời vàng son). On the contrary, some noun-adjective combinations in Vietnamese are translated into Noun-Noun collocations in English (e.g. răng khôn and wisdom tooth). In addition to the differences in structure, the concepts of equivalence between words and equivalence between collocations do not necessarily coincide between the two languages. To put it differently, even if two words in a language form a collocation, their equivalents in another language do not necessarily have the same relationship. These differences between the two languages are probably a major cause of difficulties in translating collocations. With respect to the cultural aspect, language itself is heavily influenced by culture and collocation, as a part of language, is not an exception. Trinh (2001) conducted a contrastive analysis between English and Vietnamese collocations, in which he gave a long list of examples of culture specific collocations. For example, in English, the term continental breakfast refers to “a breakfast that consists of a hot roll or croissant with some sort of spread or filling, served with coffee … used on the wider European continent, and in most tourist hotels throughout the world” (Trinh, 2001, p. 68). Its word-for-word Vietnamese translation bữa sáng lục đi ̣a, however, does not really make sense. Conversely, Vietnamese also has culture specific collocations that do not exist in English. The term Ông Xanh, according to Trinh, refers to God, Heaven, or Creator, and thus a word-for-word English translation such as Mr. Blue is not an accurate one. These collocations are also a great challenge for translators as they require not only collocational but also cultural knowledge. In sum, it is clear that linguistic and cultural gaps between the two languages may cause great difficulties for translators. These differences also give rise to the concepts of congruent and incongruent collocations, the factors which possibly affect learners’ acquisition and use of collocations, and thus are discussed in detail in the next section. 18
2.2.3.2. Congruent and incongruent collocations Simply speaking, congruent collocation (Kurosaki, 2012) refers to equivalent combinations, of which the components are also equivalents of each other, for example high fever and sốt cao. In contrast, incongruent collocation (ibid.) refers to equivalent combinations having inequivalent components, that is to say “collocations that do not have [direct] translation equivalents1 in L1” (Nakata, 2007). For instance, the correct equivalent of the Vietnamese combination giá rẻ is low price rather than its translation equivalent cheap price. The fact that these two types of collocations could confuse learners as they may find it hard to tell them apart has attracted much attention. Maurer-Stroh (2005), for instance, distinguished four types of collocations based on two criteria: “predictability” and “lexical congruence”. The former means that two collocations are semantically predictable, as are high fever and sốt cao. The latter refers to the similarity in structure which hardly exists between English adjective-noun collocations and their Vietnamese equivalents. Among the four types of collocations proposed by Maurer-Stroh, the fourth type, namely “unpredictable and lexically noncongruent”2, according to him, is “the one that needs special attention in the contrastive light” (2005, p. 61). These concepts of congruent and incongruent collocations were also addressed by Nakata (2007), who suggested that “collocations, especially non-congruent [incongruent] items, cannot be acquired easily through mere exposure and are amenable to form-focused, intentional learning” (p. 154). In general, most researchers, regarding the issue, have agreed that incongruent collocations tend to cause more difficulties for learners and thus need more attention in teaching and learning. However, that does not mean congruent collocations should be neglected. Since learners find it hard to distinguish between these two types of collocations, it is possible to argue that they may not know when they can resort to translation equivalents and when they should not. Congruent collocations are, 1
Direct translation equivalent refers to the kind of equivalent attained by translating separately the components of a combination, or in other words through literal word-for-word translation. 2 The term unpredictable used by Maurer-Stroh is similar in meaning to the term incongruent in the present study, while lexically non-congruent can be understood as a kind of structural dissimilarity. Therefore, this kind of collocations proposed by Maurer-Stroh is, in fact, referring to the kind of incongruent collocations being mentioned in the present study.
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therefore, not necessarily easy for them. More importantly, this type of collocations may lead learners who lack collocational knowledge to a false assumption that collocation equivalence and direct translation equivalence are identical.
2.2.4. Strategies in translating collocations During the process of translation, translators have to deal with different text types and purposes. For that reason, a large number of translation methods have been proposed. Among them, the literal word-for-word translation is one commonly used by translators due to its simplicity and effectiveness. According to Newmark (1981), “in communicative as in semantic translation, provided that equivalent effect is secured, the literal word-for-word translation is not only the best, it is the only valid method of translation” (cited in Munday, 2001, p. 44). Toury (1995), sharing the same view with Newmark, added that “the translator has to maximize the efficiency of the cognitive processes by concentrating energy on especially difficult problems, devoting less effort to those parts of the text which produce a reasonable translation by the ‘literal’ procedure” (cited in Munday, 2001, p. 45). The problem with this translation method is that it is only viable when “equivalent effect is secured” (Newmark, ibid.). However, for idiomatic expressions and particularly collocations, such an effect is not always guaranteed. If the combination being considered is a congruent collocation, the use of this translation method is acceptable. However, when it comes to incongruent ones, whose collocation equivalence and translation equivalence are not identical, the literal translation of such a combination cannot produce the desired effect. To put it differently, although wordfor-word literal translation is a popular and effective method, inappropriate use of it in translating collocations only leads to errors. In addition to the aforementioned method, some other translation strategies also have the same problem. Dweik & Shakra (2010), for example, found five common strategies adopted by students in translating collocations in religious texts from Arabic to English: (1) synonymy, (2) generalization, (3) paraphrasing, (4) deletion, and (5) literal translation. Similarly, Hussein (2011), studying advanced EFL learners’ translations, pointed out several strategies used by the students, including (1) L1
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transfer/literal translation, (2) substitution/paraphrase, (3) assumed synonymy, (4) analogy and overgeneralization, (5) formal/semantic association, (6) idiomaticalness, (7) quasi-morphological similarity, and (8) avoidance of the task. The problem is that while strategies are usually considered as a means for translators to deal with difficulties in translation, the use of these strategies in translating collocations, on the contrary, may lead to faulty translations or errors. Sughair (2011) commented that “one of the big mistakes translators tend to make is adopting several strategies while translating collocations such as using simplification, reduction, synonymy, and paraphrasing. … The higher the rate of these strategies is, the less effective the translation is” (p. 10). Considering culture gaps in translation, Newmark (1988) suggested that the use of these strategies, though effective, may lead to serious problems in case of cultural disparity. These ideas are in accordance with the findings of Dweik & Shakra (2010) and Hussein (2011). The former pointed out that the five strategies above usually led students to faulty translations, while the latter considered the strategies as “hypothetical causes of errors” (p. 216). Among them, synonymy, paraphrase and literal word-for-word translation were said to be most frequently used and also the major causes of errors. To sum up, wrong choice of translation methods and strategies may be a cause of errors in translating collocations. This issue will be taken into account again in the later section which discusses about the hypothetical causes of collocational errors.
2.3. Error analysis So far, the researcher has presented and discussed basic concepts about collocation. This part will be devoted to presenting the theoretical background of error analysis which is a major focus of the present study.
2.3.1. Theory of error analysis When it comes to error analysis, the first issue to be taken into account is the distinction between error and mistake. Corder (1967) distinguished two types of errors: “errors of performance” and “errors of competence”. The former, which he addressed as mistakes, are unsystematic “slips of the tongue (or pen)” which happen even with native speakers due to memory lapses, physical states. The latter, which 21
were addressed by the term error, refer to the systematic errors of the learner from which his knowledge of the language to date can be reconstructed (p. 166 – 167). Ellis (2003) maintained that errors “reflect gaps in a learner’s knowledge” and occur due to the learner’s lack of knowledge, while mistakes refer to “occasional lapses in performance”, happen when learners are unable to perform what they have known (p. 17). Regarding mistake and error, most authors have agreed that the latter plays a significant role in language teaching and learning. According to Corder (1967), errors are important because they show learners’ progress in learning, indicate the process of language learning, and serve as a learning device for learners themselves. Furthermore, “errors cannot be self-corrected until further relevant input has been provided and converted into intake by the learner” (James 1998, p. 83). Because of their significance, errors have received much attention from researchers, especially those who have interest in error analysis. Brown (1980) defined error analysis as the process to observe, analyze, and classify the deviations of the rules of the second language and then to reveal the system operated by learner (p. 166). Richards & Schmidt (2002) viewed error analysis as “the study and analysis of errors made by second language learners” (p. 184). Error analyses are carried out in order to (1) find out strategies which learners use in learning a language, (2) identify the causes of learner errors and (3) obtain information on common difficulties in language learning, as an aid in teaching or in the preparation of teaching materials. It is believed that, by analyzing learners’ errors and identifying sources of errors, one may see the gaps in the learners’ knowledge and find appropriate methods to effectively improve their competence. The process of error analysis involves different procedures suggested by different authors. Corder (1974), for instance, proposed a five-step procedure: (1) collection of learner language, (2) identification of errors, (3) classification of errors, (4) explanation of errors, and (5) evaluation of errors seriousness. Gass & Selinker (2008) introduced another procedure with six steps: (1) collecting data, (2) identifying errors, (3) classifying errors, (4) quantifying errors, (5) analyzing sources, (6) remediation. The two procedures, in fact, share many similarities. Even the final steps, despite being addressed by different terms, are similar in nature, as they both focus on the 22
remediation of errors. However, the fourth step (quantification of errors) in Gass & Selinker’s procedure is what the procedure of Corder lacks. This step, according to Dang (2014) is “of great importance because it yields more insights into the learning process and also specifies what kind of errors need more pedagogical intervention” (p. 37). As a result, the six-step procedure developed by Gass & Selinker (2008) will be adopted as the framework for conducting the error analysis in the present study.
2.3.2. Types of errors related to adjective-noun collocations With respect to collocational errors, different authors have different classification criteria based on their perspectives and the types of collocation being considered. Among them, there was one commonly known classification proposed by Nesselhauf (2003), including nine types of collocational errors presented in Table 2.3 below. This classification was, later, adapted by Hong et al. (2011) and Nguyen (2014), who omitted several categories (i.e. preposition (noun), structure and preposition (verb)) as they refer to grammatical collocations, which were not the focus of their studies. Table 2.3: Types of collocational errors (Nesselhauf, 2003, p. 232) 1. 2. 3. 4.
Type of mistake Verb: Wrong choice of verb (or non-existent verb) Noun: Wrong choice of noun (or non-existent noun) Usage 1: Combination exists but is not used correctly Usage 2: Combination does not exist and cannot be corrected by exchanging single elements
5. Preposition (verb): Preposition of a prepositional verb missing, present though unacceptable, or wrong 6. Preposition (noun): Preposition of a noun missing, present though unacceptable, or wrong 7. Determiner: Article or pronoun missing, present though unacceptable, or wrong 8. Number: Noun used in singular instead of plural or vice versa 9. Structure: Syntactic structure wrong
Example *carry out races (hold races) *close lacks (close gaps) take notice (to notice) *hold children within bounds (show children where the boundaries lie) *fail in one's exams (fail one's exams) *raise the question about (raise the question of) *get the permission (get permission) *pass one's judgments (pass judgment) *make sb. friends (make friends with sb)
Although this classification was developed by Nesselhauf for his study on verb-noun collocation, it can be applied to other types. Kurosaki (2012) conducted a study on several types of collocation, including adjective-noun, in which he adapted 23
Nesselhauf’s classification for all of the collocation categories. The following are the types of adjective-noun collocational errors in Kurosaki (2012) 1. Adjective: The adjective in a collocation is wrong. 2. Noun: The noun in a collocation is wrong. 3. Determiners: The article or possessive pronoun is missing or added. 4. Structure: Syntactic structure is wrong. 5. Preposition: Preposition is added through unnecessary or wrong choice. 6. Different expression: Translation does not include a collocation and/or consists of a circumlocution. 7. Number: Noun is used in singular instead of plural or vice versa. Since the present study focuses on adjective-noun collocations, this way of classification is really relevant to and appropriate. However, it cannot be applied to the present study without some modifications. Firstly, for the study focuses on adjective-noun collocations, errors related to determiners, preposition, number and structure may not occur frequently. In fact, Kurosaki himself found that learners made no errors in these categories. Moreover, as grammatical ones, they are not really relevant to the aims of the study, which only focus on lexical collocational errors. Therefore, the four categories: determiners, preposition, number and structure should be omitted. Secondly, although Kurosaki’s classification of collocational errors is very comprehensive, the names given to the categories seem not clear enough and thus need clarification. The types of adjective-noun collocational errors proposed by Kurosaki (2012), as a result, are revised as follow: 1. Wrong choice of adjective: the adjective in a collocation is incorrectly chosen. 2. Wrong choice of noun: the adjective in a collocation is incorrectly chosen. 3. Wrong combination: the entire combination is incorrect or circumlocutory.
(Adapted from Kurosaki, 2012) It is necessary to note that wrong combination, the new name for different expression, includes the two categories usage 1 and usage 2 proposed by Nesselhaulf (2003). Since these categories refer to erroneous combinations of which both components are incorrectly chosen, it is unnecessarily complicated to distinguish between them in the 24
present study. Hence, they are put under the same name as mentioned above. The three aforementioned categories of adjective-noun collocational errors will be used to categorize the collected errors, which is an important step in data analysis.
2.3.3. Causes of collocational errors One of the most important purposes of error analysis is to find out the remedy for learners’ errors; in order to do so, identifying causes of errors is inevitably essential. In this section, the researcher will review the relevant literature so as to identify the hypothetical sources of error applicable to the present study. The very first reason for learners’ making of collocational errors, according to Howarth (1998) and Darvishi (2011), is their unawareness of the concept. This may lead learners to the faulty assumption that words can co-occur without any restrictions, although they obviously have come across the phenomenon of restricted combinability in their mother tongue. This assumption, as a result, makes students unconsciously produce combination violating collocational rules. This issue may be the result of a teaching – learning process in which collocations are not considered as an important factor and thus receive little attention from teachers and students. Particularly, in teaching translation, teachers usually focus more on translation skills and strategies, while collocations like other aspects such as culture, idioms, etc. are only integrated in texts for practicing, and sometimes not clearly explained by teachers. The teaching – learning process, therefore, may be a cause of errors. Hence, the research methods will also include, besides the tests as the primary tools, an interview (with the teachers) and a questionnaire (to the students) for deeper insight into the actual teaching situation, so that the research can yield more accurate implication. The lack of collocational concepts also leads to learners’ lack of knowledge, which hinders their performance, especially in translation. In order to compensate for the deficiency in knowledge, learners usually resort to certain strategies. As previously discussed above, among translation methods and strategies that may lead to collocational errors, literal translation, paraphrase and synonymy are common ones. However, they are not the only causes of collocational errors. Many authors have discussed other noticeable causes of errors.
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Several studies, including: Farghal & Obiedat (1995), Yamashita & Jaing (2010), and Kurosaki (2012) have concluded that interlingual transfer, which often leads to negative transfer, is known as one major cause of errors. It is said that learners tend to be linguistically and culturally influenced by their mother tongue due to overusing word-for-word translation from L1 to L2, which is what most learners do when they face a difficult expression in the foreign language. In addition to interlingual transfer, intralingual transfer is also a factor that should not be overlooked, especially when L2 is much different from L1 and thus would possess many features unfamiliar to learners. Hong et al. (2011), adapted from Richards (1974) and Tarone (1981), presented a comprehensive classification of causes of collocational errors that took into account both interlingual and intralingual transfer as follow: (1) L1 transliteration/L1 literal translation is included in the concept of “negative transfer” mentioned in Li (2005) which is usually caused by the negative effect of literal word-for-word translations from L1. (2) Language switch is the use of L1 in the places where L2 should be used. (3) False concepts hypothesized errors are those “derived from faulty comprehension of distinctions in the target language” (cited in Dang, 2014, p. 35). (4) Overgeneralization refers to the creation of an incorrect structure based on two structures learners have acquired in L2. (5) Ignorance of rules restrictions “is failure to observe the restrictions of existing structures, that is, the application of rules to contexts where they do not apply” (ibid.) (6) Approximation happens when learners use an incorrect lexical item or structure sharing semantic features similar to those of the desired item. More recently, Dang (2014) adapted from Li (2005) the classification of causes of collocational errors. The list included some elements similar to the ones proposed by Hong et. al (2011) above. However, the two causes overgeneralization and ignorance of rules restrictions were excluded as they accounted for grammatical errors. The list thus consisted of the following elements: (1) false concepts hypothesized, (2) the use of synonyms, (3) negative transfer, (4) word coinage and (5) approximation. The 26
second cause of errors, namely the use of synonyms, refers to the use of synonymous words/expressions to replace a desired item. The fourth one refers to the act of making new words to express a desired idea. Another comprehensive list of hypothetical causes of collocational errors is the one proposed by Hussein (2011), consisting of eight categories as follow: (1) L1 transfer/literal translation refers to students’ tendency to manipulate their L1 in their L2 translation when they felt defective in authentic linguistic resources. (2) Substitution/paraphrase is used as a compensatory strategy motivated by a substitute option based on some sense relationship, or certain semantic properties (e.g. education job instead of teaching profession). (3) Assumed synonymity refers to the use a synonym or a near synonym in place of the appropriate word. (4) Analogy and overgeneralization is a psychological tendency of students to extend the meaning of a certain word to other semantic situations where that word does not reasonably appeal. (e.g. Students know the collocation thick soup and thus produce a combination like thick tea instead of strong tea) (5) Formal/semantic association happens when students conceive some sort of formal or semantic link or affinity between the constituents to be collocated (e.g. He remembered (reminded) them of that) (6) Idiomaticalness refers to students’ tendency to contrive idiomatic forms in English parallel to those in their L1. (7) Quasi-morphological similarity occurs due to defective learning, students may feel that some linguistic forms resound or echo other words and use those forms instead of the correct ones (e.g. a violation (violent) attack) (8) Avoidance/abandonment of the task means that students left out the expressions, which may be the result of ignorance, carelessness, failure to recollect/recall from memory, and limited time constraints. Although these classifications are different from each other in components and names, they in fact share many similarities. First of all, literal translation, the translation method mentioned by several authors including Hong et al. (2011) as a major cause of collocational errors, is actually one of the factors accounting for negative interlingual 27
transfer, and thus can be included in the bigger category of L1 Transfer. Assumed synonymity and use of synonyms are only different names of the same strategy, with which learners use a lexical item to replace its synonymous word/expression. In addition, false concepts hypothesized, which refers learners’ inability to make distinction between similar words in the target language, may also account for learners’ use of synonyms. Similarly, approximation, word coinage, formal/semantic association and quasi-morphological similarity, according to Hong et al. (2011) and Dang (2014), are different forms of paraphrase. However, as they involve errors with different characteristics, it is difficult to put them in one category. Among them, formal/semantic association and quasi-morphological similarity reflect some sorts of confusions over forms of words and thus will be grouped into one category, namely formal confusion, the term which was used by Johansson (2008) to address this type of error. In her research, Dang (2014) found several errors resulted from the misplacement of parts of speech and grouped them in the category of approximation. However, as these errors are also related to form, they will be considered as a type of formal confusion in the present study. Although errors caused by word coinage are also related to form, this cause of errors is considered as a separate category due to its nature, which is different from that of formal confusion. To sum up, based on the aforementioned classifications, a list of hypothetical causes of collocational errors is formulated for the present study, which includes: (1) approximation, (2) use of synonyms, (3) L1 transfer, (4) word coinage, (5) formal confusion and (6) abandonment of tasks. These hypothetical causes of errors are of great importance in data collection and analysis as they guide the researcher in designing the research tools and identifying the causes of the collected errors.
2.4. Collocation and language teaching The primary purpose of error analysis is to find the remedy for learners’ errors. Through the analysis of error, researchers can figure out the appropriate methods for teaching collocations. This objective can hardly be achieved without basic knowledge about the teaching of collocations in EFL/ESL. This part, therefore, will be dedicated to reviewing some relevant literature in the field.
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The very first questions to be asked when it comes to teaching collocations is “should collocations be taught implicitly or explicitly?” What makes the issue controversial is the assumption that learners can figure out the concept of collocation and acquire knowledge by themselves through implicit teaching. However, empirical studies have yielded a contradictory result. Nakata (2007), for example, found that collocation can hardly be acquired through exposure and thus suggested intentional teaching/learning of collocations. Dang (2014) also proposed similar ideas. Arguing that collocation is a universal phenomenon existing in every language, yet learners usually come across the concept unconsciously without recognizing it, the author suggested that “the concept of collocation should be introduced and explained to learners” (p. 25). She gave the erroneous combination expensive price as an example and explained that to avoid causing confusion for learner, teachers should draw their awareness to the notion of collocation rather than giving an arbitrary explanation such as “we just do not usually say so” (ibid.) If collocations should be taught explicitly, the next question should be “what kinds of collocations should be chosen to teach?” It is commonly seen that some teachers tend to focus more on grammatical collocations by correcting learners’ grammatical errors such as verb-preposition or preposition-noun compositions, etc. while lexical collocations and related errors are usually neglected. The issue leads to the suggestion that more attention should be directed to the latter kind of collocations. In consideration of lexical collocations, Bahns & Eldaw (1993) have suggested that “EFL teaching should concentrate on those collocations which cannot readily be paraphrased” (p. 101). More recently, Nakata (2007) and Kurosaki (2012) have remarked that it is incongruent collocations that need special attention. Hodne (2009), holding a similar point of view, maintained that lexical collocations selected for teaching should be challenging to but at the same time practical and useful for learners to acquire. On this basis, she also suggested a comprehensive list of useful collocations to introduce to students, which is shown in Table 2.4 below. The list can indeed be used as a guideline for teachers on choosing appropriate collocations to introduce to students and designing more effective teaching activities.
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Table 2.4: Useful collocations to teach students (Hodne, 2009, p. 104) Types of collocation with words that appear repeatedly in the exercises with words that are already familiar to students but which expand the knowledge of the known word related to chapter themes when teaching infrequent words, those containing the infrequent word and a known word frequent and strong in corpora Collocations of near synonyms to avoid using them interchangeably independent of context non-congruent with L1 equivalent evoking communicative situation useful to talk about news and current events revealing various meanings of a word
Examples general election, free election, hold an election incredibly busy, trendy restaurants
constitutional monarchy (government in the UK), vocational education (education) grow weary and auspicious start
pledge allegiance, environmentally friendly notable example and important point
conveying sociocultural aspects (These do not need to be directly taught, but brought to students’ attention in order to foment discussions about cultural issues.)
poor health, dense population hectic schedule, feel frustrated high unemployment, cause consternation bright future and bright light, cast a vote and cast doubt affluent suburbs, white prom
In addition to the aforementioned issues, methods for teaching collocations are also a factor that needs consideration. Hill (2000), as cited in Dang (2014), stated that “in order to teach collocation, we have to give it the same kind of status in our methodology as other aspects of language such as pronunciation, intonation, stress, and grammar” (p. 25). From this perspective, studies on collocation-teaching methods have been conducted. Hodne (2009) not only pointed out the useful collocations for teaching but also introduced a variety of methods for teaching them. She suggested several kinds of activities including matching, in which learners were asked to match a node with a collocate/group of collocates or a combination with its equivalent, and filling, which required learners to complete certain collocations with words found in a text. These activities, according to her, are helpful in teaching collocations with close synonyms, introducing new collocations containing familiar words and making use collocations 30
available in course books, etc. Besides, she also highlighted the aid of corpora, with which activities can be designed to teach culture through collocations or help learners discover words’ meanings. Farrokh (2012) discussed several techniques for teaching collocations. He first introduced an activity using grids designed by Channell (1981) which was similar to the one proposed by Hodne (2009) in that learners were required to form potential collocations based on the given nodes and collocates. While Farrokh did not negate the usefulness of this activity he argued that such kind of activity may lack effectiveness as it did not provide a context. Regarding this issue, he introduced a variety of context-bound approaches which make use of texts, dictionaries as well as corpora and concordances. Among them, corpora and concordances were believed to help teachers decide what collocations to teach, provide different contexts in which collocations appear, and increase learners’ fluency and naturalness in language use. Not only did Farrokh focus on input but he also highlighted the importance of output in teaching collocations. Regarding output as an important factor promoting L2 learning, he remarked that output tasks possibly led to significant acquisition of collocations. Pirmoradian & Tabatabaei (2012) examined the effectiveness of a corpus-based approach, namely Data Driven Learning (DDL), in which Collins Collocation Dictionary was used as a concordancing tool for learning lexical collocations. It is believed that the DDL approach, proposed by Johns (1991), can help learners make their own discoveries about language use, through a concordance and a corpus used as a database. The study involved two groups: an experimental group and a control one. During the experiment, the control group was asked to pay attention to collocations and mis-collocations in some given texts, whereas the treatment group had access to collocations via the dictionary software installed on computers. The results showed that the experimental group performed significantly better on lexical collocations than the control group, which proved the effectiveness of the DDL approach. Using corpora in teaching collocations was taken into account again in Jafarpour et al. (2013) which aimed to test the hypothesis that the traditional method of teaching 31
collocation is not as helpful as the corpus-based approach. This was done by comparing the effects of the two approaches on learning collocations of nearsynonymous pairs. The result revealed that the experimental group, thanks to the aid of concordancers from BNC in learning collocations, had better performance and production of the collocations. The corpus-based approach also proved its superiority to the traditional one as it provided authentic data helping learners discover collocational knowledge by themselves. More recently, Dang (2014) investigated the collocational knowledge of Englishmajored students and recommended relevant pedagogical implications. The author highlighted the importance of explicit instruction as well as using corpora and concordancers in teaching and learning of collocations. In addition, she combined the ideas of Woolard (2000), Hill (2000), Lewis (2000) and Boonyasaquan (2009) to formulate a comprehensive list of classroom procedures for teaching collocations as follow: (1) Introducing the term collocation (2) Convincing learners of the importance of collocations (3) Turning learners’ attention to collocations in given texts (4) Carefully choosing what collocation to teach (5) Encouraging learners to actively collect and study collocations on their own (6) Repeating and recording already-met collocations (7) Identifying and correcting errors (8) Using corpora and concordancers (Dang, 2014, p. 29) Based on this, she developed a question to investigate teachers’ techniques for teaching collocations in Academic Writing classes, in response to which the student participants had to choose from the aforementioned list the techniques used by their teachers. Thanks to its design, the question required little time to answer, yet it yielded accurate and comprehensive information for the research. Since the present study also takes the actual teaching of collocations as an important source of data, such an effective question is really necessary and thus will be adapted for the questionnaire on the teaching of collocations in Basic Translation described later in Chapter 3. 32
To sum up, the studies mentioned above have shown the necessity of teaching collocations explicitly. Moreover, to ensure the effectiveness in teaching, collocations should be chosen carefully following specific criteria. Methods for teaching collocations are also an essential factor. Among them, methods that allow teaching collocations in contexts, as discussed above, seem to be more effective and preferable.
2.5. Methods for testing collocational knowledge This part is devoted to presenting and discussing methods for testing collocations, from which the researcher will choose the appropriate methods that can be used in the present study. The methods to be discussed are divided into three main categories: corpus-based, translation-based and test-based. Corpus-based methods. Methods of this type have been the favorite choice of many researchers studying collocations. Corpora are used as the sources of data in these methods. Usually, researchers choose at least two corpora/sub-corpora; one of which is a corpus produced by learners of English (e.g. Taiwanese Learner Corpus of English, German sub-corpus of ICLE, etc.), the other is a corpus produced by native speakers of English (e.g. British National Corpus, Corpus of Contemporary American English, etc.). The data are extracted from the learners’ corpus and compared with the native speakers’ corpus. The strength of these methods is that they provide researchers with a great amount of authentic data. Since a corpus is usually a large collection of many types of text at different places and times, the data from a corpus are usually more representative and more accurate than those collected by other methods. Their weakness is that an appropriate corpus is not always available for researchers to use; and it also takes a great amount of time and effort to analyze the corpora. Translation-based methods. Similar to corpus-based methods, translation-based ones are also the methods of choice. Researchers, using these methods, usually design some kinds of translation test which require learners to translate phrases, sentences or even whole texts from L1 to L2 or vice versa. It allows researchers to “investigate the learners’ productive knowledge of collocations” and stimulate them to “elicit their knowledge of collocations based on their L1 version of collocations” (Kurosaki, 2012, p. 86). Moreover, researchers, using these methods, can modify the tests in the way
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that helps them collect sufficient amount of data on the right type of collocation. However, since translation is a complicated process with many factors that can affect learners’ performance, researchers need to design tests carefully by choosing appropriate lexical items, providing contexts, etc. to yield valid and reliable results. Test-based methods. This category comprises of many types of test such as clozetest, multiple choice, COLLEX (collocating lexis), COLLMATCH (collocate matching), etc. The two last test types (i.e. COLLEX and COLLMATCH) were developed by Gyllstad (2007) and later adapted by Nguyen (2014). COLLEX has the format similar to that of multiple choice; while COLLMATCH provides a grid of words in which learners have to tick in the boxes to choose the correct combinations. These types of test are commonly used to investigate learners’ receptive skill. Clozetest, specifically, can also be used to examine productive skill. These tests are easy to score and analyze the results, compared to the two aforementioned methods. However, as most researchers using these tests have stated, it is difficult to design test items. The most difficult step, according to them, is choosing the collocations to put into the tests. Moreover, careful processing is needed to ensure tests’ validity and reliability. Since each method has its own strengths and weaknesses, it seems impossible to choose a perfect one among them. Therefore, as it is suggested in Kurosaki (2012), a combination of multiple methods is employed in this study. The corpus-based method, with its advantages, is the first one to be chosen. Since there is no official VietnameseEnglish corpus available, the students’ translation exam papers are used as the source of data in the present study. However, the amount of data collected might be insufficient since the availability of adjective-noun combinations in the students’ papers are unpredictable and uncontrollable. To make up for that limitation, a translation-based method is employed. With a carefully designed and administrated test, one could stimulate other aspects of the students' errors which might not be sufficiently reflected in their exam papers. The problem is that there are many types of test to choose from. Some of them require learners to translate the whole sentences or texts, the others only require to translate phrases. For the present study only investigates learners’ use of collocations, translating whole sentences or texts might bring unnecessary difficulties to students, 34
and thus negatively affect the reliability of the test. Therefore, the test format proposed by Kurosaki (2012), which only focuses on translating the target collocations in given contexts, is chosen. The two methods above, however, only focus on the students’ productive knowledge. In order to have a thorough view of learners’ collocational knowledge, it is advisable that their receptive ability should also be investigated. For that reason, the COLLEX test developed by Gyllstad (2007), among the tests of receptive knowledge mentioned above, is chosen due to its simplicity in preparation and design. To sum up, three different methods of testing collocations are used in this study for a more complete view on the issue. Further descriptions of the methods will be presented later in Chapter 3.
2.6. Conceptual framework This section is dedicated to further elaborating on the conceptual framework, which is formulated based on the major theories presented and discussed above. The framework significantly serves as a guide for the researcher to carry out the study and achieve the research goal. First of all, as the present study lays its emphasis on error analysis, the procedure of error analysis proposed by Gass & Selinker (2008) is chosen as an important component in the conceptual framework. With a detailed description of six steps: (1) collecting data, (2) identifying errors, (3) classifying errors, (4) quantifying errors, (5) analyzing source, and (6) remediation, the procedure provides a comprehensive instruction on how to collect, analyze and interpret data. In addition, for the study deals with collocation and collocational errors, a definition of collocation is also essential. The definition suggested by Hodne (2009) therefore is adapted as the operational definition, which defines a collocation as a combination that appears in COCA (1) with a minimum MI of 3.0 and (2) with at least five-time frequency. This definition is of great importance as it establishes the criteria to decide whether a combination is a correct collocation or not, which is essential for the identification of errors.
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Categorization of errors is one of the important steps in error analysis. It not only makes the analysis more systematic but also provides valuable information on the factors in relation to the error types that need special attention. For that reason, the typology of errors formulated based on Nesselhauf (2003) and Kurosaki (2012) is included in the framework. Although it consists of only three categories (1) wrong choice of adjective, (2) wrong choice of noun and (3) wrong combination, it is believed to be simple and yet comprehensive enough for categorizing errors. Another important and also difficult step in error analysis is identifying causes of errors. Since the making of errors is a complicated mental process, involving different factors, it is impossible to state with certainty that an error is the result of a specific factor. It is even more difficult to support the identification of the causes by empirical evidences, for there are few methods to completely investigate and monitor mental processes. However, as suggested by most previous studies in the fields, such a goal, to a certain extent, can be achieved thanks to an appropriate list of hypothetical causes of errors. As errors caused by the same factor usually share similar characteristics, one can make inferences about the cause of an error by comparing its characteristics with those of the given hypothetical list. In a nutshell, a list of hypothetical sources of errors is of great importance for identifying causes of errors. For that reason, the comprehensive list consisting of six hypothetical causes of errors: (1) approximation, (2) the use of synonyms, (3) L1 transfer, (4) word coinage, (5) formal confusion and (6) abandonment of tasks adapted from multiple authors including Hong et al. (2011) and Hussein (2011), etc. is employed in the present study. The aforementioned list not only helps in identifying causes of errors but of also provides a guideline for choosing the target collocations for the translation and the COLLEX tests, which will be describe later in Chapter 3. In order for the tests to be effective the chosen collocations must have the potential to reflect the causes of errors. For example, since L1 transfer is said to be a possible cause of errors, the researcher needs to include some incongruent collocations in the test to see if learners are influenced by it. The errors for analysis, as previously mentioned, are collected from learners’ exam papers and through the translation test. In addition to these instruments, the COLLEX 36
test, which aims to test their receptive knowledge of collocations, is included for a more complete picture of their collocational knowledge. Besides, the actual teaching and learning of collocations are also investigated through additional data collected from the teacher and student participants. Regarding the teachers, their (1) perception of collocation, (2) practices in teaching and (3) observation of students are the factors to be considered. Their perception provides a general view on how they regard collocations, which probably has certain influences on their teaching. Their practices in teaching show whether and how they teach collocation, which yield valuable information for the remediation. Last but not least, their observation of students is also a valuable source of information, since no one has better understanding of the students than the teacher. The information is collected through an interview which will be presented in Chapter 3. With respect to the students, the factors to be taken into account are their (1) perception of collocation, (2) acquisition and use of collocations, and (3) view on teachers’ teaching, which were collected through a questionnaire. The students’ perception may affect their learning and thus needs consideration. For their acquisition and use, the collected information aims to support and strengthen the findings in the analysis of errors, which is the main method to investigate the students’ use of collocation. Finally, their view on teachers’ teaching provides information about their awareness of teachers’ instructions, which may also yield valuable information for the remediation. Finally, based on the result of the error analysis and those additional data about their receptive knowledge and the teaching/learning of collocations, recommendations can be formulated in order to tackle the addressed issues and remedy the errors.
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Figure 2.1: Conceptual framework of the study To sum up, this conceptual framework is of great importance as it provides a thorough guidance for carrying out the study. It not only helps designing the research tools but also puts the analysis of error in a manageable procedure with sufficient supporting theories at each step. With the result of the analysis of error as the main source of information and additional data from the teachers and the students, it is expected that the remediation of errors will be more appropriate and sufficient. An illustration of the framework is given in Figure 2.1 above. 38
CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY This chapter is dedicated to presenting the research methodology employed in the current study. Firstly, the research design is introduced. Next, detailed descriptions of context of the study, participants, research materials and research tools are presented. Finally, at the end of this chapter are the procedures of data collection and analysis.
3.1. Research questions The present study aimed at answering two main research questions: (1) “what are the common types of adjective-noun collocational errors made by 3rd year EF students at USSH in their translations?” and (2) “what are the possible causes of adjective-noun collocational errors made by 3rd year EF students at USSH in their translations?”. These two questions are expected to be answered through the analysis of collocational errors collected from the two main research instruments (i.e. the students’ exam papers and the translation test). However, identifying the causes of errors is a complicated process, which needs as many data to support as possible. Therefore, as discussed in the conceptual framework, additional information regarding the actual teaching/learning of collocations in translation classes and learners’ receptive knowledge of collocation is also collected through the other instruments (i.e. the COLLEX test, the questionnaire to the student respondents, and the interview with the teacher participants), which will be presented later in this chapter. These additional data are expected to yield not only more evidence supporting the identification of the errors’ causes but also valuable information that helps improve the current teaching/learning of collocations if necessary.
3.2. Research design 3.2.1. Context of the study The current study was conducted in five classes of Basic Translation in the academic year 2014-2015. The course is among the intermediate courses in the curriculum of EF, which aim at preparing students for the specialized courses later in the B.A. program. Precisely, it aims to make students ready for translation and interpretation, 39
which is one of the three specializations they have to select from after finishing the intermediate courses. With such an important role, the course’s objectives are to enhance students’ knowledge and at the same time equip them with skills and techniques necessary for translation, which are quite new to and unfamiliar with them. Given such objectives, the course is designed with activities involving translation from Vietnamese to English and vice versa from English to Vietnamese. The translation tasks are chosen to be simple enough for students to get acquainted with translation and yet diverse in terms of topic and challenging enough to stimulate their acquisition of new knowledge. Being able to expose themselves to many types of texts on different topics can help students considerably broaden their vocabulary, which is crucial to the work of a translator. Moreover, through these activities they are introduced to new concepts in translation, one of which is unit of translation. This concept can draw their attention to the fact that translation is not necessarily at word level as usually seen in word-for-word translation but also involves phrase, sentence or even paragraph levels depending on the type of translation unit being considered. As a result, learners will be more careful in their translation and will be able to choose appropriate methods to translate effectively and accurately. With the aforementioned objectives and the fact that collocations play important roles both in vocabulary acquisition and in translation, collocations teaching/learning should be included in this course and considered as an important element in the teaching program. However, it has been seen that teachers of translation tend to lay more emphasis on practical translation techniques and strategies rather than elements such as collocations due to their belief that the latter should be taught in grammar courses. The teaching of collocations, therefore, may receive inadequate attention in Basic Translation regardless of its importance.
3.2.2. Participants The current study focused on learners’ collocational errors in translation. In order to have a thorough view on the issue and to suggest appropriate remedies, relevant data were collected not only from learners but also from teachers. That is to say, the study investigated two groups of participants: one of students and one of teachers.
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3.2.2.1. Student participants The student participants in this study were the students of the five Basic Translation classes mentioned above. They were all juniors at EF, USSH, who had spent 4 semesters polishing their skills through general English courses and other introductory courses (e.g. Academic Writing, Introduction to Linguistics, etc.). Therefore, they were supposed to be at a high level of English proficiency and familiar with collocations, which frequently appear in the course books of these subjects. Moreover, the students had also been attending the basic translation course, which equipped them with necessary skills and knowledge of translation. To put it differently, they completely met the requirements for participating in the study. Given the reason above and the fact that the seniors, who were also potential candidates, were busy with their internship and preparation for graduation, the juniors seemed to be the best choice available. Among these five classes, one was randomly chosen to carry out the pilot study. The other four, which participated in the main study, consisted of 136 students in total. However, as the collection of data was carried out in multiple phases, the numbers of students participated in these phases were different due to uncontrollable reasons. To be precise, there were 136 midterm exam papers in Basic Translation collected from the 136 students because all of them had taken part in the exam. However, the number of students taking the translation test was only 89 since some of them were absent on the days the test was conducted. For the same reason, there were 104 students responding to the questionnaire and the COLLEX test, which were carried out simultaneously. Ideally, the number of participants should be consistent through all the phases of data collection. However, due to the constraints of time and the tight schedule of these classes, it was impossible to arrange a better time when all the students would be present. Nevertheless, the researcher managed to attain data from as many students as possible. Moreover, in terms of quantity, the number of participants in each aforementioned phases seemed also acceptable.
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3.2.2.2. Teacher participants In addition to the students, the teachers of the Basic Translation classes also participated in the study, or precisely in the interview. In total, there were four teachers in charge of the five mentioned classes. One of them, however, could not take part in the study due to personal reasons. The other three showed great interest in the study and were willing to participate. All of them hold a Master degree in TESOL and had much experience in both teaching and translation. Their gender was not important in the present study, but it was worth mentioning that all of the three teacher participants were female. Except for the information above, other personal information about the teachers was considered private and unnecessary for the study and thus were not to be presented. Besides, the teacher participants were tagged with the following codes: T1, T2 and T3 to keep their answers anonymous as a way to protect their personal identities and stimulate accurate responses. Three teacher participants might be considered a small number and might not be representing enough. However, since the current study focused on the Basic Translation classes and at the time the study was carried out they were the only teachers teaching the course, they were inevitably the only choice. Moreover, as they had directly taught the classes, they were undoubtedly the ones having the most thorough and accurate view on the students and the teaching situation. In other words, they were not only the only but also the best candidates for the study.
3.2.3. COCA As mentioned in the operational definition of collocation, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) was used in the current study as a reference source for categorizing the combinations produced by the students. There were reasons for COCA but not any other corpora or reference sources to be chosen. Firstly, in previous studies a collocation dictionary can be used instead of a corpus, or both of them can be employed at the same time. However, since collocation dictionaries are developed based on corpora and have much smaller database, replacing the latter with the former or using both of them is inefficient and unnecessary. For that reason, corpora remain the prime choice in this study.
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Regarding the corpora of native speakers of English, there are several major ones in addition to COCA, including the British National Corpus (BNC) and the American National Corpus (ANC), etc. Compared to them, COCA has certain advantages. Firstly, with a database of more than 520 million words, recently updated in 2015, COCA is not only the largest but also the most up-to-date corpus at the moment. Since the way people use languages changes over time, such a corpus will be more reliable as it reflects accurately the current, ongoing changes in the language. Its larger database with 20 million words added each year also means that the corpus is more representative. Secondly, COCA is one of a few corpora providing easy access through the Internet and a powerful search engine. Last but not least, according to Dang (2014), American English is more popular among EF students due to its growing popularity, especially in movies, reality shows, music, etc. COCA, as a corpus of American English, is obviously more suitable for the analysis of the language used by young people. For the reasons above, COCA is inevitably the most appropriate corpus for the current study. COCA is accessible at http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/. The user interface is quite simple to understand and convenient to use. On top of that, the corpus provides a powerful search engine with many functions necessary for a variety of research purposes. In the present study, however, the corpus was used for two main purposes. The first one was to design the research tools, which will be described later in this chapter. The second one was to check if a combination is a collocation or not using two values provided by the corpus: raw frequency (FREQ) and mutual information score (MI). The FREQ of a combination is the times it occurs in the corpus. It shows how frequently that combination is used by native speakers. In other words, the higher the FREQ of a combination is, the more commonly it is used. The concept of MI, however, is more complicated. According to Church & Hanks (1990), it “compares the probability of observing x and y together (the joint probability) with the probabilities of observing x and y independently (chance)” (p.23). Hodne (2009) suggested that the higher the MI score is the stronger the bond between the elements in a combination is. The MI score, therefore, can be simply understood as a value indicating the strength of the bond in a combination. As previously discussed in 43
Chapter 2, for a combination to be considered as a collocation, it must be frequently used by native speakers and has a strong bond between its components. The FREQ and the MI score provided by COCA, therefore, were used as the criteria to identify collocations. The way these criteria were applied in the present study has already been discussed in the operational definition in Chapter 2.
3.2.4. Research instruments In order to collect accurate and reliable data to answer the research questions, the current study employed several research instruments including: (1) the students’ midterm exam papers, (2) a translation test, (3) a COLLEX test, (4) a questionnaire and (5) an interview. Each of them served a specific purpose. The students’ exam papers and the translation test reflected the learners’ productive knowledge of collocations and provided essential data for the analyses of errors. The COLLEX test, on the other hand, was used to test their receptive knowledge. Together, these instruments showed a more complete picture of the students’ collocational knowledge. The questionnaire and the interview, additionally, aimed to investigated the teaching and learning of collocations in Basic Translation from both teachers’ and learners’ perspectives. 3.2.4.1. Students’ midterm exam papers in Basic Translation As previously discussed, corpora are valuable and reliable sources of data in error analysis thanks to the great number of authentic texts and the diversity of topics they cover. Usually, researchers would make use of official corpora such as the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE). However, when there are no appropriate corpora available, a collection of texts produced naturally and spontaneously by learners can be used as a substitution because they can accurately reflect learners’ competence and thus should be as authentic as ones in a corpus. In the present study, since no ready-made corpus of Vietnamese learners of English was available, the students’ midterm exam papers were chosen as the source of data. In previous studies, researchers often make use of learners’ final exam papers, as seen in Dang (2014) and Nguyen (2014). Nevertheless, at the moment the current study was carried out, the students did not take the final exam yet. Hence, the researcher had 44
to opt for the midterm papers instead. Moreover, while the final exam would be organized by the faculty with the same questions for all of the classes, the midterm exam was decided by teachers and thus the questions were different from one class to another. This turned out to be an advantage of using the midterm exam papers. Since they were collected from different classes, the translation tasks in these papers probably covered different topics and thus the data collected would be more diverse. There were a total of 136 midterm exam papers collected. All of these papers consisted of two main parts: one required the students to translate from English to Vietnamese, the other from Vietnamese to English. Due to the scope of the study, only the Vietnamese – English translation tasks were taken into account. These tasks consisted texts that focused on several different topics, including: health, society, environment, literature, etc. The papers, therefore, were expected to provide a large amount of authentic data for the current study. 3.2.4.2. Translation test In addition to the exam papers, the translation test was also used to collect collocational errors from the students. The format of the test was adapted from Kurosaki (2012); its content, nonetheless, was developed by the researcher to match the current research context. Kurosaki (2012) introduced a type of translation test in which the respondents were asked to translate word combinations from their L1 into English. The combinations to be translated were put in specific contexts as an aid to their comprehension. The author, however, argued that the aim of the test was to test learners’ collocational knowledge, and thus unnecessary factors that hindered their performance should be eliminated. For that reason, translations of the contexts were provided beforehand, leaving only the target combinations for the respondents to translate. Moreover, this also considerably reduced the amount of time needed to carry out the test, which is also important in studies where time pressure is a problem. With the aforementioned advantages, this test format was appropriate for the current study. However, in order to give the student participants more freedom in their answers, they were allowed to
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produce their own translations of the contexts if they were not satisfied with the given one. Because the study of Kurosaki (2012) focused on French and Japanese learners’ of English, the content of the test could not be applied in the present study due to the difference in participants’ L1. For that reason, the researcher had to make a new translation test based on the original format. The development of the test consisted of three main steps: (1) choosing the target collocations, (2) choosing the contexts and (3) creating and modifying the test. First of all, adjective-noun combinations were collected from two sources. The first one was course books that the students had studied such as Interactions, Mosaic, etc., since the lexical items in these books were expected to be familiar with and appropriate to them. The second source was other studies on collocations such as Shehata (2008) and Kurosaki (2012), in which lists of common collocations extracted from corpora were included. These collocations, according to the authors, occurred frequently in daily use of language and thus were usually introduced to learners. Then, these collected combinations were checked in COCA to see whether they matched the criteria set by the operational definition (FREQ ≥ 5, MI ≥ 3). After that, the combinations satisfying the aforementioned conditions were checked again using the Oxford Text Checker, a text difficulty assessing tool based on the Oxford 3000™, to choose the combinations appropriate for the students’ level of English. According to the publisher, a typical text at low intermediate level should have about 100% of the words appearing in the Oxford 3000™. As the student participants were 3rd year English-majored students, their level should be above intermediate. Therefore, the combinations which passed the test of the Oxford Text Checker could be considered appropriate for the students’ level. The others, on the other hand, were excluded. Finally, from these remaining collocations, the researcher carefully chose the most suitable ones for the collection and analysis of errors basing on the criteria mentioned in the conceptual framework (e.g. the selected combinations should potentially reflect different causes of errors and include both congruent and incongruent collocations, etc.). The result of the whole process was 42 target adjective-noun collocations, which were later reduced to 20 after the pilot test. 46
In the second step, the context for each selected collocation was chosen. Again, COCA was employed as the source. Firstly, the researcher looked up in the corpora with the chosen collocations as the keywords. With each entry, all the sentences containing the keyword were shown. For each keyword, one sentence or group of sentences were chosen. The selected sentences must provide meaningful and complete contexts, in which the target collocations could be accurately understood. At the same time, they must also match the students’ level of English. Therefore, the chosen sentences were also checked in the Oxford Text Checker. The sentences containing words outside the Oxford 3000™ were replaced or simplified in order to minimize unnecessary difficulties for the students. Subsequently, the selected contexts were translated into Vietnamese. The researcher tried to make the translations as natural as possible, and at the same time to maintain the equivalent structure of the target collocations, which means the adjective-noun collocations in English should be translated into noun-adjective (or noun-noun in some cases) collocations in Vietnamese. The reason for the sentences to be strictly translated like that was to direct the students’ attention to the target collocations. The sentences and its Vietnamese translations, finally, were paired, with the target collocations being erased from the English ones. The students taking the test had to fill in the blanks with the correct collocations, using the hints given by the Vietnamese version. The following is a sample item of the translation test3: Karlow mất một chân trong chiến tranh và đã phải đi đến Philadelphia để được lắp một cái chân giả mới. Karlow had lost his leg in the war and had gone to Philadelphia to be fitted for a new ____________. The respondents had to translate only the target combination. However, they were allowed to provide their own translations of the whole sentences if they wanted. From 42 chosen combinations, 42 corresponding test items were created initially. After the pilot test, which will be presented later in this chapter, some of them were opted out. The translation test used in the current study, subsequently, consisted of 20 items.
3
A sample of the translation test is included in Appendix 1 47
The whole process of choosing the test format, selecting the target collocations and the relevant contexts, as well as creating and modifying the test described above aimed to eliminate unnecessary factor hindering the students’ performance and to focus on testing their collocational knowledge. 3.2.4.3. COLLEX test The two instruments above served as the main tools to collect collocational errors from the students and thus focused only on their productive knowledge. However, the participants’ receptive knowledge should also be investigated for a more complete picture of their collocational knowledge. For that reason, the COLLEX test was included in the present study. The format of the test was adapted from Gyllstad (2007) with some modifications. The original version required respondents to make choices between only two options: one correct collocation and one distractor. With a 50/50 chance for respondents to answer correctly even when they do not know the correct option, the test seems not demanding enough. Moreover, with such a format, learners only need to know the correct option; the other one is obviously incorrect. However, it was argued that receptive knowledge involves not only the ability to recognize correct lexical items but also the ability to point out incorrect ones. For the reasons above, the test format was modified with a third option both are correct added. This not only increased the difficulty of the test but also made it possible to check learners’ ability to identify erroneous collocations. Similar to the translation test, the COLLEX test consisted of 20 items. Each item had three options, one of which was the target collocations used in the translation test. The other one was either an incorrect combination or another correct collocation having the same meaning with the first one. The incorrect combinations were created by translating from their Vietnamese equivalents using word-for-word translation or replacing one component of a correct collocation with its synonym, or taken from the students’ answers to the translation test. The correct collocations for this option were selected from COCA and also from the translation test. The last option was the newly added one, namely both are correct, mentioned above.
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With the aforementioned modifications, the COLLEX test could investigate learners’ receptive knowledge of collocation more thoroughly. Moreover, by using some of the students’ answers to the translation test as options, the researcher expected the COLLEX test would yield valuable information supporting the error analysis. 3.2.4.4. Interview The interview was carried out for a thorough view on the actual teaching and learning of collocations in Basic Translation from the teachers’ perspective. As the ones directly teaching these classes, they understood their students and the current situation more clearly and thoroughly than anyone else. Their opinion, therefore, was expected to yield accurate and valuable data supporting the error analysis and remediation. The interview was carefully prepared with eight questions focusing on three main aspects: (1) the teachers’ perception of collocation, (2) their teaching practices and (3) their observation of the students’ performance. The teachers’ perception was taken into account because it was an important factor influencing their teaching practices. In the present study, the teachers’ perception of collocations was investigated through two questions. The first one aimed to explore their knowledge of collocations. A teacher with profound knowledge about collocations was likely to have clear perception of the matter. The second question asked about their opinion on the role of collocations in translation and translation teaching. If the teachers thought they were useful, they would probably include them in the teaching program. On the contrary, they would neglect them if they considered them unimportant. The teaching of collocations was the next factor to be investigated. Based on the teachers’ answers to the filtering question of whether they taught collocations in Basic Translation, more questions would be asked to elicit further information. If their answer was yes, the next questions would be about their method of teaching collocations and corresponding problems they had to face. Conversely, if they denied teaching collocations in Basic Translation, the questions would be ones that sought for the reason and further elaboration.
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Finally, the teachers’ observation of learners’ performance on collocations were explored through five questions, each of which focused on a specific aspect. The first one aimed to find out if the students had any problems in translating collocations and what the problems were. The second one focused on the benefits which the teachers’ instruction on collocations could bring to the students. Obviously, this question was relevant only if the teacher affirmed their teaching of collocations in class. In accordance with the first question, the third one asked about the strategies the students used to deal with difficulties in translating collocations. The last question asked for the teachers’ opinion about the causes of collocational errors in learners’ translations. Despite focusing on different aspects, all of the questions above served one chief purpose: to provide the researcher with an insight, from the teachers’ perspective, into the learning of collocations in Basic Translation. 3.2.4.5. Questionnaire The questionnaire was included in the present study to collect information that cannot be achieved through either the students’ exam papers or the tests. Similar to the interview, the questionnaire also focused on three major aspects: (1) the students’ perception of collocations, (2) their acquisition (learning) of collocations and (3) the teaching of collocations from their perspective. Their perception was taken into account because, similar to the teachers’, it could greatly influence their acquisition of collocations. Their opinion on the learning and teaching of collocations was collected for comparison with that of the teachers and also for more insight into the issue. The items for the questionnaire were adapted from Dang (2014) and Mai (2010). The questionnaire in Mai (2010) was designed to investigate learners’ use of collocations in V-E translation, which was in line with the present study. It consisted of 12 items which mainly focused on learners’ perception, acquisition and use of collocations. Nevertheless, it failed to take into account some important factors such as the teaching and learning of collocations, which were investigated carefully in Dang (2014). However, the questionnaire in this study was designed for learners of Academic Writing. Therefore, the two questionnaires were combined and adapted to match the purposes of the present study. The questionnaire of the present study, thus, consisted
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of 11 items, divided into three parts, namely perception of collocations, acquisition and use of collocations and teaching of collocations. The first part was comprised of four items adapted from Mai (2010) which asked about the students’ perception of collocations. The first and the second questions (Q1, Q2) investigated their knowledge of the term collocation and the sources of knowledge. Among them, Q1 functioned as a filter. The student answering No to this question would be asked to finish the questionnaire there, because without the necessary knowledge their answers to the other questions would be unreliable. The third and the fourth questions (Q3, Q4) focused on their opinion about the role of collocations in translation. Again, Q3 acted as a filter. The students who answered No to Q3 would be asked to skip Q4 since it was pointless for those who failed to recognize the importance of collocations in translation to elaborate their ideas on the issue. The next part consisted of five items which were also adapted from Mai (ibid.). Each of them focused on one aspect of the students’ acquisition and use of collocations. Question 5 (Q5) aimed to find out the methods they frequently used to broaden their collocational knowledge. The next three questions (Q6, Q7 and Q8) respectively asked how frequently the students cared about choosing correct collocations in translation, faced difficulties in doing so and paid attention to their collocational errors. The last question of this part (Q9) asked about the strategies frequently used by the students to deal with collocation-related difficulties in translation. The third part consisted of two items investigating the teaching of collocations in Basic Translation. The first one (Q10), again, served as a filter, asking the students whether collocations were taught by the teachers. Those who affirmed the teachers’ instruction of collocations in class would be asked to elaborate on the specific teaching strategies listed in Q11, which was adapted from Dang (2014) as previously mentioned in Chapter 2. The questionnaire was expected to provide valuable data related to the teaching and learning of collocation in Basic Translation from the students’ perspective which were unattainable through other instruments. Since the collected data could possibly yield important information supporting the analysis and remediation of errors, it was
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considered an important research instrument in the current study. A summary of the items and their functions were given in Table 3.1 below. Table 3.1: Description of the questionnaire items Part
Question
Content Ss’ knowledge of collocation
Q1 Q2 1
Q3
Ss’ perception of collocations
Q4 Q5 Q6 2
Q7 Q8
Ss’ acquisition and use of collocations in translation
Q9 Q10 3 Q11
Teaching of collocations
Ss’ knowledge of the terms collocation Sources of Ss’ knowledge of the terms
Ss’ opinion on the role of collocations in translation Acquisition of collocations
Whether knowledge about collocations is important in translation How knowledge about collocations actually helps Ss in their translation How Ss acquire knowledge about collocation Ss’ awareness of choosing correct combinations in translation How often Ss use wrong combinations Use of collocations Ss’ awareness of their own errors Ss’ strategies to deal with difficulties in translating collocations Whether collocations are taught in Basic Translation classes Practical strategies of the teaching of collocations in Basic Translation classes
3.2.4.6. Summary of the research instruments The present study employed a variety of research instruments for a multi-perspective insight into the problem. Each of them served a specific purpose and had its own limitations. Nevertheless, when combined, not only did they compensated for each other’s weaknesses, but also supported one another to yield reliable data for the study. A summary of the instruments and their purposes were given in Table 3.2 below. Table 3.2: Summary of the research instruments Instruments Ss’ midterm exam papers in Basic Translation Translation test COLLEX test Questionnaire Interview
Number of participants 136 students
Purpose of use Data for error analysis
89 students 104 students 104 students 3 teachers
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Ss’ receptive knowledge Information on the teaching/learning of collocations from Ss’ perspective Information on the teaching/learning of collocations from Ts’ perspective
3.2.5. Pilot study The pilot study was carried out in order to make sure that the research instruments would work correctly in the main study. The pilot study involved the translation test and the questionnaire to the students. The COLLEX test was created later as it needed some information from the pilot study. Furthermore, its design was not as complicated as that of the translation. For those reasons, the COLLEX test was not included in the pilot study. As mentioned above, the translation test initially consisted of 42 items. The test papers were delivered to 19 of the students of the Basic Translation class chosen for carrying out the pilot study. The students were expected to complete the test in 30 minutes. However, most of them needed about 40 minutes to finish their task. The test papers later were scored based on the scoring criteria which will be presented later in this chapter. After that Cronbach’s Alpha was calculated to ensure the reliability of the translation test. Table 3.3: Reliability statistics of the translation test Reliability Statistics Cronbach's Alpha N of Items .863 42
The Cronbach’s Alpha for the translation test was 0.863, higher than the acceptable coefficient 0.7 in most social science research, which confirmed the internal consistency of the test’s items and its reliability. However, the test with 42 items still seemed too long for the main study. As seen in the pilot study, most of the participants needed about 40 minutes to finish the test while the time limit for the collection of data in class could hardly exceed 30 minutes, not to mention the time needed for other procedures such as giving instruction, distributing and collecting the test papers, etc. For the reasons above, the researcher decided to reduce the number of items in the test to 20 by opting out the items that appeared to be too easy for the participants. As a result, the translation test used in the main study consisted of only 20 items and was estimated to be completed in 20 minutes.
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The questionnaire was given to the rest of the class (20 students). The reason for the translation test and the questionnaire being distributed to two different groups was to ensure that the pilot study would not occupy too much time of the class although the teacher in charge was very supportive and willing to allow more time for it. For the questionnaire included both multiple choice items and open-ended questions, the Cronbach’s Alpha for it could not be calculated. The pilot study of the questionnaire, therefore, was to ensure the students’ clear understanding of the questions and to identify possibly ambiguous or misleading details. After the pilot study, the items causing misunderstanding or difficulties for the students were modified or reworded. The number of items in the questionnaire, however, remained unchanged because all of them proved to be necessary and the average amount of time needed to finish answering the questionnaire was only about 10 minutes. The pilot study not only double-checked the research instruments before the main study was carried out but also provided essential information for creating the COLLEX test. Precisely, some of the most frequent incorrect responses to the translation test were chosen as distractors in the COLLEX. As mentioned above, with these incorrect combinations included, the COLLEX test was expected to generate more relevant information for the analysis of errors. It could suggest, for example, an error was made due to learners’ lack of knowledge or another reason. The pilot study, therefore, was of great importance in the present study.
3.3. Data collection procedure Since the present study employed multiple research instruments, the procedures of data collection were complicated. This section, therefore, provided a detailed description of how data were collected with each research instrument.
3.3.1. Collection of adjective-noun collocational errors As previously mentioned, the adjective-noun collocational errors used in this study were collected from two sources: (1) the students’ midterm exam papers in Basic Translation and (2) their responses to the translation test. The procedures for collecting data from each source were described below.
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3.3.1.1. Collection of errors from students’ midterm exam papers Firstly, adjective-noun combinations in the students’ English translations were carefully identified and extracted from the 136 midterm exam papers in Basic Translation. The researcher, after that, looked in the original texts for the Vietnamese equivalents of these combinations. The equivalents came in different forms including noun-adjective and noun-noun combinations or even long, complicated phrases, which explained why the identification of the adjective-noun combinations and their Vietnamese equivalents had to follow the aforementioned order and not the opposite. In the second step, the identification of collocational errors from the extracted combinations was carried out as follow. First of all, the node (headword) and the collocate of each combination were identified. As discussed in Chapter 2, the present study considered the noun in an adjective-noun combination as the node and the adjective as the collocate. After these elements were determined, COCA was employed as the tool to check their collocability. Based on the criteria and the possibilities set by the operational definition, the FREQ and the MI of a combination in COCA could tell if it was a collocation (FREQ ≥ 5, MI ≥ 3), a free combination (FREQ ≥ 5, MI < 3) or an erroneous/uncommon one (FREQ < 5). A detailed illustration of how COCA was used is given below.
Figure 3.1: The COCA Search Interface 55
In Figure 3.1, the combination common disease was used as an example. The noun disease was the node and therefore was put in the box WORD(S). The square brackets told the program to include both the singular and the plural forms of the noun in the result. The adjective common was the collocate and thus was put in the corresponding box. The box POST LIST below it determined the part of speech of the collocate. The two boxes (with numbers) next to the box COLLOCATES indicated the number of words before (left) and after (right) the headword to be taken into account in each search entry, which was also understood as the span in which the collocate might be found. Since the present study focused only on attributive adjective-noun combinations, the maximum span being considered was five words left to the node. Each combination was checked with the span starting at 1. If the combination could not be found in COCA or had the FREQ below 5 within that span, the span would be increased until the combination appeared and had the FREQ higher than 5. However, if the result was still unsatisfactory at the span of 5, the combination would be considered as non-existent or uncommon because it was mostly impossible to find adjective-noun combinations beyond this span, not to mention that the MI would decrease as the span increased. The two boxes at the bottom were the criteria for sorting and limiting the search results. In the present study, the options were set as above so that both the MI and the FREQ would be shown in the search results as can be seen in Figure 3.2 below.
Figure 3.2: The COCA Result Interface In addition to COCA, the Vietnamese equivalents of the combinations were also taken into account as a criterion to identify errors since it was pointless to produce a correct collocation if the combination could not successfully convey the message of its supposed equivalent in the source text. In other word, a combination failed to transfer the intended message would be considered an error even if it appeared as a perfectly correct collocation in COCA. The evaluation of the translations was done by the researcher with the help from the teachers of Basic Translation.
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To sum up, among the extracted adjective-noun combinations, the ones successfully conveyed the original message and satisfied the criteria set by the operational definition would be considered as collocations or free combinations (depending on which criteria were satisfied). On the contrary, the combinations that did not accurately transfer the message and/or did not meet the criteria would be recognized as errors. 3.3.1.2. Collection of errors from the translation test The translation test was another instrument to collect collocational errors from the students. After the pilot study, the test was modified to match the time limit, which resulted in the number of items being reduced to 20. The refined test later was distributed to the student respondents, except for those who had attended the pilot study. They were asked to provide their name in the test for research purposes, with the assurance that their personal information would be held in strict confidentiality and their performance on the test would by no means affect their academic results. Since the respondents included students from four different classes, the test had to be carried out at different times. Nevertheless, the researcher tried to maintain the consistency of the data collection procedure by giving all of them the same instructions and the same amount of time (25 minutes) to finish the test. However, the number of students going to class on the days the test was carried out was still uncontrollable, which resulted in the inconsistency in number of participants responding to each research instrument, mentioned earlier in this chapter. Consequently, out of the total 136 students of the four classes, only 89 of them responded to the translation test. Due to the tight schedule of these classes, it was impossible to give the test again to those who had missed it. Nevertheless, 89 participants still seemed sufficient for the present study. After the test had been given to the participants, the same procedure used to identify collocational errors in the exam papers was applied to identify errors from the test. Similarly, the combinations produced by the students were extracted and paired with their Vietnamese equivalents. This process, however, was simpler than it had been with the exam papers thanks to the design of the test. Moreover, with such a design,
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the researcher could easily identify the cases where the respondents left an item unfinished, which allowed the investigation into a new category of error, namely abandonment of tasks, which could hardly be approached through the data from the exam papers. After that, COCA and the aforementioned criteria were again employed to distinguish erroneous combinations from correct collocations and free combination.
3.3.2. Collection of additional data As discussed above, in addition to collocational errors, the present study also collected data related to the current teaching and learning of collocations in Basic Translation and learners’ receptive knowledge of collocations in order to support the analysis and remediation of errors. These data were collected through different instruments including the COLLEX test, the questionnaire and the interview. The procedure of data collection with each instrument was presented below. 3.3.2.1. Questionnaire The questionnaire was to collect data on the current teaching/learning of collocations from the students’ perspective. Similar to the translation test, the questionnaire was also given to the student respondents who did not take part in the pilot study. However, due to the fact that the researcher had only about 30 minutes for each time he met the classes, the questionnaire could not be distributed at the same time with the translation test. Instead, another day was chosen for each class, on which the questionnaire, along with the COLLEX test was given to them. On the chosen days, the researcher himself went to the classes at break time and asked the teachers in charge for 30 minutes to work with the classes. The participants, then, were allotted 10 minutes to fill in the questionnaire. Similar to the translation test, there were some students absent and thus did not responded to the questionnaire. Consequently, the total number of students answering the questionnaire was 104. 3.3.2.2. COLLEX test The COLLEX test focused on the students’ receptive knowledge of collocations – an important part of their collocational knowledge which could not be investigated through the error analysis. Similar to the other instrument, this test was also given to the student who did not attended the pilot study. Since the COLLEX test was simpler 58
and less time-consuming than the translation test, it was distributed to the participants on the same day with the questionnaire. With this test, the students were given 15 minutes to complete. Also, they were asked to put their name in the test paper so that the researcher could later compare the result of this test with that of the translation. Since the test was distributed on the same day with the questionnaire, there were also 104 test papers collected in total. 3.3.2.3. Interviews to the teachers Unlike the other instruments, the interview was designed to collect data from the teachers on the teaching and learning of collocations in Basic Translation. There were three teachers willingly taking part in the interview, who were also the teachers in charge of the Basic Translation classes being studied. As they had their own schedules and in order to keep their information confidential, the interviews were carried out individually at the most convenient time for each of them. At the beginning, the purposes of the interview were clearly explained to the teachers. They were assured that the information they were going to provide would be used for the sake of research only, and their identity and personal information would be kept strictly confidential. During the interviews, extensive notes were taken carefully. The interviews were also audiotaped, with the teachers’ permission, in case any piece of information was missed during note-taking.
3.4. Data analysis procedure 3.4.1. Analysis of adjective-noun collocational errors After the collocational errors from the Basic Translation midterm exam papers and the translation test had been collected, they were carefully analyzed. The procedures for analyzing the errors from the two sources were mostly the same except for the difference in the number of categories. The main tools for calculation used in the analysis were the programs Microsoft Excel 2013 and SPSS 20. Firstly, the numbers and percentages of correct collocations, free combinations and errors collected were calculated. Then, the errors were put into the three categories mentioned in the conceptual framework (i.e. wrong choice of noun, wrong choice of 59
adjective and wrong combination). However, for the errors from the translation test, a category called no/incomplete answer was added to deal with the cases when the students left certain items unfinished, which, according to Hussein (2011), was also a type of errors. The number and percentage of errors in each category, after that, was computed. In the next step, the possible causes of the errors were identified based on the list of hypothetical causes of errors presented in Chapter 2. However, the category abandonment of tasks was not taken into account in the analysis of errors from the exam papers, since it was difficult to extract such errors from this source. Besides, during this process a new category, namely others, was added to categorize the errors that did not originate from the hypothetical causes. Their frequencies and percentages were also calculated. Finally, based on the errors and the causes, corresponding corrections were suggested.
3.4.2. Questionnaire Prior to the analysis, the questionnaires were checked carefully so that those with missing information would be excluded. The number of valid questionnaire, fortunately, remained unchanged. After that, the questionnaires were coded and inputted into the SPSS 20. During this process, the data were grouped into three main categories regarding the participants’ perception of collocations, their acquisition and use of collocations, and their opinion on the teaching of collocations in Basic Translation. Simple descriptive statistics of the data including frequency and percentage of the participants’ responses, then, were calculated. These data from the student’s perspective, finally, were compared with those obtained from the teachers and also were used to support the error analysis.
3.4.3. COLLEX test The students’ performance on the COLLEX test would be compared with theirs on the translation test for a more complete picture of their collocational knowledge. For that reason, only the test papers from the students who attended both the COLLEX test and the translation test were taken into account. The chosen COLLEX test papers, then, were scored with each correct answer counted as 1 point, resulting in the maximum score being 20. The chosen translation test papers were also scored again. However,
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this time, free combinations were excluded, leaving only correct collocations as acceptable answers, since the researcher wanted to compare the students’ ability to recognize collocations with their ability to produce collocations. A paired sample ttest with the test scores as variables, then, was computed using SPSS 20 for a general comparison between the participants’ receptive knowledge and their productive knowledge. After that, their performance on each item in the COLLEX test was compared with its counterpart in the translation for a more detailed analysis of the students’ receptive and productive competence in each case, which would probably yield more data on their knowledge of collocations.
3.4.4. Interview The notes of the interviews were carefully checked with the audio recordings to ensure that no information was missing. After that, from the notes and the recordings, data on the teachers’ perception of collocations and their opinions on the teaching and learning of collocations in Basic Translation were extracted and put in corresponding categories. The data, then, were analyzed qualitatively. Particularly, noticeable opinions and comments from the teachers were highlighted and grouped by relevant topics. The data, finally, were compared with those from the students and were also used in the analysis and remediation of errors.
3.5. Summary The chapter provided a complete description of the methodology used in the present study. Based on the conceptual framework, five research instruments, each of which served specific purposes, were designed and presented. In relation to these instruments, the procedure of data collection and the way in which the data were analyzed were also clearly described.
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CHAPTER 4 FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION This chapter presents and discusses the results of the study based on the analysis of the data collected from the research instruments. The data were carefully analyzed in order to find the answer to the research questions mentioned in the previous chapters.
4.1. Data analysis and discussion In order to have a comprehensive insight into the participants’ making of collocational errors, a great amount of data was collected. The participants, as mentioned in Chapter 3, consisted of four classes of 3rd year English majored students studying Basic Translation and the three instructors teaching the subject. The data were then analyzed following the conceptual framework presented in Chapter 2. As the main aim of the study, the analyses of collocational errors are presented first. The analyses of data from the other sources, including the multiple choice test, the questionnaire and the interview, are discussed later.
4.1.1. Analysis of collocational errors from students’ exam papers As mentioned in the previous chapters, the collocational errors to be analyzed were collected from two primary sources, i.e. the students’ midterm exam papers in Basic Translation and the translation test designed by the researcher. Both sources were important to the study. While the former, as a corpus-based source, provided authentic information about the participants’ use of collocations, the latter allowed the research to investigate the issue more thoroughly from another perspective, with the kinds of errors that may not be seen in the exam papers. The collected errors were, then, analyzed based on the framework of error analysis adopted from Gass & Selinker (2008). In this section, the results of the error analysis, including the types and the hypothetical causes of errors, will be presented for each source of data respectively, starting with the errors from the students’ midterm-exam papers. From 136 midterm exam papers in Basic Translation, a totality of 1427 adjective-noun combinations was identified. Based on the criteria set by the operational definition presented in Chapter 2, these combinations were then classified into three categories, 62
namely correct collocations, free combinations and erroneous combinations, as shown in Table 4.1 below. Table 4.1: Lexical combinations from the midterm-exam papers
Count Percent
Acceptable Combinations Correct Collocations Free Combinations 731 285 51.2% 20.0%
Errors Total Erroneous Combinations 411 1427 28.8% 100%
One noticeable point from the result is the fact that the percentage of free combinations is much lower than the number observed in several recent studies, especially in Dang (2014) – a study involved the analysis of collocational errors, which also used the same criteria to categories lexical combinations. In the aforementioned study, there were 5403 free combinations out of 6285 identified combinations, accounting for 85.97% of the totality. The explanation given to such a high number was that “free combinations were very popular and used very frequently” and that they could “appear several times in an essay” with “every of their single incidence was recorded and counted” (ibid., p. 83). However, while such an explanation was reasonable and convincing, it does not mean that the low percentage of free combinations in the present study is inaccurate. In fact, there is a factor which may explain the difference: the targets of the two studies. In Dang (ibid.), the author investigated multiple types of lexical combinations, including verb-noun, adjective-noun, adverb-adjective, etc. Among them, there might be certain types of combination, such as verb-noun, that allowed freer combinations of words and thus led to the high frequency of free combinations observed. In contrast, the present study only focuses on one type of combination, i.e. adjective-noun. The low proportion of free combination, therefore, may indicate that the combination between adjectives and nouns is more restricted, which limits the availability of choices in combining adjectives and nouns, making accurate production of adjective-noun collocations more challenging. The fact that more than a half of all the combinations (51.2%) are correct collocation seems to be encouraging. It signifies that the students had knowledge about collocation and made use of it in their translations. However, it is an ineligible fact that they did also produce erroneous combinations in the process. Thus, no conclusion or
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assumption should be carelessly made before the significance of the erroneous combinations is thoroughly investigated. Regarding the number of erroneous combinations produced by the students, there are 411 of such combinations, accounting for 28.8% of all the combinations acquired. Although the percentage of erroneous combinations is lower than that of correct collocations (50.1%), this number still has its own significance due to some reasons. Firstly, 28.8% is, in fact, a considerable number compared to other similar studies. The proportion of incorrect combinations in Dang (2014), for example, was only 6.72%. In Nguyen (2014) it was 31.9%, which is just slightly higher than 28.8%. Secondly, it is necessary to note that many of the combinations in the midterm-exams, according to the teachers, were not really unfamiliar to the students, as they had been introduced to them during the course. Moreover, the students also had access to monolingual dictionaries during the exam, which is also an advantage for them. With the given conditions, it is expected that the students performed better in their test. To put it differently, the percentage of erroneous combinations (28.8%), though may not be a discouraging number, is significant enough to draw attention towards the students’ knowledge about collocation. To sum up, the figures indicate that although the students possessed knowledge about collocation and used it in their translations with relatively high degree of accuracy, a considerable number of incorrect combinations were inevitably made, which might be partly attributed to the possibly high restriction in adjective-noun combinations, shown by the low percentage of free combinations. That factor, however, is not enough to explain all the difficulties the participants had to face in using collocation correctly. For a deeper insight into the problem, the types and the causes of errors need to be analyzed. 4.1.1.1. Types of errors The erroneous combinations were classified into three categories, namely wrong choice of adjective, wrong choice of noun and wrong combination, which reflect the nature of the errors. The first one, as the name suggested, refers to combinations which are made incorrect because of the adjectives and can be improved by replacing them
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with other adjectives. Regarding the second category, it is the nouns that need replacing. The last one, however, is more complicated than the other two, since combinations of this type cannot be improved by simply changing either of their components. The purpose of this categorization is to find out which tends to be more problematic for students: choosing the collocate (adjective), choosing the node (noun) or producing the combination itself. For that purpose, the incorrect combinations were categorized and presented in Table 4.2 below. Table 4.2: Types of collocational errors from the midterm-exam papers Types of Error
Count
Percent
Wrong Choice of Adjective
213
51.8%
Wrong Choice of Noun
62
15.1%
Wrong Combination
136
33.1%
Total
411
100%
Examples underground (coral) reef, destroying (fishing) method, fatal rate small piece (of money), modern chemical environment protecting, environmental living, medical pharma
The figures show that wrong choice of adjective is the dominant category, with 213 instances accounting for 51.8% of the collected errors. Some typical examples of this type are combinations such as underground (coral) reef (dải đá ngầm san hô), destroying (fishing) method, fatal rate (tử lệ tử vong) which should be respectively translated as underwater (coral) reef, destructive (fishing) method and death rate. At the second position is the category wrong combination, which accounts for 33.1% of the totality, with incorrect combinations like environment protecting (việc bảo vệ môi trường – environmental protection), environmental living (môi trường sống – living environment), medical pharma (công ty dược – pharmaceutical company), etc. Wrong choice of noun, as a result, is the category with the smallest number of incidences. In total, there are only 62 combinations (15.1%) in which the nouns were incorrectly chosen. This category includes the instances such as small piece (of money) (một món tiền nhỏ – small amount of money), modern chemical (dược phẩm hiện đại – modern medicine) etc. The statistics above, in other words, signify that choosing correct adjectives for adjective-noun combinations seems to be the most common challenge for the participants. Nevertheless, it does not mean that choosing nouns is easy for them, 65
because when the two categories wrong choice of noun and wrong combination being added together, the total number of combinations having the nouns incorrectly chosen were 198, accounting for nearly half of all the errors. Besides, as previously discussed, in an adjective-noun combination, it is the noun that determines the adjective, and thus incorrect choice of the former usually leads to incorrect choice of the latter, which explains why the number of errors with both adjectives and nouns incorrectly used is even higher than that of errors with incorrect nouns alone. To put it differently, it is possible to conclude that choosing nouns for adjective-noun combinations is also quite a problem for the participants. The categorization of error types has shed some light on the issue. In the next section, the causes of errors are identified for deeper insights. 4.1.1.2. Causes of errors One essential step in error analysis is identifying the causes of errors, by which solutions can be found to avoid making similar errors in the future. However, it is not an easy task because the making of errors is a complicated mental process and in most circumstances, there is little evidence strong enough for researchers to confirm with 100 percent of certainty that an error is caused by a certain factor. For that reason, this process of identifying the causes of errors needs to be done carefully to reduce the probability of making false assumptions. In the present study, in order to achieve a result with as high degree of accuracy as possible, a comprehensive list of hypothetical causes of collocational errors was employed. Based on this list, the underlying causes of all 411 errors were painstakingly analyzed and presented in Table 4.3 below. Table 4.3: Causes of collocational errors from the midterm-exam papers4 Causes of Errors Approximation Use of Synonyms L1 Transfer Word Coinage Formal Confusion Others Total
4
Count 120 73 128 19 112 21 473
Percent 25.4% 15.4% 27.1% 4.0% 23.7% 4.4% 100.0%
Examples fish-catching/hunting methods, ozone damaging cardiovascular troubles, submarine (coral) reef attractive (street) food, underground (coral) reef uneffective medicine, ozone destroyment Europe countries, tasteful food coral field/ plain, diligent web, coral oust ranges
Refer to Appendix 6 for more examples of students' collocational errors in context 66
Along with the five hypothetical causes in the list, a new category, called others, was added to address the cases that did not belong to the other five or needed special explanation. Moreover, it is important to note that some errors might have more than one cause; the total number of causes, therefore, is higher than that of the errors as shown in Table 4.3 above. Approximation According to Hong et al. (2011), approximation is the act of using an incorrect lexical item in place of the expected one to express an intended meaning due to some similarity in the semantic properties of the two items. Approximation, as previously mentioned, is a form of paraphrasing, which usually happens when learners do not know or cannot find the necessary word and opt to use another lexical item instead. This strategy, as observed in other studies, is a common cause of error. Hong et al. (2011), for example, have found that 21.19% of the errors collected in their study had been caused by approximation. Similarly, Dang (2014) revealed that about 27.18% of the collected errors resulting from the use of this strategy. In the present study, the result seems to conform with that of the aforementioned ones. With 120 observed cases, making up 24.5% of the totality, approximation is the second most common cause of errors. It seems that the students, unable to produce the desired combination, usually resorted to this strategy to produce combinations using the words which they thought could convey the intended messages. For example, when translating the phrase các phương thức đánh cá, some students failed to produe the collocation fishing methods, and thus opted to use some incorrect/uncommon combinations such as fish-catching methods, fish-hunting methods or fishing measures. There were some similarities in terms of semantic properties between fishcatching/fish-hunting and fishing or between measure and method, which might explain the students’ making of errors. Similarly, ozone damaging, an incorrect translation of việc phá hủy tầng ozone, was also a result of approximation when they were unable to produce correct expression such as ozone destruction/ depletion. Use of synonyms It is commonly known that distinguishing between synonyms is a big challenge to learners of English. Moreover, many of them usually resort to bilingual dictionaries, 67
which often provide the same translation/explanation for synonyms. As a result, the learners tend to make a false assumption that words which are synonyms of each other have the same meaning and thus can be used interchangeably. Such an assumption, along with the lack of knowledge about restriction rules of collocations, usually leads to the learners’ making of collocational errors by using a synonym in place of the desired word. The statistics show that the use of synonyms is also a common cause of error, with 73 cases, making up 15.4 % of the total number. Some typical examples for this cause of errors are combinations such as popular diseases (những bệnh phổ biến), cardiovascular troubles (vấn đề về tim mạch) and submarine (coral) reef (dải đá ngầm san hô) which should be translated as common diseases, cardiovascular problems, and underwater (coral) reef respectively. It is possible that the synonymous meanings between popular and common, trouble and problem, submarine and underwater are the reason making the learners choose the former ones to substitute the latter, without knowing that the uses of them are inappropriate in these combinations. The result signifies that there was possibly a lack of knowledge about restriction rules of collocations among the participants, and they also, as Kim (2009) suggested, had difficulties in choosing the correct word among the synonymous ones in the target language. L1 transfer The influence of L1 on learners’ use of L2 is commonly seen, especially when they have to deal with collocations and translation. It has been confirmed by several authors including Kim (2009), Mai (2010), and Kurosaki (2012) that learners’ use of English collocations might be heavily influenced by their L1. Therefore, in the present study L1 transfer was expected to be a major cause of collocational errors. It seems that the statistical evidence also supports the aforementioned assumption. There were 128 errors resulting from L1 transfer, accounting for 27.1% of all the observed cases, making it the primary cause of errors. The influence of L1 on the participants’ making of collocational errors usually took place in two circumstances. The first one is when two or more words in English share the same equivalent in learners’ L1. When this happens, learners may possibly use the one they know in 68
English for every single incidence of its assumed L1 equivalent appearing in the original text, unaware that the two words are not always the correct equivalent of each other. This seems similar to the case of synonyms and thus making it confusing to distinguish between them. However, while synonymous words can be used interchangeably in certain cases, the words sharing the same L1 equivalent described here can hardly replace each other in most situations. This phenomenon accounted for a number of errors caused by L1 transfer, with some typical examples such as attractive (street) food, underground (coral) reef, nutrition system which are incorrect substitutions of delicious (street) food (món ăn đường phố hấp dẫn), underwater coral reef (bãi đá ngầm san hô) and nutritious diet (chế độ dinh dưỡng) respectively. The second circumstance for L1 transfer to take place is when the learners resorted to literal word-for-word translation, which usually ended up in an erroneous translation violating the rules of collocation or betraying the implying message of the source text. Upon investigating the collected errors, a relative large number of incorrect combinations caused by literal word-for-word translation were identified. For example, the phrase bài toán khó was figuratively used in one of the tests, which actually meant a big problem or a challenge. However, some of the students, unable to realize the figurative meaning of the phrase, literally translated it as mathematic problems or a tricky math. Another example of errors caused by word-for-word translation is the case of bệnh điếc (deafness or hearing loss) which was translated by some students as deaf disease. While Vietnamese people tend to use the word bệnh (disease) for most abnormalities of the body, the native speakers of English consider deafness as a handicap rather than a disease. This difference in cultural perspective may be the cause of the aforementioned translation. Similarly, the phrases mẩu bánh mì con con (a tiny piece of bread) and một món tiền nhỏ (a small amount of money) were translated as a small bread and a small money respectively, which also violated the rules of word-combination. It seems that collocations and translation all together created big challenges for the students. Being unable to produce a desired combination, they resorted to their knowledge in L1 and literal word-for-word translation, which led to the large number of errors observed. The result is in line with that of Dang (2014), which also focused 69
on Vietnamese learners of English. In her study, the author also pointed out that L1 transfer was the primary cause of collocational errors. However, some other authors, who have conducted studies on participants with different L1 other than Vietnamese, have come to quite different results. Farghal & Obiedat (1995) and Hong et al. (2011), for example, have pointed out that L1 transfer only accounted for 12.6% and 11.92% of the errors made by their participants respectively, although those figures still made L1 transfer a common cause of errors in their studies. One possible explanation for this is the difference in the participants’ native languages. Besides, the theoretical framework chosen by the authors might also have affected the results. Regardless of the differences in statistics, all of the authors have agreed that L1 transfer is one of the major causes of collocational errors, which supports the result of the present study. Word coinage This hypothetical cause of errors refers to the act of creating new vocabulary items, which usually results in malformed words or spelling mistakes. This cause of errors has been neglected by several authors due to its low frequency of occurrence. However, there were still several incidences of word coinage observed in the study. Some of the errors, such as radioactive emition, nutrious regime, pharmatical products, etc. might result from the learners’ uncertainty of the desired words (i.e. emission, nutritious and pharmaceutical respectively). It is possible that the students had seen those words before, but due to certain reasons they failed to use them correctly and thus ended up with those spelling mistakes. In some other cases, the errors were made by the students’ misuse of affixes. The students might know the roots of the desired words but were uncertain about the words themselves. As a result, they tried to form the words using the affixes they know, which led to some malformed words such as uneffective medicine, ozone destroyment, etc. In total, there were 19 errors caused by word coinage, accounting for only 4% of all the cases. Although the number is small, the errors described above are the proof of the students’ lack of knowledge about both collocation and vocabulary in general. Formal confusion The term formal confusion used in this study refers to the cases in which learners use another part of speech of the desired word, or another English word that looks or 70
sounds like the desired one in place of the word itself. This seems similar to word coinage; however, while word coinage results in incorrect vocabulary items, the misused words resulting from formal confusion are perfectly correct ones in English. Regarding the cases of misplaced parts of speech, a large number of errors of this kind were identified. For examples, (powerful) Europe countries (các cường quốc châu Âu), literature works (các tác phẩm văn chương), power countries (các cường quốc) and densely fog (sương mù dày đặc) were the incorrect versions of European countries, literary works, powerful countries and dense fog respectively. The point here is that, most of the combinations above were expected to be familiar with the students. Indeed, as third year English majored students, it is quite unusual for them not to know those combinations. It is, therefore, possible to think that the student’s carelessness and their anxiety while taking the tests were the main reasons behind the making of these errors. With respect to the errors in which the incorrectly-used words were similar to the desired ones in spelling or pronunciation, several cases were identified, including combinations such as coal reefs, tasteful food, small load (of bread), etc. It is possible that they mistook the words underlined with the desired ones, which are coral, tasty, loaf respectively. However, it is also possible that these were just mere spellingmistakes. Either way, the errors, similar to those mentioned above, reflect a certain degree of the students’ carelessness, as well as their lack of vocabulary knowledge in general. In total, there were 112 cases belonging to this category, accounting for 23.7% of all the cases observed, making formal confusion the third most common cause of errors. One more noticeable point is that some combinations, which were supposed to be familiar with the students, were produced incorrectly quite frequently. For example, the phrase việc bảo vệ môi trường (environmental protection) was translated into environment protection 16 times. Similarly, the combination powerful Europe countries mentioned above occurred 8 times. All these figures together signify how mental factors (e.g. carelessness, anxiety, etc.) in addition to knowledge might possibly affect the students’ linguistic performance in general and their use of collocations in particular. 71
Others This category was added in order to discuss the cases that did not belong to the aforementioned causes of errors or could not be explained by a single one of them. There were only 21 incidences in this category, making up 4.4% of the totality. However, the information these errors provided was quite interesting. Firstly, there were some strange combinations such as diligent web, coral oust ranges which were the translations of chuyên trang (du lịch) (travel column/magazine) and dải đá ngầm san hô (underwater coral reef) respectively. In fact, the reason why the words like diligent and oust had been used in these combinations was inexplicable, since there was not any connection in form, meaning or pronunciation between these words and the correct ones. However, upon checking some popularly used edictionaries such as Vdict by accident, it was found out that oust was among the answers for the entry đá ngầm (the meaning of đá ngầm here, however, is similar to stab in the back), and diligent was one of the answers for the entry chuyên (which means hard working in this case). Such coincidence brought about a possibility that the words used in the strange combinations mentioned above might came from such sources like this dictionary. Given the fact that e-dictionaries are being used quite commonly today due to their availability on smartphones and online sources, this assumption seems plausible. Upon further investigation, such coincidence was found in combinations previously listed in the other categories. Some combinations like coral field, coral plain (bãi san hô – coral reef), contrast relation (mối quan hệ tương phản – contradictory relationship), and attractive street food (món ăn đường phố hấp dẫn – delicious street food) are typical examples, in which field and plain were found in the entry bãi while contrast and attractive were seen in the entries tương phản and hấp dẫn respectively. Although it is not confirmed with 100 percent of certainty, the existence of these combinations and such coincidence might signify possible influence of the way the students used dictionaries, especially Vietnamese-English edictionaries, on their making of collocational errors. They also suggest the pressure of time the students might have to face during the test, under which they could not consider the word they found carefully. This idea is, in fact, in line with the opinions of Farrokh (2012) who suggested that when students face a difficult collocation, they
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may seek help from a dictionary. It is the kind of dictionary that decides if their problem can be successfully solved or not. In addition to the combinations discussed above there were others whose causes could not be identified in any way. They included cases like dim name, bad view (số phận hẩm hiu – unfortunate fate), ancient people (ông cha ta – our ancestors/fathers), current days (những năm gần đây – recent years), etc. It was inexplicable how these errors were made. Maybe, the students, under the pressure of time, just used any vocabulary items they could think of or were familiar with to compensate for their lack of knowledge. The cause of these errors is closest to approximation, but the sense relation between the misused words and the desired ones was not strong enough to put them into that category. To sum up, upon investigating the causes of the errors related to adjective-noun collocations collected from the participants’ midterm-exam papers, based on the criteria set by the hypothetical causes of errors, some conclusions are possibly made. Firstly, L1 transfer and approximation, conforming with Dang (2014), were the most common causes of errors. Moreover, the results revealed that the students’ lack of vocabulary knowledge in general and their uncertainty about words’ spelling or their parts of speech in particular also contributed to the making of errors. Last but not least, it was also suggested that careless use of dictionaries and time pressure might possibly lead to collocational errors.
4.1.2. Analysis of collocational errors from the translation test The purpose of the translation test, as stated above, is to draw more information about the learners’ errors, which the analysis of their exam papers may not have revealed. The test consisted of 20 items and was taken by 89 students. From these 89 test papers, only 1594 responses were satisfactory. The other 186 cases were either not answered or incomplete, which were also considered as a type of error, and will be discussed later. Among these satisfactory responses, there were 539 erroneous combinations. These combinations together with the 186 instances of no/incomplete answers mentioned above made a total of 725 errors. The other 1055 responses were acceptable answers, consisting of 903 correct collocations, 84 free combinations and 68 cases of
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single words. The occurrence of responses in the form of single words was, in fact, unexpected since it had been highlighted in the test that the translations should be adjective-noun combinations. However, as these single-worded responses were lexically and grammatically correct, they were also considered as acceptable answers. A summary of the result is presented in Table 4.4 below. Table 4.4: Summary of students’ responses to the translation test
Errors Acceptable Answers
No/Incomplete Answers Erroneous Combinations Single Words Free Combinations Correct Collocations
Total
Count 186 539 68 84 903 1780
Total 725
1055 1780
Percent 10.4% 30.3% 3.8% 4.8% 50.7% 100%
Total 40.7%
59.3% 100%
The result above has several noticeable differences from that of the error analysis conducted on the exam papers. Firstly, the frequency of free combinations is very low. With 84 free combinations observed, accounting for only 4.8% of the totality, it is much lower than the frequency of free combinations collected from the midterm-exam papers, which was 20%. This low frequency of occurrence possibly resulted from the nature of the translation test, which aimed to test the participants’ production of adjective-noun collocations in English. Because of that, most of the target Vietnamese combinations in the test needed specific English adjective-noun collocations as their equivalents, which limited the choice of vocabulary items and the number of acceptable combinations. Secondly, with 725 observed cases, accounting for 40.7% of the totality, the proportion of errors from the translation test is higher than the proportion of errors from the midterm-exam papers, which is only 28.8%. The difference of 11.9% is quite a noticeable number, which might possibly result from two factors. Firstly, thanks to the design of the test, the cases where no/incomplete answers were given can be easily identified, which allows the investigation into a new category of error. Secondly, the level of difficulty of the test might also be a reason for the high frequency of errors. Given the facts that many of the target combinations were expected to be unfamiliar to the students, it is possible to assume that the translation test was more demanding
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than the midterm-exam in terms of collocation, which resulted in a greater number of errors being made. It can be seen, through the brief overview above, that the translation test can undoubtedly provide some new information which the analysis of the student’s exam papers could not. In order to fully exploit this valuable source of data, a thorough analysis of the errors was conducted, which also involve two major steps: categorizing the errors according to their types and identifying their possible causes. 4.1.2.1. Types of errors Similar to the errors from the students’ exam papers above, the incorrect combinations collected from the translation test were also put into three categories wrong choice of adjective, wrong choice of noun and wrong combination, following the framework mentioned in Chapter 2. Regarding the cases where no answer or incomplete answers were given, which have been also considered as a type of error, a new category, namely No/Incomplete Answer, was added to address them since it is impossible to put these errors into any of the three other categories. According to these four categories the errors were categorized and calculated, which resulted in the figures presented in Table 4.5 below. Table 4.5: Types of collocational errors from the translation test Types of Errors
Count
Percent
Examples light tea, condense milk, purple eyes, dead sentence
Wrong Choice of Adjective
462
63.7%
Wrong Choice of Noun
27
3.7%
bad healthy, great proud/pleasure
Wrong Combination
50
6.9%
sweet water, executive charge, unhealthy condition
No/Incomplete Answers Total
186 725
25.7% 100.0%
Regarding the three types of erroneous combinations, the errors analyses of the translation test and of the students’ exam papers show a similar tendency, with wrong choice of adjective being the broadest category, following by wrong combination and wrong choice of noun respectively. As the number indicated, there were 462 combinations incorrectly produced due to wrong choices of adjectives, accounting for 75
63.7% of all the errors. Combinations such as light tea (trà loãng – weak tea), condense milk (sữa đặc – condensed milk), purple eyes (mắt bầm – black eyes) and dead sentence (án từ hình – death sentence) are examples of this type. Considering wrong combination, there were 50 instances in this category, including some combinations such as sweet water (nước ngọt – soft drink), executive charge (án tử hình), unhealthy condition (sức khỏe kém – poor health). Wrong choice of noun, as the category with the lowest frequency of occurrence, had only 27 instances, accounting for 3.7% of the totality. Some examples of this error type are bad healthy (sức khỏe kém), great proud and great pleasure (vinh dự lớn lao – great honor). Compared to the figures from the error analysis of the students’ exam papers, the statistics here show some differences. Regardless of those statistical dissimilarities, the results confirm the aforementioned finding, which suggests that choosing correct adjectives is the commonest challenge to the students when it comes to producing adjective-noun collocations in English. With the new category of error (i.e. no/incomplete answer) taken into account, the analysis shows some valuable information which was unobservable in the previous one. Interestingly, a large number of test items were left with either no answers or incomplete ones. In total, there were 186 incidences, accounting for 25.7% of the totality, which was a considerable number compared to the percentages of the two categories wrong choice of noun and wrong combination (3.7% and 6.9% respectively). This kind of error may result from several factors, including the expected high level of difficulty of the test, the pressure of time, or the fact that the test was not considered important by the students as it did not influence their academic result. That is to say, the high frequency of occurrence of this error type may signify the participants’ noticeable lack of either collocational knowledge or motivation in completing the test. To sum up, the results above confirm the findings of the analysis of errors from the students’ midterm-exam papers, and provide valuable information about the new category of error type. The next section will be dedicated to identifying the causes of the collected errors.
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4.1.2.1. Causes of errors Again, the list of hypothetical causes of collocational errors was employed as the framework for the conduct of this step. This list, as mentioned above, consists of six categories including (1) approximation, (2) use of synonyms, (3) L1 transfer, (4) word coinage, (5) formal confusion and (6) other. Regarding the instances where no/incomplete answers were given, however, these errors were not incorrect combinations, and thus could not be grouped into any of the hypothetical causes above. In order to address this kind of error, a new category, namely abandonment of tasks was added. As a result, the list of hypothetical causes of error used here included seven categories in total. Based on them, the possible causes of the collected errors were identified and presented in Table 4.6 below. Table 4.6: Causes of collocational errors from the translation test Causes of Errors
Count
Percent
Examples imitate leg, weakened health, carbodinate drink, plastic/ceramic teeth
Approximation
147
19.3%
Use of Synonyms
38
5.0%
manmade leg, thick population
L1 Transfer
186
24.4%
black fortune/destiny, enough condition, condensed soup
Word Coinage
15
2.0%
hurted eyes, eated oil, contensy milk
Formal Confusion
59
7.7%
Others
132
17.3%
Abandonment of Tasks Total
186 763
24.4% 100.0%
tense population, poor qualification, bad healthy, value experience stiff/ solid/ tough/ tight soup, heavy milk/ soup, light tea/ soup
Approximation The figures show that approximation is a major cause of errors in the translation test, with 147 instances, making 19.3% of the totality. This conforms with the result from the analysis of the exam papers above and also with the studies of Hong et al. (2011) and Dang (2014), which have pointed out that approximation is one of the most common causes of collocational errors.
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In addition, the analysis also revealed some new information regarding how some of the errors had possibly been made in relation to the use of approximation. As mentioned above, approximation is the use of one vocabulary item in place of another due to certain semantic similarities between them. This kind of approximation, which had been commonly seen in the exam papers, was also observable in the translation test, with some examples such as imitate leg (chân giả – artificial leg), unlucky thing (vận đen – bad luck), weakened health (sức khỏe kém – poor health), etc. However, there is another kind of approximation which was also commonly used by the students in this test. With this kind of approximation, the participants did not base on sematic similarities between vocabulary items as described above, but resorted to their knowledge about the subjects which the target combinations refer to and tried to create combinations that describe the subjects’ characteristics. For example, to translate the phrase nước ngọt (soft drink), some students created several combinations such as gas drink, carbodinate drink, carbondized water, which might result from their knowledge that soft drinks usually contain carbon dioxide – a kind of gas. Similarly, cork/plastic leg, plastic/ceramic teeth, which are incorrect translations of chân giả (artificial leg) and răng giả (false teeth) respectively, might be the result of the students’ assumption that artificial legs and false teeth are made from those materials. Some other examples are purple eyes, black eyes, bluish eyes, blue eyes which possibly originated from the students’ knowledge about the possible colors of a bruised eye. These translations may also embrace the influence of the participants’ culture, in which colors such as purple or blue are usually used to describe the color of bruises. While the reason why this way of approximation was commonly seen in the translation test and not in the exam papers is hard to explain, it is an undeniable fact that the discovery of this strategy as a cause of collocational errors is a valuable finding, shedding more light on how collocational errors were made and signifying the students’ lack of vocabulary knowledge in general. Use of synonyms The use of synonyms here is also a cause of adjective-noun collocational errors, but not a major one. In total, there were 38 errors resulting from the use of synonyms, making up only 5% of the totality, which is noticeably smaller than the number found 78
in the analysis of the exam papers (15%). A viable explanation for this is the difference in content between the two tests. It is possible that the target combinations in the exam papers stimulated the use of synonyms more than those in the translation test. While the number is small, it still has its own significance. Collocational errors caused by the use of synonyms occur when learners use a synonymous word in place of the desired one, unaware of the restrictions in word combinations. For example, some students translated the phrases chân giả (artificial leg) and dân số đông (dense population) as manmade leg and thick population respectively, without knowing that these synonymous words (i.e. artificial – manmade; dense – thick) could not be used interchangeably in these contexts. The errors, in other words, indicate the participants’ lack of collocational knowledge, which strengthens the result from the analysis of the midterm-exam papers. L1 transfer It has been suggested by many studies and also by the error analysis of the exam papers above that L1 transfer is a major cause of lexical collocational errors. This idea is once again confirmed by the statistics presented in Table 4.6 above. With 186 instances, making up 24.4% of the totality, L1 transfer was the primary cause of errors in the translation test. Similar to those in the exam papers, most of the errors caused by L1 transfer here took place when the students either resorted to word-for-word translation or failed to make a distinction between lexical equivalence and collocational equivalence, which leads to a false assumption that two words being equivalent in one context will have the same relationship in others. Regarding the first circumstance, several errors caused by the use of word-for-word translation could be identified, including black fortune/destiny (vận đen – bad luck), enough condition (điều kiện đủ – sufficient condition). In the first example, it seems that the student failed to understand the figurative meaning of the word đen, which means bad here, and thus ended up with such an incorrect combination. Considering the second one, the students used word-for-word translation to compensate for their lack of vocabulary knowledge, unaware that enough is an adverb and thus could not be used in such a way.
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Compared to the use of word-for-word translation, the second circumstance seems to take place more frequently with a large number of combinations incorrectly made due to the participants’ inability to distinguish between lexical equivalence and collocational equivalence. Although this phenomenon was mentioned during the error analysis of the students’ midterm-exam papers, more evidence for it could be found here thanks to the design of the translation test. In order to see how the participants would respond to the situation when a word in Vietnamese has different English equivalents depending on the combinations in which it appears, some target combinations such as súp đặc (thick soup), sữa đặc (condensed milk), súp loãng (thin soup) and trà loãng (weak tea), etc. were specially included in the test. Upon investigating the students’ responses to these combinations, the researcher found that the students tended to use the same English equivalent for one Vietnamese word, regardless of the combination in which it appeared. For example, there were eleven students translating the word đặc in both sữa đặc and súp đặc as condensed/condense¸ unaware that the words đặc in the two combinations had different meanings and thus the latter one could not be translated into condensed. Similarly, thirteen of the students used the word artificial as the equivalent for the word giả in both chân giả (artificial leg) and răng giả (false teeth), without knowing that the use of this word was inappropriate in the latter combination. In addition to the two examples above, there were many other instances that can be identified, such as crowded population, precious experience which were incorrect translations of dân số đông (dense population) and kinh nghiệm quý báu (valuable experience) respectively. The discussions above, in general, support the result of the error analysis conducted on the students’ exam papers regarding the influence of L1 on their making of collocational errors and provided relatively dependable evidence of their inability to realize the mismatch between lexical equivalence and collocational equivalence. Word coinage Among the minor causes of collocational errors, word coinage is one that signifies learners’ deficiency of vocabulary knowledge. It can be seen from the figures above that word coinage occurred quite infrequently in the translation test, with only 15 instances (2%). Some of them are malformed words resulting from incorrect use of 80
affixes, including hurted eyes, eated oil, etc. The others are words that do not exist in English such as carbodinate drink, contensy milk, licid eyes, etc. which might result from the students’ efforts in creating a vocabulary item basing on their vague memory. Formal confusion The figures show that formal confusion was the cause of 59 incorrect combinations found in the translation test, accounting for 7.7% of all the observed incidences. As mentioned above, formal confusion involves incorrect uses of vocabulary items in place of desired ones due to formal associations between them. For example, tense population and poor qualification, which were incorrect translations of dân số đông (dense population) and chất lượng kém (poor quality) respectively, might result from the formal similarities between tense and dense, qualification and quality. Similarly, gracious/precise experience were possibly caused by formal confusion, due to their formal associations with the word precious. However, it is noted that precious experience is also an incorrect translation of kinh nghiệm quý báu (valuable experience), caused by L1 transfer, which means that those errors above might result from two causes (i.e. formal confusion and L1 transfer). Formal confusion also refers to the cases where an inappropriate part of speech of a desired word was used, with several instances identified in the translation test, including died/dead sentence, bad healthy, value experience and bruise eyes. Those combinations were incorrect translations of án tử hình (death sentence), sức khỏe kém (poor health), kinh nghiệm quý báu (valuable experience) and mắt bầm (bruised eyes) respectively. As previously mentioned, formal confusion may signify the students’ deficiency in vocabulary knowledge and/or the influence of mental factors (e.g. anxiety, motivation, etc.) on them. The figures also indicate that the occurrence of formal confusion in the translation test is noticeably less frequent than that in the students’ exam papers (with 112 instances observed, accounting for 23.7% of all the totality). However, this does not necessarily mean that the participant performed better in the translation test. Usually, formal confusion takes place when learners have certain ideas about the desired vocabulary items but cannot produce them correctly and thus end up with incorrect substitutions that formally associate with the intended ones. However, with unfamiliar word 81
combinations, it is unlikely that they could have even the slightest idea about the desired words in mind and thus formal confusion, probably, would not occur in such cases. Given the fact that the test was expected to be more demanding than the midterm exam in terms of collocational knowledge, the idea above seems to be a viable explanation for the low frequency of formal confusion found in the translation test. Besides, the relatively large number of responses identified as no/incomplete answers in the translation test also supported the aforementioned proposition. The participants, without any idea about the desired combinations, were not likely to make errors related to formal confusion. Instead, they opted to other strategies or even gave up on the tasks, which resulted in the large number of no/incomplete answers mentioned above. In sum, the low frequency of occurrence of formal confusion seen in the translation test is not necessarily an encouraging sign. It may, instead, signify the participants’ unfamiliarity to the given target combinations. Others This category, similar to the one in the analysis conducted on the exam papers, was included to address other causes of errors besides the five hypothetical ones mentioned above. As the figures indicated, there were 132 incidences in this category, making up 17.3% of the totality. These errors, as the analysis revealed, might result from the following causes. Firstly, there were combinations such as light tea (trà loãng – weak tea), light soup (súp loãng – thin soup), heavy milk (sữa đặc – condensed milk) and heavy soup (súp đặc – thick soup), some of which had quite noticeably high frequency of occurrence, for example, light tea appeared 33 times and light soup 14 times. At first, the causes of these errors and their high frequency of occurrence seemed to be inexplicable. However, upon close look, a suggestive detail was identified. That is one of the items in the test, which is as follow: “Trà loãng” là loại trà có màu và vị đều nhạt. "__________________" means the tea that is light in color and taste.
In the given English translation, the adjective light was used to describe the taste and color of weak tea, and quite coincidentally, this word also appeared 33 times in the incorrect combination light tea mentioned above. It is, thus, possible that the students, 82
unable to find the appropriate adjective, opted to use the word they found right in the test due to the fact that it was used to describe the attributes of the tea. If this is the cause of the error, then it also explains for the making of the other three. Regarding the case of light soup, the students translating trà loãng as light tea above might probably apply the adjective light to the translation of súp loãng due to the appearance of the word loãng in both combinations, which resulted in such a deviant combination. This proposition seems to be supported by statistics. Out of the sixteen students who produced the combination light soup, fourteen of them also translated trà loãng as light tea, making it a viable explanation for the cause of this error. With respect to the cases of heavy milk and heavy soup, it is possible that the students used the adjective heavy in these combinations as it is an antonym of light in certain contexts, given the fact that đặc and loãng also have the same relationship in Vietnamese. This inference was also backed by the statistics, which showed that all of the five cases of heavy soup and five out of the six instances of heavy milk came from the students who also produced the combinations light soup and light tea. With the suggestive details and statistics above, it could be suggested that the students’ use of the aforementioned strategy, in which they relied on certain appealing vocabulary items or details in the content of test to compensate for their lack of knowledge, was the possible causes of these errors. This strategy, to some extent, seems like a kind of approximation. However, it was included in this category due to its distinctive origin and the complicated discussion needed to prove its existence. There were other errors, which might originate from the students’ use of dictionary previously mentioned in the error analysis of the exam papers above. They include deviant combinations such as stiff soup, solid soup, tough soup, tight soup which were all incorrect translations of the phrase súp đặc (thick soup). While there was not a vivid connection between the desired adjective and the incorrect ones which could account for the use of these substitutions, it was found out that all these adjectives (i.e. stiff, solid, tough and tight) appeared in the entry đặc of several Vietnamese-English edictionaries. Such a coincidence suggested that the students, in an effort to seek for necessary vocabulary items and under the pressure of time, had checked dictionaries and carelessly picked these adjectives.
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Aside from those errors, there were other cases in this category which have unidentifiable causes. They include combinations such as good/necessary/prior condition, life sentence, great pleasure, etc. which were incorrect translations of điều kiện đủ (sufficient condition), án tử hình (capital punishment) and vinh dự lớn lao (great honor) respectively. As suggested in the error analysis of the exam papers, it seemed that the students, unable to produce the desired translations, opted to use any vocabulary items they could think of or were familiar with, which resulted in such erroneous combinations. Abandonment of tasks Abandonment of tasks refers to learners’ act of giving up on a task without completing it, which might result from their lack of knowledge, motivation or shortage of time. The figures show that this category, along with L1 transfer, was the primary cause of errors in the translation test, with 186 instances of no/incomplete answers collected, accounting for 24.4% of the totality. Given the fact that the students were provided with a sufficient amount of time to complete the test, this high frequency of occurrence signifies their’ lack of motivation. It also possibly indicates their unfamiliarity with the target combinations in the test, which conforms with the explanation for the low frequency of occurrence of formal confusion discussed above. This cause of error, which was not investigated in the analysis of the exam papers, shed more light on the students’ making of collocational errors. It suggested that motivation is a very important factor, without which learners, facing a challenging combination, are likely to abandon it rather than trying other strategies to overcome the difficulty.
4.1.3. Summary of the error analyses The two error analyses above provide extremely valuable information for the present study. Although there were differences in their sources of data (i.e. the students’ midterm-exam papers and the translation test), they yielded several similar results, which supported each other. As can be seen in Figure 4.1 below, both analyses arrived at the result that wrong choice of adjective was the broadest category among the three
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types of errors, which suggests that choosing correct adjectives for adjective-noun combinations in English is a constant challenge to the students. 70.00% 60.00% 50.00% 40.00% 30.00% 20.00% 10.00% 0.00% Wrong choice of adjective
Wrong choice of Wrong combination noun
From the midterm exam papers
No/Incomplete answer
From the translation test
Figure 4.1: Summary of types of collocational errors With respect to the causes of errors which were summarized in Figure 4.2 below, both analyses revealed that L1 transfer and approximation were the first and the second primary causes of errors respectively. Use of synonyms and word coinage were also among the causes of errors but occurred with lower frequencies. The results above suggested that the students’ making of collocational errors was heavily influenced by their L1. They also indicated that the students’ lack of collocational and vocabulary knowledge, as well as their carelessness and other mental factors when taking the tests might lead to collocational errors. 30.00% 25.00% 20.00% 15.00% 10.00% 5.00% 0.00%
From the midterm exam papers
From the translation test
Figure 4.2: Summary of causes of collocational errors
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However, there were also notable differences between them. Firstly, the frequencies of occurrence of formal confusion, one of the causes of error, were noticeably different between the two analyses. This dissimilarity, as previously discussed, suggested that formal confusion, which signifies the students’ carelessness and lack of vocabulary knowledge, occurs more frequently when learners are familiar with target combinations than when they are not. Regarding the category called others, the error analysis conducted on the exam paper proposed that incorrect use of VietnameseEnglish dictionaries, especially e-dictionaries, possibly accounted for some of the collected errors, which was later confirmed by the error analysis of the translation test. The latter analysis, moreover, suggested the use of a strategy in which the students’ use a vocabulary item in the content of the test, which looked suggestive to them, to compensate for their lack of knowledge. This strategy also led to collocational errors. Finally, the error analysis conducted on the translation test allowed the investigation into another cause of error, namely abandonment of tasks. The result of the analysis showed a high frequency of occurrence of this phenomenon, which might result from the students’ lack of motivation and unfamiliarity with the target combinations.
4.1.4. Learners’ receptive knowledge of collocations It has been suggested from the analyses above that a large number of the errors collected had certain connection with the participants’ lack of knowledge about collocation. Regarding collocational knowledge, most authors have distinguished between receptive and productive ones and stated that learners’ receptive knowledge of collocation had influence over their productive knowledge. While the error analyses above provided comprehensive view into the students’ productive ability, they gave little information about their receptive knowledge. Therefore, in order to thoroughly investigate the participants’ knowledge of collocation, a receptive test in the form of a multiple choice one was conducted. The result of this test was compared with that of the translation test to see how the students’ receptive knowledge of collocations is in comparison to their performance in the productive task (i.e. the translation test). To ensure the accuracy of the comparison, the student having done only one of the tests were excluded. As a result, only 61 of the participants, who had attended both of them, were taken into account. 86
More importantly, as mentioned in Chapter 2 a new scoring criterion was applied to the translation test, by which only responses in the form of correct adjective-noun collocations were considered acceptable to ensure to relevance between the two tests. With the results of the tests as the variables, a paired-samples t-test was carried out, the result of which is presented in Table 4.7. Table 4.7: Comparison between productive test and receptive test Paired samples statistics Pair 1
Productive test Receptive test
Mean 10.03 8.92
N 61 61
Std. Deviation 2.989 2.610
Std. Error Mean .383 .334
Paired samples test
Paired Differences
Mean Std. Deviation Std. Error Mean 95% Confidence Interval of Lower the Difference Upper
t df Sig. (2-tailed)
Pair 1 Productive test – Receptive test 1.115 3.852 .493 .128 2.101 2.260 60 .027
The paired-sample t-test was conducted at 95% confidence interval of the difference, with the zero hypothesis that there is no statistical difference between the results of the receptive and the productive tests. The sig. number (0.027 < 0.05) indicates that the zero hypothesis is rejected. That is to say, the results of the two tests are statistically significantly different. Moreover, the mean value of the receptive test scores is 8.92, which is lower than that of the productive test scores (10.03). The numbers above signify that not only did the students performed differently in the two tests but they also performed slightly worse in the receptive one. This is quite unexpected compared to the results of previous studies which have suggested that learners tend to do better in receptive tests than in productive ones. The students’ poor performance on the receptive test might come from the fact that the test, with three options, required the ability to recognize not only correct collocations but also incorrect ones. With limited knowledge about collocations, they 87
might have difficulties in telling whether an unfamiliar combination was a correct collocation or not. This is observable by comparing the results of the two tests together, item by item. (Before being compared, the items in the receptive test were rearranged to match the order of those in the translation test.) Table 4.8: Students’ performance on each item of the two tests
Item 1 Item 2 Item 3 Item 4 Item 5 Item 6 Item 7 Item 8 Item 9 Item 10 Item 11 Item 12 Item 13 Item 14 Item 15 Item 16 Item 17 Item 18 Item 19 Item 20
Translation Test Correct Column Answer Total N % 46 75.4% 15 24.6% 18 29.5% 9 14.8% 12 19.7% 22 36.1% 21 34.4% 47 77.0% 50 82.0% 21 34.4% 44 72.1% 43 70.5% 54 88.5% 35 57.4% 37 60.7% 16 26.2% 25 41.0% 24 39.3% 33 54.1% 40 65.6%
Receptive Test Correct Column Answer Total N % 13 21.3% 14 23.0% 30 49.2% 33 54.1% 23 37.7% 47 77.0% 13 21.3% 52 85.2% 6 9.8% 21 34.4% 31 50.8% 29 47.5% 11 18.0% 23 37.7% 32 52.5% 43 70.5% 23 37.7% 39 63.9% 16 26.2% 45 73.8%
It can be seen, in Table 4.8, that the students’ performances in the two tests were inconsistent. Firstly, there were cases, such as items 4, 6 and 16, where they performed significantly better in the receptive test than in the other. Most of them were able to recognize the correct collocations included in these items (i.e. thin soup, condensed milk and sufficient condition), regardless of the distractors. However, when being asked to translate their Vietnamese equivalents (i.e. súp loãng, sữa đặc and điều kiện đủ) into English, only a few could successfully produce these collocations as translations. This is in line the proposition of Alsakran (2011) that learners’ productive knowledge of collocations may lag behind their receptive knowledge. In other words,
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that they are able to recognize a correct collocation does not ensure that they can successfully produce it when needed. On the contrary, there were also incidences where the students’ productive performance surpassed their receptive one. For example, most of them were able to produce the target collocations as correct answers to items 1, 9 and 13 in the translation test, but not many could answer these items in the receptive one correctly. This result is quite surprising as it seems contradictory to Alsakran’s idea above. However, it is explicable with the designs of the two tests being taken into account. To be precise, item 1, 9 and 13 in the translation test required the students to provide the English equivalents of the phrases chân giả, dầu ăn and gió lớn respectively. Among the acceptable answers to these items were common English collocations such as artificial leg, cooking oil and strong wind which most of the students were able to produce. Nevertheless, in the receptive test, these collocations were paired with other correct but less commonly used collocations: fake leg, edible oil and powerful wind. The correct answer to these items in the receptive test, therefore, was the option both are correct. However, while most of the students could correctly produce the former collocations, only a few of them were able to recognize that the other ones were also correct ones, which explained the results. To sum up the receptive test suggested gaps in the students’ knowledge about collocations. Due to the lack of knowledge, they failed to recognize collocations which were unfamiliar to them. Even with ones they could recognize, there were chances that they were unable to produce them correctly, which directly hindered their productive performance.
4.1.5. The teaching and learning of collocations in Basic Translation The error analyses and the receptive test of collocation above have suggested a lack of knowledge about collocations among the student respondents, which possibly has certain connection with the teaching and learning process. In order to have a comprehensive insight into the students’ making of errors and find possible remedies, the actual teaching and learning of collocation in the three Basic Translation classes were investigated based on the data collected from the interview with the teachers and the questionnaire to the student respondents. 89
4.1.5.1. The teaching of collocations The teaching of collocations and related concepts in Basic Translation were investigated through data collected from both the teachers and the students. From teachers’ perspective Firstly, it is important to know the teachers’ perception, because it is an important factor deciding their actual teaching practices. In the present study, the teachers’ perception of collocation was investigated through questions 1 and 2 in the interview. Regarding the first question, which aimed to check their knowledge of collocation, all three teachers demonstrated their comprehension of the term collocation. However, only T1 was able to further elaborate on the types and uses. In response to question 2, all of them agreed on the idea that knowledge about collocations plays an important role in translation. “Translation is not a simple process of translating word-for-word. It requires a thorough understanding of a text’s message in order to transfer it to a target language. Knowledge about collocations not only helps in discovering the meaning of a text but also provides efficient ways to translate it,” T2 explained. Commenting on the significance of collocational knowledge in translation, T1 added that using collocation makes students’ language more natural and understandable with alternative and richer ways of expressing their ideas. In general, all of the teachers being interviewed recognized the importance of collocational knowledge in translation, which had had certain influence on their teaching practices. With respect to the teachers’ actual instruction on collocations in Basic Translation classes, the relevant data were collected through question 3 in the interview. All of the teachers being asked affirmed their teaching of collocations in Basic Translation classes. However, upon further questioning they revealed that they had not often provided explicit instruction on collocations. Only T1 claimed to use activities such as gap-filling and paraphrasing to teach collocations. The other two, most of the time, had employed integrated teaching method by drawing students’ attention to collocations (if they existed) in translation texts. While this method is efficient as it allows teachers to teach translation and collocations at the same time, its effectiveness heavily relies on the texts. If the texts contain few or inappropriate collocations, this method does not seem applicable. In addition to those methods, the teachers had also 90
encouraged the students’ self-studying to broaden their knowledge about collocation by reading relevant material, learning vocabulary in chunks or blocks, and making their own glossary, etc. However, they did not mention having any method to monitor the students’ self-learning of collocations. Without their monitoring, it is possible that some students did not have enough motivation to study seriously by themselves. From students’ perspective The teaching of collocations in Basic Translation classes was investigated not only from the teachers’ perspective but also from the students’ through questions 10 and 11 in the questionnaire. Among 104 student respondents, only 72 answered Q10 as the other ones were already filtered by Q1 as described in Chapter 3. Table 4.9: Student’s statement about the teaching of collocations in Basic Translation
Valid Missing Total
Yes No Total System
Frequency 60 12 72 32 104
Percent 57.7 11.5 69.2 30.8 100.0
Valid Percent Cumulative Percent 83.3 83.3 16.7 100.0 100.0
The figures show that the students had different opinions on the teaching of collocations in Basic Translation. More than half of the respondents (57.7%) affirmed their teachers’ instruction on collocations in class while 11.5% of them denied it, not to mention a large percentage of the participants (30.8%) did not answer this question due to their answer to the filtering question that they did not understand the notion of collocation. The figures above indicate a mismatch between the teachers’ and the students’ opinions. While all of the teachers claimed that they had had some teaching of collocations in Basic Translation classes, only more than half of the students had the same idea. One possible explanation is that the teachers had not usually given explicit instruction but employed the integrated teaching method, and thus the students, not paying enough attention or not having enough relevant knowledge, had been unaware of their integrated teaching of collocations.
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Among the 60 students answering yes to Q10, only 59 of them actually responded to Q11, which asked about the strategies used by the teachers to teach collocations. Their answers are presented in Table 4.10 below. Table 4.10: Strategies used by the teachers to teach collocations Strategies Introducing the term collocation Introducing the role of collocation Directing students’ attention to collocations in tasks/texts (1) Teaching some collocations in class Encouraging self-study (2) Reviewing learned collocations Using collocation dictionaries Using linguistic corpora Identifying errors, asking students to look for corrections (3) Identifying errors and giving corrections (4) Others Total
Count 17 8 29 26 31 17 5 1 24 30 0 59
Column N % 28.8% 13.6% 49.2% 44.1% 52.5% 28.8% 8.5% 1.7% 40.7% 50.8% 0.0% 100.0%
It can be seen that the students’ opinion was quite in line with the teachers’. Strategies (1), (3) and (4) above belong to the integrated teaching of collocation mentioned by the teachers as their commonly used method. By directing students’ attention to collocations in texts and identifying collocation-related errors, the teachers could make use of translation tasks to increase students’ awareness towards collocations as well as their collocational knowledge. Giving corrections to their errors was also useful but not always doable, possibly due to the heavy workload the teachers had to cope with. Regarding strategy (2), it was also frequently used by the teachers as previously presented in the interview with them. However, the uses of linguistic corpora and collocation dictionaries, despite their usefulness, were affirmed by few student respondents, which indicates that they are among the infrequently used strategies. To sum up, the data suggested that collocations were taught in Basic Translation classes. However, the teachers usually provided instructions about collocations through integrated-teaching and encouraged students’ self-study, while other useful strategies such as using collocation dictionaries and linguistic corpora were infrequently used. Although integrated teaching of collocations is convenient and appropriate in the situation that collocation is not a part of the Basic Translation 92
curriculum as the teachers explained, its effectiveness heavily relies on whether the texts have necessary collocations to teach or not. Given the remarks of two teacher respondents that the texts used to teach Basic Translation might contain few collocations and some of them were outdated and no longer appropriate for teaching, it is possible to doubt the effectiveness of the aforementioned method. Similarly, selfstudy requires students’ ability to work on their own, effort and responsibility. With one third of the student respondents did not understand the concept of collocation and another 11.5% negated their teachers’ teaching of collocations in class, this method may not be as effective as expected. 4.1.5.2. The learning of collocations The learning of collocations was also investigated from students’ and teachers’ perspectives. For the former one, the relevant data were collected through questions 1 to 8 in the questionnaire. For the latter, the data were obtained through questions from 4 to 7 in the interview. From students’ perspective Firstly, similar to the teachers’, the students’ perception of collocations, as one of the factors determining their learning activities, was investigated thanks to questions 1 to 4 in the questionnaire. Q1, as previously presented was a filtering question, used to opt out the student respondents who were unaware of collocation. Among 104 students responding to this question, nearly one-third (30.8%) did not understand the concept of collocation. This is a noticeable number, provided that their Basic Translation teachers had given instruction about collocation in class, not to mention the fact that they, as 3rd year English majored students, should have learnt about it in previous courses. The other 72 students, who knew about collocation, were questioned about their source of knowledge (Q2). Their answers to this question are presented in Table 4.11 below, which shows that their knowledge came from various sources. The majority of them (76.4%) obtained the knowledge from teachers. Only 17 of them (23.6%) learnt from self-study by reading reference materials. The figures indicate that the students were quite passive in acquiring the knowledge, with about two-thirds of them relied on teachers’ instruction.
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Table 4.11: Sources of students’ knowledge about collocations Frequency Percent Studied in compulsory curriculum Introduced by teachers out of compulsory curriculum Reading reference materials Other Total Missing System Total Valid
Valid Percent
28
26.9
38.9
27
26.0
37.5
17 0 72 32 104
16.3 0 69.2 30.8 100.0
23.6 0 100.0
Cumulative Percent 38.9 76.4 100.0 100.0
The students’ opinion on the role of collocations in translation was also investigated. In response to Q3, which is a filtering question, all the students who had knowledge about collocations affirmed their importance. Regarding Q4, asking about specific roles of collocations in translation, they gave different opinions. Table 4.12: Students’ opinions on the roles of collocations in translation Roles of collocations in translation Increase writing fluency Providing alternative and richer ways of expression Producing more precise and more natural language Maintaining and strengthening cohesion of the text Others Total
Count 39 44 39 25 0 72
Column N % 54.1% 61.1% 54.1% 34.7% 0.0% 100.0%
This question, according to Mai (2010), aimed to find out to what extent the students realized the benefits of using collocations in translation. Given the figures in Table 4.12 with only one option chosen by about 61% of the respondents, and two others chosen by slightly more than 50% of them, it can be seen that the students were aware of the importance of collocations but did not fully understand it. With reference to the students’ acquisition and use of collocations, necessary data were collected through several questions. Q5 aimed to investigate their acquisition of collocations, or, precisely, the strategies used to broaden their knowledge. Q6, Q7 and Q8, in general, dealt with the participants’ use of collocations. However, they only focused on the aspects which could not be approached through the analyses of errors, including the students’ awareness of choosing correct collocations in translation, the 94
likeliness to face difficulties in translating collocations and their attention towards the collocational errors they made. Last but not least, Q9 was designed to investigate how the respondents deal with collocation-related difficulties. Table 4.13: Students’ strategies to broaden knowledge of collocations Strategies Reading reference materials Paying attention to collocations used in texts Memorizing words in groups or chunks Looking up for collocations in dictionaries Using linguistic corpora Others Total
Count 26 53 34 35 6 1 72
Column N % 36.1% 73.6% 47.2% 48.6% 8.3% 1.4% 100.0%
Table 4.13 shows different strategies the respondents used to broaden their knowledge about collocation. Among them, learning by focusing on collocations found in texts was most frequently used. This conforms with the result found in the investigation into the teaching of collocation, which showed that the main method of teaching collocations employed by the Basic Translation teachers was integrated teaching, or precisely, drawing learners’ attention towards collocations appearing in texts. This strategy is useful for the students as it allows them to practice other skills while broadening their knowledge about collocation at the same time. The contexts in the texts also help with their comprehension and acquisition. However, as mentioned above, the effectiveness of this strategy relies heavily on whether the texts contain enough collocations for learning and also whether the students really know what they need to focus on. In addition, other useful strategies such as learning words in chunks or reading reference materials were also used but by fewer students. Among them, the former one has been suggested by follower of LA as an effective way to learn vocabulary and collocation. However, only nearly half of the respondents made use of this strategy. Collocation dictionaries, despite not being mentioned by the teachers in the teaching of collocations, was used quite commonly by the students as a way to broaden their knowledge. However, in contrast to collocation dictionaries, linguistics corpora were mostly unused. It seems that corpora were still an unfamiliar concept to the students, and thus without instructions they did not know what corpora were or how to use them effectively. 95
Regarding the students’ use of collocation, their responses to Q6, Q7 and Q8 are presented and compared in Figure 4.1 below. 60.0%
52.8% 51.4%
50.0% 38.9%
40.0%
38.9%
38.9% 37.5%
30.0% 19.4%
20.0% 9.7% 8.3%
10.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0%
1.4% 2.8% 0.0%
Never
Rarely
0.0%
Sometimes
Often
Very often
Being aware of choosing correct collocations in translation Having collocation-related difficulties Paying attention to collocational errors
Figure 4.3: Students’ responses to Q6, Q7 and Q8 The figure shows that the majority of the students had high awareness of choosing collocations in translation, with 51.4% of the totality (72 students) often cared about choosing correct collocations for their translation and 37.5% of them very often. Despite that, producing correct collocations seems to be a constant challenge to them as the figures show that more than half of the respondents (52.8%) often have difficulties in translating collocations, another 38.9% of them face difficulties very often. It seems, however, that they did not pay as much attention to their collocational errors. The majority of them claimed that they often (38.9%) or sometimes (38.9%) pay attention to the errors they made. Only 19.4% did so very often. To sum up, the students paid more attention to choosing correct collocations but less attention to their collocational errors although they admitted that they had many difficulties in translating collocations. One possible explanation is the fact that the teachers did not always provide corrections for erroneous collocations found in students’ translation. The student, without teachers’ corrections, had no idea about what caused the errors or where to look for corrections, and thus might neglect them.
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With respect to the strategies the respondents used to deal with difficulties in translating collocations, the relevant data were presented below. Table 4.14: Students’ strategies to deal with difficulties in translating collocations Strategies Using word-for-word translation Paraphrasing or finding other words to express the idea Using a synonym of the correct word Avoiding translating the difficult collocations if possible Checking dictionaries Others Total
Count 15 46 25 12 50 2 72
Column N % 20.8% 63.9% 34.7% 16.7% 69.4% 2.8% 100.0%
Table 4.14 shows that paraphrasing is among the frequently used strategies, with 46 of the respondents (63.9%) affirming their use of it. This conforms with the result of the error analyses above, which suggested that approximation (paraphrasing) is among the common causes of collocational errors. Word-for-word translation, on the contrary, was said to be used much less frequently. While word-for-word translation is considered a form of L1 transfer in this study, the use of it does not completely reflect the influence of L1 transfer on learners, because there is a kind of unconscious L1 transfer which cannot be investigated using the questionnaire. As seen in the error analyses, L1 transfer was the primary cause of collocational errors; however, wordfor-word translation only accounted for a small part of the errors. Using synonyms was a quite common strategies affirmed by one third of the respondents (34.7%). This is also in line with the error analyses, which showed that the use of synonyms resulted in a relatively large number of collocational errors. Only a few of the respondents admitted abandoning their tasks when they could not produce the desired combinations, which is quite contrary to what observed in the translation test above. The most noticeable strategy, however, is the use of dictionaries, which was affirmed by the majority of the respondents (69.4%). It has been suggested during the analyses of errors that learners’ incorrect use of dictionaries might lead to collocational errors. The fact that checking dictionaries was the students’ favorite strategy to deal with collocation-related difficulties seems to support this proposition.
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From teachers’ perspective The teachers’ opinions about students’ learning and use of collocations were investigated through questions from 4 to 7, which focused on four major issues: (1) whether the students had difficulties in translating collocations, (2) how the teachers’ teaching of collocations helped them in dealing with these difficulties, (3) what strategies the students used when facing difficulties in translating collocations and (4) what were the main causes of collocational errors in their translations. All of the teachers being asked affirmed that their students, more or less, had difficulties in translating collocations, which mainly resulted from their lack of knowledge and experience. “Due to their lack of knowledge and experience, students tend to understand word combinations based on the literal meanings of its components,” T2 explained, “for example they interpreted the word “body” in the phrase “a body of something” (an amount of something) as the whole physical structure of a human/ an animal, without realizing that in this combination the word did not have its literal meaning.” Unable to understand the correct meaning of a combination, they could hardly provide accurate translations. Lack of knowledge and experience also amplified negative influences of linguistic and cultural differences, T3 added. However, the teachers believed that their teaching of collocations had positive effects on the students, helping them discover a text’s meaning more accurately and translate it more easily. According to them, the teaching of collocation helps students have a wide selection of words in different situations, and make effective use of synonyms and lexical items to make their translation more natural and understandable. Nevertheless, T1 remarked that the effectiveness of their teaching relied heavily on the students’ hardworking and effort. Without these characteristics, they could hardly improve themselves regardless of the teachers’ help. Considering the strategies used by the students to deal with collocation-related difficulties, the teachers suggested three major ones. The first strategy, according to T2, was checking dictionary or similar sources. “When facing a difficult combination, students usually look for translations in dictionaries or on the Internet,” she explained. “The problem is, however, that they tend to hastily use a translation they find, without 98
considering about the appropriateness of using it in a specific context.” The second strategy, as being suggested by the three teachers, was using word-for-word translation. Some students tend to understand a combination based on the meaning of each separate word, which usually leads to the use of this strategy. Last but not least, in order to compensate for their lack of knowledge, some students also provide “random” translations, with the hope that such translations could, by chance, accurately convey the necessary messages. With reference to the causes of collocational errors, all of the teachers agreed that students’ lack of knowledge about collocation, culture and translation is among the major reasons leading to collocational errors. Without necessary knowledge, students could neither accurately discover a text’s meaning nor produce appropriate translations. Besides, according to the teachers, the use of the strategies above, especially word-for-word translation, could also result in collocational errors. “In Vietnamese – English translation, it is common for students to look for the English equivalent of each individual word in a Vietnamese sentence before translating it, regardless of the fact that not all sentences can be successfully translated that way,” T3 remarked. All of the teachers’ opinions above are in line with the results of the error analyses, which pointed out that the aforementioned factors more or less contributed to learners’ making of collocational errors. In conclusion, the data collected from the teachers’ and the students’ perspectives provide valuable information about the learning of collocation in Basic Translation classes. Firstly, it can be seen that some of student respondents had relatively clear perception of collocation and its role in translation; nevertheless, there were a noticeable number of them who were not aware of collocation or did not fully understand its importance. Moreover, the data suggested the student had been quite passive in learning collocations. To be precise, they had gained their knowledge mostly from teachers’ instructions and collocations in translation texts, rather than actively searching other sources or doing extensive reading. On top of that, it can be inferred that the students had rarely paid much attention to their collocational errors, although learning from errors can be very effective. Such attitude and learning methods may be the implying factors affecting their actual performance. Secondly, 99
the data seem to conform with the results from the analyses of errors, which suggested that Approximation and L1 Transfer were the major causes of errors. Last but not least, a large number of the student respondents affirmed that they had usually checked dictionaries when facing difficult combinations, which, according to the teachers, might lead to errors if the students were careless. This information is important as it supports the aforementioned suggestion that a number of the collected errors possibly resulted from the students’ incorrect use of dictionaries.
4.2. Major findings The present study focused on analyzing errors related to adjective-noun collocations made by the 3rd year English majored students in order to identify the underlying reasons behind the errors and find appropriates remedies. The study, therefore, aimed at answering two main research questions as follow: 1. What are the common errors related to attributive adjective-noun collocations made by 3rd year English majored students at USSH? 2. What are the possible causes of these errors? In order to answer these questions, different sources of data were collected, analyzed and discussed, which altogether provided comprehensive insights into the issues. This section is dedicated to recapitulating those major findings of the study. Regarding the first research question, both of the error analyses showed that, among the categories of errors, wrong choice of adjective was the broadest one, followed by wrong combination and wrong choice of noun respectively, which indicated that the student respondents tended to have difficulties in choosing the correct adjectives for adjective-noun collocations. The explanation for this lies in the fact that in collocations the choice of word for one component is usually restricted by the other. In the case of adjective-noun collocations, it is the noun that restricts the choice of the adjective because language users commonly produce a noun phrase by selecting the noun first. Moreover, the sense of the adjective in an adjective-noun collocation is also determined by the noun, and some words may have uncommon senses that only occur in specific combinations. For example, the word green in green leaves and green fingers has two different meanings simply because of the words it precedes, and while 100
green in the former combination has its literal sense, green in the latter one has an idiomatic sense which occurs restrictively in that combination. Learners, in order to produce an adjective-noun collocation, have to go through multiple process of choosing words. The noun can be quite easily chosen if they know the words that express the desired sense. However, after a noun is chosen, the choice of adjectives, as explained above, will be restricted by that noun. Learners will need not only lexical knowledge but also collocational knowledge to choose the accurate adjective. To put it differently, even though they know the adjectives with the desired sense, they may fail to pick the correct one if they do not know which of them can co-occur with the chosen noun, not to mention the cases where the adjective has an uncommon sense. The argument above explains why choosing correct adjectives for adjective-noun collocation is the major challenge to the participants. However, it does not mean that attention should be paid solely on adjectives. On the contrary, it implies the significance of choosing nouns in producing adjective-noun collocations because, after all, the noun is the factor determining the choice of adjectives. It can be inferred that wrong choice of nouns usually leads to wrong choice of adjectives. Evidently, the error analyses showed that combinations with both nouns and adjectives incorrectly used occurred even more frequently than those with only nouns incorrectly chosen. The purpose of identifying the common types of error in error analyses is to find out the factors, in relation to the error types, which need attention. In the present study, it can be seen from the arguments above that in order to produce desired adjective-noun collocations, learners need to make accurate choices of nouns and adjectives, which requires sufficient knowledge of both vocabulary and collocation. More importantly, the fact that the participants tended to face difficulties in choosing correct adjectives, as previously discussed, suggests the necessity to focus on broadening their collocational knowledge, since it is commonly known that learning/teaching of collocations usually receives less attention in comparison to general learning/teaching of vocabulary. To sum up, by identifying the common types of error, the study points out the aspects in learners’ knowledge that need focusing on. However, to find specific ways to effectively broaden their knowledge about vocabulary and collocation requires deeper insights into the causes of errors and other factors such as the actual 101
teaching and learning of collocations, which were addressed by the second research question. Regarding the causes of errors, the analyses yield the following major findings. Firstly, L1 transfer was identified as the primary cause of error, which was not only in line with previous studies but was also supported by the teachers’ opinion. L1 transfer, as previously discussed, usually occurred when learners either resorted to word-for-word translation or failed to distinguish between collocational equivalence and lexical equivalence, which led to a false assumption that two words being equivalent in one context would have the same relationship in others. The former case reflects learners’ inexperience in translation, which was mentioned by the teachers as one of the factor causing difficulties for the students. The latter case, which was more frequently observed in the error analyses, on the other hand, probably signifies learners’ lack of knowledge of collocation. Without the necessary knowledge to produce a desired collocation, learners, as the teachers explained, tend to rely on their L1 knowledge and try to attain collocation equivalence by using lexical equivalence. Especially when translation is involved, as in the present study, the influence of L1 seems to be amplified. Moreover, that L1 transfer can take place unconsciously makes it even more problematic for learners as they cannot avoid what they are not aware of. After L1 transfer, approximation was another major cause of collocational errors. It is, in fact, a strategy that learners use to compensate for their lack of knowledge by substituting the lexical items they are unable to produce with expressions that they thought could convey the desired message. There are different types of approximation depending on the way substitutions being made, which were observed in the present study. The first was the type of approximation described by Dang (2014) as the act of using a lexical item in place of the desired one, with which it shares some semantic properties. This is the type of approximation mentioned in most previous studies. In addition, the error analyses suggested another type of approximation in which substitutions were made not basing on semantic properties that share between words but on learners’ knowledge of the real world. To put it differently, they tried to express the intended message by describing certain characteristics of the subject being referred to. That approximation was a major cause of collocational errors, as the analyses 102
suggested, was not only in line with previous studies but was also supported by the questionnaire to the student respondents, which showed that the majority of them had been using approximation as a strategy to deal with collocation-related difficulties in their translations. Besides, the second type of approximation discussed above can be considered a new finding in this study as it has hardly been mentioned in any previous one. Along with L1 transfer and approximation, use of synonyms is a cause of errors that has been frequently discussed in other studies. In the present study, it also accounted for a considerable number of errors although it was not as prominent as the previous two. The use of synonyms takes place due to learners’ false assumption that synonyms are interchangeable in word combinations, which signifies their lack of knowledge about collocation. If they had known that word combinations adhere to collocational rules and thus synonyms cannot always replace each other, they would probably have avoid making this kind of error. Unlike in previous studies where it was usually neglected or included in other categories, formal confusion was identified as a major cause of errors in the present one. It involved the cases in which misused words were confused with the desired ones due to formal similarities between them and the misplacements of parts of speech of the desired words. As discussed in the error analyses, it indicates learners’ lack of vocabulary knowledge. However, given the fact that it occurred more frequently when learners had to deal with familiar combinations than with unfamiliar ones, formal confusion may also result from deficiency in learners’ memories or pure carelessness. Whatever the reason is, this cause of error is worth consideration as it accounted for many errors that the student respondents, at their level, were supposed not to make. Another cause of errors that also connected to form of words was word coinage. However, unlike formal confusion word coinage involved the cases of deviant lexical items which usually resulted from either misuse of affixes or misspelling. In the present study, word coinage only accounted for a small number of errors; however, similar to formal confusion, it also signifies the students’ lack of vocabulary knowledge and deficiency in their memory.
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All the aforementioned causes of errors belong to the list of hypothetical causes of errors, which have been more or less mentioned in previous studies. Apart from them, the present study also identified some other causes that have been rarely observed or usually neglected. The first one to be mentioned is the students’ incorrect use of dictionaries. In fact, the idea that learners resort to dictionaries when dealing with difficult collocations is not new as it was suggested by several authors, including Farrokh (2012). However, not many studies mentioned it as a cause of collocational errors. In the present study, several errors were identified with suggestive details that could be considered as evidence for the students’ use of dictionaries. On top of that, the investigation into the teaching and learning of collocations also supported this finding. More than half of the student respondents affirmed their use of dictionary when translating collocations, while the teachers remarked that some of their students had made mistakes due to their careless use of dictionaries. Moreover, it is necessary to note that the identified errors only reflected one aspect of the problem. There were probably other errors having connection to the students’ use of dictionaries, which are not provable due to the limit of the study. For example, upon checking bilingual dictionaries, learners found several words that were equivalents of the target one. Unable to distinguish one from another, they chose an equivalent which happened to be a synonym of the desired one and created an erroneous combination. Obviously, the use of synonym would be identified as the cause of this error and by which the use of dictionaries was neglected. Given the fact that dictionaries are commonly used in translation, and since the present study focuses on collocational errors in translation, learners’ use of dictionary, as discussed above, is a factor that needs proper consideration. The second one to be mentioned was a strategy observed through the translation test. As previously described in the error analysis, some of the student respondents, unable to produce the desired translations, seek solutions from seemingly suggestive details in the test itself. This strategy involves the act of substituting a desired lexical item with another one and thus can be considered a type of approximation. However, since it was only an ad-hoc solution used by some of the respondents and was rarely seen elsewhere, the researcher decided to mention it separately. Although this strategy 104
accounted for a limited number of errors, it provided valuable information regarding what learners could do in compensation for their lack of knowledge. In addition to the errors resulted from the aforementioned causes, there were other errors whose causes were unidentifiable. It seems that these errors were the results of the students’ effort to finish their tasks under the pressure of time and their lack of knowledge. Unable to produce a desired combination, they might think of a combination they were familiar with as substitutes, following teachers’ advice that no blanks should be left in a translation test. However, when the students lacked motivation they might also give up on their tasks as it was observed through the translation test, which had no influence on their academic result, that a large number of instances were left with no or incomplete answers. Therefore, motivation is also a factor affecting their performance. To sum up, through the error analyses, the present study has identified the causes of collocational errors and also the underlying factors beneath them such as learners’ lack of knowledge (both vocabulary and collocation), mental factors (carelessness, anxiety, motivation, etc.), and time pressure, etc. While the causes of errors show how the errors were made, those underlying factors give suggestions on how learners’ performance can be improved. Some of them, such as anxiety or time pressure, seem to be difficult to approach. Other mental factors (carelessness, motivation) are possibly adjustable. Most importantly, learners’ knowledge, which is one of the determining factors, is improvable through teaching and learning. However, in order to do so, a thorough understanding of the current teaching/learning situation in the target classes is essential. The investigation into the teaching and learning of collocations in the Basic Translation classes showed that the main methods the teachers had been using for teaching collocations were integrated teaching and encouraging self-study. The first method, as mentioned above, had its effectiveness determined by the availability of collocations in translation tests and also by learners’ awareness of the activity. Similarly, the second method heavily relied on the students’ awareness of collocation and motivation. However, as the data suggested, only a part of the student respondents recognized the teachers’ teaching of collocations. In addition, the learners were quite 105
passive in broadening their knowledge of collocation, and they did not fully understand its importance either, not to mention a considerable number of them did not even understand the concept of collocation. Those issues above may hinder the effectiveness of the aforementioned teaching methods and thus negatively influence the students’ knowledge. Regarding this, the error analyses suggested many flaws in their productive ability. Moreover, the receptive test of collocations also showed the learners’ limited receptive ability, which reflects their insufficient passive knowledge of collocation. The insufficiency in passive knowledge obviously resulted in limited active knowledge, which directly determined their productive performance.
Figure 4.4: Summary of the major findings 106
In brief, the study has pointed out the causes leading to learners’ making of collocational errors. Most of them, according to authors including Dweik & Shakra (2010) and Hussein (2011), are strategies employed by learners to deal with difficulties in translating collocations. These difficulties are believed to result from several underlying factors including insufficiency of knowledge, mental conditions or other objective factors from the environment, among which the lack of knowledge is one major factor that can be addressed by making changes to the teaching/learning process, and thus corresponding recommendations on the teaching and learning of collocations will be made in Chapter 5 for the improvement in students’ knowledge and the remediation of errors. These major findings of the study are recapitulated in Figure 4.4 above.
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CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS This chapter serves as the concluding part of the current research by recapitulating the major findings that give answers to the research questions. Moreover, based on these findings, recommendations are made to teachers and students for improving the teaching and learning of collocations in Basic Translation in particular and in translation courses in general. Finally, given the limitation in the design of the study, suggestions for future research are also presented in this chapter. 5.1. Conclusion The researcher conducted the study which aimed at analyzing adjective-noun collocational errors made by 3rd year students of EF, USSH in their translations, in order to have a thorough insight into the nature of the errors and their causes. In addition, thanks to the implementation of multiple research instruments, other factors including the students’ receptive knowledge and the actual teaching and learning of collocations in Basic Translation were also carefully investigated for a better understanding of their collocational knowledge, and the underlying reasons hindering their performance. In general, the analysis of errors showed that the students, despite their expected high level of English competence, made quite a large number of errors, which possibly resulted from several major causes. The study also revealed a deficiency in the students’ collocational knowledge which was probably the result of the teaching and learning process. The data for error analysis in the present study were collected from two sources the students’ midterm exam papers and the translation test. Their performances on both the exam and the test were, in general, quite unsatisfactory. Precisely, nearly one third of the adjective-noun combinations collected from the exam papers were errors. With the translation test, the errors accounted for roughly 40 percent of the extracted combinations. Among the types of error, wrong choice of adjective was the dominant category, which was followed by wrong combination and wrong choice of noun respectively. The result suggested that the choice of adjectives tends to cause more difficulties for learners and thus needs special attention; however, as discussed above, 108
the choice of nouns is also very important as it is the noun that determines the choice of adjectives. The causes of the errors were also identified, among which L1 transfer, approximation and formal confusion were dominant ones, accounting for a large portion of the errors. The study also revealed several emerging causes of errors besides the hypothetical ones, among which the most noticeable was incorrect use of dictionary. The errors and their causes signified several issues including the limitations in the students’ productive knowledge of collocations and their lack of concentration and/or motivation in translating/producing collocations. Not only was the students’ productive knowledge of collocation insufficient but their receptive knowledge, as reflected through the COLLEX test, was also limited, which signified their lack of knowledge about collocations in general. The deficiency in knowledge was probably the result of the teaching and learning process that lacked focus on collocations. Although collocations were said to be taught in Basic Translation, the teachers seemed to devote inadequate attention toward the actual teaching of collocations. Particularly, instructions on collocations were mostly given through integrated teaching, of which the effectiveness was influenced by the nature of the tasks themselves. In addition, although the teachers did encourage the students’ self-learning of collocations, they hardly provided any instruction for self-study, neither did they monitor the process. Also, they did point out collocational errors in students’ translation but sometimes did not give corrections, which resulted in the students’ frequent neglect of these errors. The teaching practices obviously influenced the students’ learning of collocations. Particularly, some of the student respondents negated their teachers’ teaching of collocations in Basic Translation, not to mention the ones who even did not understand the term collocation. Without sufficient background knowledge and awareness of the concept, the students could neither follow teachers’ instructions nor broaden their knowledge about collocations through self-study. Besides, the research also revealed some other factors, to which the students’ deficiency in collocational knowledge could be partly attributed, such as the lack of motivation in studying and limitations in vocabulary knowledge.
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To sum up, the research suggested that although the students were supposed to be at relatively high level of English proficiency, there were inevitably flaws in their collocational knowledge which were attributed to several reasons including the teaching and learning process. In the next sections, recommendations are given to teachers and students in order to address the aforementioned issues.
5.2. Suggestions and recommendations Error analyses were carried out to identify nature of errors and their causes, based on which appropriate solutions could be found for the remediation of errors. In the present study, the adjective-noun collocational errors might be attributed to several causes. Most of them, however, originated from the same underlying factor: the teaching and learning process. Therefore, in this section, recommendations on the teaching and learning of collocations in Basic Translation in particular and translation courses in general are formulated and given to both teachers and students.
5.2.1. Suggestions to teachers Although all of the teachers being questioned affirmed their teaching of collocations in Basic Translation, their teaching practices as the research revealed were not always effective. The researcher, therefore, basing on the theoretical framework and the authentic data, tentatively suggested some adjustments to the teaching of collocations as follow. Firstly, it is suggested that the teaching of collocations should be more explicit. While the teachers did include collocations in their teaching program, most of their instructions were integrated in other activities. Despite their explanation that collocations were not a focus of courses like Basic Translation and thus could hardly be taught explicitly, there has been an undeniable fact that collocations are an important unit of translation and usually cause difficulties to translators, which was also affirmed in the study. Besides, the teachers’ implicit instructions on collocations proved to be insufficient to catch students’ attention as some of them negated such instructions or were even unaware of the concept of collocation. Moreover, it has been suggested in previous studies that explicit teaching of collocations was beneficial to students. Given the reasons above, it is not only appropriate but also necessary for 110
collocations to be taught explicitly in Basic Translation and also in translations courses in general. Secondly, for the teaching of collocations to be effective, it is also important to raise students’ awareness. As mentioned above, the study revealed a large portion of the student respondents who were not aware of either the concept of collocation or teachers’ relevant instructions. Consequently, they could hardly obtain any knowledge about collocation from the teachers and neither could they broaden their knowledge through self-study. Developing students’ awareness, therefore, is necessarily the very first step in the teaching process. To achieve such a goal, it is advisable that teachers first introduce the term collocation to the students, explain the concept and highlight its role. According to Dang (2014), they can also use students’ native language as a means to introduce the concept as it is a universal phenomenon existing in every language. Explicit teaching of collocations also plays an important role in raising students’ awareness. By giving explicit and formal instructions on collocations, teachers can attract students’ attention and thus foster their awareness more easily. In addition, it is necessary to introduce to students the fundamental concepts related to collocations such as congruence and collocational equivalence, etc. as it is common for students without knowledge about these concepts to form false assumptions that easily lead to errors. For example, they may develop a tendency to seek collocation equivalence through direct word-for-word translation or to use synonymous words as substitutes for ones they do not remember. This issue was affirmed in the current study as the analysis of errors showed that L1 transfer, substitutions (approximation), use of synonyms, etc., which obviously resulted from the students’ lack of the aforementioned knowledge, accounted for a large number of errors. Teachers, therefore, need to draw students’ attention towards these issues in order to reduce their probability of making errors. For example, they can use contrastive analysis to highlight the differences between native and foreign languages, and explain the concept of congruence/incongruence. Collocations in translation tasks can also be used as examples to draw their attention to the fact that not all collocations are able to be translated using word-for-word translation. Similarly, it is advisable to explain to them that synonyms may not be used interchangeably in collocations as combination rules 111
are sometimes arbitrary and the meaning of one word may be restricted by the other in a combination. As discussed above, explicit instructions on collocations and related concepts in translation would bring great benefits to students. However, according to the teachers of Basic Translation, it was impossible to implement such formal teaching due to the constraints of time. Within that limited time of the course, they had to deliver a great amount of knowledge about translation to students, which allowed them to focus only on certain issues that they found important. Given the difficulty above, it is necessary to have a method that can make instructions on collocations more explicit and effective and, at the same time, maintain the sufficiency of knowledge about translation delivered to students within the time limit. Such a method incorporates some essential steps including choosing of collocations and contexts, choosing suitable teaching activities and giving appropriate corrections. Choosing target collocations and contexts The first step is choosing target collocations for teaching. Due to the limit of time, teachers should pick collocations that are useful and necessary to teach to the students. However, it is quite problematic since the degree of usefulness and necessity depends on many factors including students’ level, their needs, courses’ objectives, etc. Fortunately, Hodne (2009) provided a good solution to the issue by proposing criteria, based on which teachers can decide which collocations are useful to teach to their students. These criteria, which were already presented in Table 2.5, take into account several essential factors including students’ needs, frequency of occurrence of the collocations, probability for them to be used in communication, etc. To put it differently, they should focus on collocations frequently used by native speakers, collocations relevant to their purposes or future jobs (economy, tourism, journalist, etc.) and those frequently occurring in communication. Problematic ones such as incongruent collocations, collocations with synonymous words, collocations involving cultural gaps, etc., as Bahns & Eldaw (1993), Hodne (2009) and Kurosaki (2012) have suggested, should also be taught to students. It is advisable to teach collocations in contexts as the contexts would help students in discovering their meaning and usage. Moreover, teachers can also use the contexts to 112
organize other activities. The chosen contexts should be suitable for the students’ level and contain the target collocations. Choosing such a text seems to be a challenge to teachers. However, with the development of technology, it is much easier than before. Teachers now have access to valuable reference sources, including corpora such as COCA or BNC, where they can find out the collocations frequently used by native speakers (i.e. those with high FREQ) and also contexts in which they occur. These contexts can be chosen for translation tasks or other activities. Especially, with courses as Basic Translation where most translation tasks are given in the form of sentences or groups of sentences, corpora are even more useful as they can provide hundreds of meaningful sentences containing the target collocations for teachers to choose from. They can also find texts from other sources through search engines such as Google. Activities for teaching collocations With aforementioned requirements, the activities used to teach collocations in translation need to give students chances to practice translation and at the same time broaden their collocational knowledge. The integrated teaching of collocations through translation tasks that the teachers have been using, in fact, is a very good method as students can learn new collocations while translating the texts. The problem of this method, however, is that its effectiveness, as previously discussed, relies on whether the texts contain enough useful collocations for them to learn. This problem, nevertheless, can be solved by careful selection of target collocations and contexts. Moreover, teachers need to give clear instructions to ensure students’ awareness of the target collocations in the texts. In addition to the integrated teaching method mentioned above, teachers can also design activities that are more collocation-oriented but also incorporate teaching translation. Take the translation task introduced by Kurosaki (2012), which was adapted as one of the research instruments in this study, as an example, although it mainly focuses on collocations, it can also be used in teaching translation. By asking students to translate target collocations in given contexts, the task not only provides them with knowledge about the target collocations but also draws their attention to the fact that sometimes instead of translating words separately they need to translate phrases or group of words as a whole unit of translation. If teachers want the task to 113
be more challenging, they can ask students to translate the whole sentences rather than just the target collocations. However, they will need to draw students’ attention to the target collocations when giving correction. A similar activity was introduced by Lewis (2000), in which students are asked to identify collocations in texts following teachers’ instructions and later to translate these collocations into their L1. This activity, according to Lewis (2000), “will help students become more aware of collocation and less inclined to translating word-forword” (p. 103). It can also be adapted as a method for self-study. Teachers can assign reading texts to groups of students and ask them to identify in the texts collocations of a certain type (e.g. adjective-noun, verb-noun, etc.) and provide their own translations of these collocations. Teachers may need to instruct students in using collocation dictionaries or corpora to help them with their assignment. The groups’ collections of collocations, later, will be corrected by teachers and used as a glossary for the students. By organizing self-study in such a way, teachers of translation can improve their students’ knowledge of collocations and also save time for other important in-class activities. Regarding the concepts related to collocations, they can be introduced to students through the following exercises suggested by Lewis (1997), in which students are asked either to find the antonyms of certain combinations or to produce correct collocation from a given list of words (see Appendix 5). These exercises can be used to show students that the meaning of a word depends on the word it combines with. Teachers can also ask them to translate the collocations into Vietnamese to highlight the fact that a word in English may have different equivalents in Vietnamese and thus they need to be careful in choosing the correct equivalent or using word-for-word translation. These exercises can also be adapted to illustrate the risk of using synonyms in translating collocations by asking students to form correct collocations from several nouns and a group of synonymous adjectives and translate them to their native language. They will realize that synonyms cannot be used interchangeably in certain collocation and that their synonymous relationship also depends on the combination in which they occur.
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In addition, the translation task proposed by Kurosaki (2012) mentioned above can be employed for the same purpose. By purposely choosing collocations that stimulate the use of synonyms (e.g. gió mạnh with mạnh means either strong or powerful in English) or ones that have the same component but will be translated differently into the other language (e.g. trà loãng and súp loãng with loãng being translated as weak and thin respectively), etc., teachers can also raise students’ awareness of the aforementioned issues. The strength of this exercise is that it provides contexts for the target collocations and can be used with both L1 – L2 translation and vice versa. Giving corrections One important step in teaching is giving corrections. By doing so teachers can help students recognize their weakness and learn from their errors. As a matter of fact, identifying and correcting collocational errors is also an effective way to teach collocations. The study showed that although the teacher participants pointed out the collocational errors in their students’ translations, they did not always give corrections. Moreover, it is commonly seen that teachers tend to focus more on grammatical collocational errors than on lexical ones, due to the fact that the former is more easily identified. Therefore, it is suggested that teachers pay more attention to identifying and correcting lexical collocational errors in students’ translations. To reduce the amount of time needed for errors correction, teachers can choose to focus only on typical errors. They can also assign groups of students to identify and correct errors by themselves. To sum up, correction of collocational errors, especially lexical ones, in students’ translation should be promoted as it is also a way to make the teaching of collocations in translation more explicitly and raise students’ awareness of the issue. In addition to the adjustments to the teaching practices, there are some other issues that also need teachers’ attention as they might possibly affect students’ performance. The first one to be mentioned is students’ use of dictionaries. It is an undeniable fact that dictionaries are essential in translation. However, incorrect use of such a useful tool may lead to serious errors. As suggested by the analysis of errors, the students’ careless use of bilingual dictionaries resulted in several errors that should not have been committed if they had been more careful, and possibly accounted for errors in other categories. Although the number of errors was not large, it emphasized the need 115
to pay more attention to their use of dictionaries. Particularly, teachers should remind them that bilingual dictionaries are useful but should be used cautiously because a word in English may have multiple Vietnamese equivalents and vice versa. The use of monolingual dictionaries, therefore, needs to be highlighted, especially when students are confused by bilingual ones. More importantly teachers should encourage the use of collocation dictionaries as it will bring more benefits to students. Linguistic corpora are also a good alternative to the dictionaries as they provide free access to much larger database and many more functions that students can make use of to broaden their knowledge. However, as corpora are quite complicated, teachers may need to give some instructions as to how to use them. The last issue is that teachers themselves also need to frequently update their knowledge about collocation as languages are changing continuously and their knowledge might be soon outdated. Again, linguistic corpora with frequently updated database such as COCA seem to be a more reliable and comprehensive source than collocation dictionaries for teachers to improve their own knowledge and also to prepare lessons on collocations.
5.2.2. Suggestions to students Based on the findings of the study, it is suggested that the students should put more effort in improving their knowledge of collocations. Firstly, they need to reinforce their understanding of the term collocation and related concepts, and their roles in communication as well as translation. The knowledge would raise their awareness of collocations and possibly reduce their probability of committing errors related to them. However, understanding the term and its related concepts is not enough. It is advisable for students to have profound knowledge of how words combine together, which would help them in recognizing and producing collocations, especially lexical ones, accurately. These kinds of knowledge are obtainable from different sources and activities including teachers’ instructions and self-study. Therefore, students should pay more attention to and follow their teachers’ instructions. More importantly, however, they should think seriously about self-study. As it is obvious that teacher can never introduce everything about collocations to them, they need to broaden their knowledge by themselves basing on teachers’ instructions. For example, they can read 116
material on collocations. Extensive reading is also useful, through which they are able to improve their reading comprehension skill, and learn new vocabulary and collocations included in the texts. Besides, the use of collocation dictionaries and corpora in translation is recommended. Students can also base on these sources to compile their own glossaries of collocations. The second recommendation is on students’ learning of vocabulary, which is believed to have positive effects on collocations acquisition and vice versa. On one hand, it is obvious that one without a wide vocabulary would have many difficulties in recognizing and producing collocations. On the other hand, effective learning of vocabulary requires collocational knowledge. Learning words as chunks, according to LA, would enhance their acquisition and retention. Moreover, as Firth remarked that one “shall know a word by the company it keeps” (cited in Gyllstad, 2007, p.7), learning words in combination with others would also help students discover their meaning and usage more easily and accurately. Learning vocabulary in such a way, in return, can improve their knowledge about collocations. While learning chunks of words they may consciously or unconsciously memorize the ways the words combine, which will eventually be helpful for them when they need to produce certain collocations. To sum up, students should broaden their vocabulary by learning words as chunks as it is an effective way to improve both their vocabulary and collocational knowledge. The last recommendation aims at their translation skills. Having a broad vocabulary and profound knowledge of collocations is necessary but not sufficient to ensure a successful translation since the knowledge, after all, will be meaningless if students do not have the essential skills to put it into practice. Therefore, it is also recommended that students improve their skills and knowledge in translation. Particularly they should be aware that there are different translation methods other than word-for-word translation, which they need to practice using more frequently. Moreover, knowledge about vocabulary and collocations will not become active knowledge until they actually use it, such as in translation. In sum, students are recommended to broaden their knowledge and put it into practice with different translation methods. Also, it is a good way to strengthen their memory. 117
5.2.3. Recommendations for future research The present study focused on collocational errors in translation. However, due to the limits in time and scope of the study, it only took into account one type of lexical collocation: adjective-noun. Therefore, a study on larger scale that includes all other types of lexical collocations can be conducted for a more thorough insight into the issue. Also, this study should be carried out with a larger size of sample for stronger generalizability. One other point that needs further research is the influence of learners’ use of dictionaries on their making of errors. The present study revealed that inappropriate use of dictionaries accounted for some errors, which was also mentioned in several previous studies. However, due to the lack of evidence, it was impossible to further elaborate on the issue. Therefore, future studies can focus more on learners’ use of dictionaries in translations in order to investigate this issue more thoroughly. Last but not least, the present study made some recommendations on how collocations could be taught and learnt in translation. However, these recommendations were produced mostly on theoretical basis and thus still need further empirical studies to confirm their effectiveness and convince teachers of the necessity of teaching collocations in translation.
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APPENDIX 1 TRANSLATION TEST Name: ______________________________________________________________ Class: ______________________________________________________________ INSTRUCTION: Fill in the blanks by translating the underlined words in the Vietnamese sentences into English. For each blank, you will need two words (one Adjective and one Noun). If you do not like to fill in the blanks, you can provide complete translations of your own. 1. Karlow mất một chân trong chiến tranh và được lắp một cái chân giả mới. Karlow lost his leg in the war and was fitted for a new __________________. ......................................................................................................................................................... 2. Ông ta mất toàn bộ răng và phải mang răng giả mới có thể ăn được. He became totally toothless and had to wear __________________ to eat. ......................................................................................................................................................... 3. Nếu muốn súp đặc, hãy thêm bột vào nồi súp. If you want __________________, add some flour to the stock. ......................................................................................................................................................... 4. Cho súp ra một cái tô lớn, và thêm nước vào nếu ba ̣n muốn có súp loãng. Transfer soup to a large bowl, and add more water if you want __________________. ......................................................................................................................................................... 5.
“Trà loãng” là loại trà có màu và vị đều nhạt. "__________________" means the tea that is light in color and taste. .........................................................................................................................................................
6. Sữa đặc là sữa bò đã được loại bỏ nước. __________________ is cow's milk from which water has been removed. .........................................................................................................................................................
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7. Người đàn ông được tìm thấy trong tin ̀ h tra ̣ng mũi gãy, mắ t bầ m, và nhiề u vế t thương ở đầ u. The man was found with a broken nose, __________________, and wounds on his head. ......................................................................................................................................................... 8. Uố ng quá nhiề u nước ngo ̣t, chẳ ng ha ̣n như Coca Cola, không tố t cho sức khỏe của ba ̣n. Drinking too much __________________, such as Coca Cola, is not good for your health. ......................................................................................................................................................... 9. Neptune là một nhãn hiệu dầu ăn nổi tiếng. Neptune is a famous brand of __________________. ......................................................................................................................................................... 10. Dân số đông và thiế u đấ t là những nguyên nhân tiề m ẩ n gây nên xung đô ̣t. __________________ and scarce land resources were the underlying sources of conflict. ......................................................................................................................................................... 11. Cô nàng mua mô ̣t tấ m bùa may mắ n để tố ng khứ vâ ̣n đen của min ̀ h đi. She bought a lucky charm in order to get rid of her __________________. ......................................................................................................................................................... 12. Vì có chất lượng kém, nên chiếc xe có giá rất rẻ. Because of its __________________, the car is very cheap. ......................................................................................................................................................... 13. Gió lớn (lên đến 60 dặm một giờ) có khả năng gây thiêṭ ha ̣i về tài sản. __________________ (up to 60mph) have the potential to cause property damage. ......................................................................................................................................................... 14. Ghế điện đã trở thành biểu tượng cho án tử hình ở Mỹ. The electric chair has become a symbol of the __________________ in the United States. ......................................................................................................................................................... 15. Mặt trăng biến mất, và có một cơn gió nhẹ hệt như hơi thở của người đang hấp hối. The moon disappeared, and there was a(n) __________________, like the breath of a dying man. .........................................................................................................................................................
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16. Hít thở là điều kiện cần nhưng không phải là điều kiện đủ để bạn tồn tại. Breathing is a necessary but not a(n) __________________ of your remaining alive. ......................................................................................................................................................... 17. Lise không phải là một đầu bếp được đào tạo qua trường lớp, nhưng cô có nhiều kinh nghiệm quý báu bắt nguồn từ việc giúp đỡ mẹ trong một khách sạn nhỏ ở Copenhagen. Lise is not a trained cook, but has a wealth of __________________ which began with helping her mother in a small hotel in Copenhagen. ......................................................................................................................................................... ......................................................................................................................................................... 18. Dù vẫn còn trẻ, ông ấy vẫn phải nghỉ hưu vì sức khỏe kém. Although he was still young, he had to retired due to __________________. ......................................................................................................................................................... 19. Chính sách mới mang lại những điều kiện thuận lợi cho phát triển du lịch. The new policy provides __________________ for the development of tourism. ......................................................................................................................................................... 20. Được mời vào Nhà Trắng và gặp tổng thống Mỹ quả là một vinh dự lớn lao. It was a __________________ to be invited to the White House and to meet the president of the United States. ......................................................................................................................................................... .........................................................................................................................................................
Thank you for your cooperation!
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APPENDIX 2 COLLEX TEST Name: ______________________________________________________________ Class: ______________________________________________________________ INSTRUCTION: For each pair of word combinations below, choose the one that, in your opinion, is the correct collocation (frequently used by native speakers). In some cases, both combinations given are correct. 1. A. Thick soup
B. Dense soup
C. Both are correct
2. A. Thin soup
B. Weak soup
C. Both are correct
3. A. False teeth
B. Artificial teeth
C. Both are correct
4. A. Artificial limb
B. Fake limb
C. Both are correct
5. A. Weak tea
B. Washy tea
C. Both are correct
6. A. Thick milk
B. Condensed milk
C. Both are correct
7. A. Cooking oil
B. Edible oil
C. Both are correct
8. A. Dense population
B. Crowded population
C. Both are correct
9. A. Soft drink
B. Sugared drink
C. Both are correct
10. A. Black eyes
B. Bruised eyes
C. Both are correct
11. A. Low quality
B. Bad quality
C. Both are correct
12. A. Powerful wind
B. Strong wind
B. Both are correct
13. A. Bad fortune
B. Black fortune
C. Both are correct
14. A. Capital punishment
B. Dead punishment
C. Both are correct
15. A. Weak wind
B. Light wind
C. Both are correct
16. A. Valuable experience
B. Precious experience
C. Both are correct
17. A. Poor health
B. Weak health
C. Both are correct
18. A. Ample condition
B. Sufficient condition
C. Both are correct
19. A. Advantageous condition
B. Favorable condition
C. Both are correct
20. A. Big honor
B. Great honor
C. Both are correct
Thank you for your cooperation!
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APPENDIX 3 QUESTIONS FOR INTERVIEWING TEACHERS A. Perception of collocation 1. Do you know about collocation? (types, uses, etc.) 2. What do you think about the role of collocation in translation and translation teaching? B. Teaching of collocation 3. Do you teach (lexical) collocations in your class of Basic Translation? If the answer is ‘Yes’ a. How do you teach collocations? b. Do you have any problems in teaching collocations? If the answer is ‘No’ a. Why do you not teach collocations in your class of Basic Translation? b. Do you think that the teaching of collocations should be required in translation classes? C. Observation of Ss’ performance 4. Do the students have any difficulties/problems in translating collocations? (What are they?) 5. How does your teaching of collocations help the students in dealing with the difficulties/problems? (Only ask if the answer to Q3 is ‘Yes’) 6. What are the strategies the students usually use when facing problems in translating collocations? 7. In your opinion, what are the main causes of collocational errors in the students’ translations?
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APPENDIX 4 QUESTIONNAIRE Name: _________________________________________________________________ Class: __________________________________________________________________ INSTRUCTION: For each response, please circle or specify the choice(s) that best corresponds to your view. A. Perception of collocations 1. Do you know what a collocation is? a. Yes b. No If your answer is No please stop the questionnaire here. Thank you for your time and cooperation! 2. How do you know the concept of collocation? a. Studied in university’s compulsory curriculum b. Introduced by teachers out of compulsory curriculum c. Reading reference materials on this issue d. Others: (please specify) _______________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________ 3. Do you think that knowledge about collocation is important in translation? a. Yes b. No (Please move to Question 5) 4. What does knowledge about collocation help you in translation process? (You can choose more than one option) a. Increase written fluency, which allows more time to discover the source text’s meanings b. Providing alternative and richer ways of expression c. Producing more precise and more natural language d. Maintaining and strengthening cohesion of the text e. Others: (please specify) ___________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
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B. Acquisition and use of collocations 5. What do you often do to broaden your knowledge about collocations? (You can choose more than one option) a. Reading reference materials b. Paying attention to collocations used in texts (i.e. reading texts, translation texts, etc.) c. Memorizing groups of words that often go together when learning vocabulary d. Looking up for collocations in dictionaries e. Using linguistic corpora f. Others (please specify) ______________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________ 6. How often do you care about choosing right word combinations during your translations? a. Very often b. Often c. Sometimes d. Rarely e. Never 7. How often do you face the problem of selecting the right collocations during your translation? a. Very often b. Often c. Sometimes d. Rarely e. Never 8. How often are you aware of erroneous combinations in your translations? a. Very often b. Often c. Sometimes d. Rarely e. Never
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9. What do you often do when facing difficulties in translating collocations? (You can choose more than one option) a. Using word-for-word translation b. Trying to paraphrase or find other words to express the idea c. Using a synonym of the correct word which you do not remember d. Avoiding translating the difficult collocations if possible e. Checking dictionaries f. Other (please specify) ____________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________ C. Teaching of collocations 10. Did your teacher of Basic Translation teach collocations in class? a. Yes b. No (Please finish the questionnaire here. Thank for your time and cooperation!) 11. How did (s)he teach collocations? (You can choose more than one option.) a. Introducing the term collocation b. Introducing the role of collocation c. Directing your attention to collocations in translation tasks/texts d. Choosing some collocations to teach/introduce in class e. Encouraging you to collect and study collocation on your own f. Mentioning already-taught collocations for a few times g. Using collocation dictionaries h. Using linguistic corpora i. Identifying your errors and ask you to look for corrections j. Identifying your errors and give corrections in your translations. k. Others: (please specify) ____________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
Thank you for your cooperation!
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APPENDIX 5 ACTIVITESS FOR TEACHING COLLOCATIONS (Lewis, 2000) Type 1: Fill in column 2 with an adjective which is opposite in meaning to the adjective in Column 1 and also makes a correct collocation with the word in Column 3. Column 1
Column 2
Column 3
helpful
__________________
suggestion
efficient
__________________
system
careful
__________________
piece of work
safe
__________________
choice
light
__________________
green
light
__________________
suitcase
light
__________________
rain
light
__________________
work
Type 2: One word in each group does not make a strong word partnership with the word in capitals. Which is the odd one? 1. BRIGHT
idea green smell child day room
2. CLEAR
attitude need instructions alternative day conscience road
3. LIGHT
traffic work day entertainment suitcase rain green lunch
4. NEW
experience job food potatoes baby situation year
5. HIGH
season price opinion spirits house time priority
6. MAIN
point reason effect entrance speed road meal course
7. STRONG
possibility doubt smell influence views coffee language
8. SERIOUS
advantage situation relationship illness crime matter
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APPENDIX 6 SAMPLES OF COLLOCATIONAL ERRORS EXTRACTED FROM STUDENTS EXAM PAPERS IN BASIC TRANSLATION Source text Việc phá rừng, phá hủy tầng ozone hay thải các chất phóng xạ ra biển đều gây ra ô nhiễm môi trường toàn cầu. Bị tác động mạnh bởi nạn ô nhiễm và các phương thức đánh bắt cá mang tính hủy diệt…
Nhân tài là nguyên khí quốc gia…
…rất nhiều bãi đá ngầm san hô bị phá hủy, không còn là môi trường sống cho cá nữa. Thomas Edison tin rằng bệnh điếc của ông đã làm tăng thêm sức tập trung của ông ấy. Thái Lan là nước duy nhất ở Đông Nam Á chưa bao giờ bị cai trị bởi một cường quốc Âu Châu. Nhờ các dược phẩm hiện đại, bệnh lao và bệnh sốt rét không còn nguy hiểm như trước đây nữa. ...chuyên trang du lịch của báo The Guardian (Anh Quốc) đã bình chọn bánh mì Sài Gòn…
Students’ translations Approximation Deforestation, ozone damaging or radioactive release result in global environmental pollution. Global pollution is caused by forest destruction, ozone layer ruin and radiation rejection to ocean. Be strongly influenced by pollutants and destructive fish-catching methods… Being strong impacted by pollution and destructed means of catching fishes… Being strongly affected by the pollution and some fish-hunting methods... Talent people are life-sustaining element of a country… Talented man is a precious core of a country… …many stretch of aqueous rock and coral have been destroyed. They are not the habitat for fish anymore. Thomas Edison believed that his deaf disease had strengthen his focus ability. Thomas Edison believes that his deaf increased his focusing ability. Thailand is the only country that has never been governed by any super western countries in Eastern Asia.
Thanks to the modern pharmacy, tuberculosis and malaria are not as dangerous as before. Thanks to modern chemical, tuberculosis and malaria haven't been dangerous like before. …the diligent travelling web of The Guardian (U.K) selected banh mi Sai Gon… …the tourist column of The Guardian newspaper (UK) chose Sai Gon bread…
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Suggested corrections ozone (layer) destruction
fishing methods
- the (source of) power - the essence
underwater coral reefs
concentration
- powerful European countries - European superpowers
modern medicine
the Travel section
Tim mạch là một trong những bệnh phổ biến của nhân loại…
Bị tác động mạnh bởi nạn ô nhiễm và các phương thức đánh bắt cá mang tính hủy diệt… …rất nhiều bãi đá ngầm san hô bị phá hủy, không còn là môi trường sống cho cá nữa. …bằng chế độ dinh dưỡng hợp lý cũng có thể khống chế căn bệnh này. Những người chiến sĩ vô danh kia đã chết để đồng bào họ được sống trong tự do.
Để có một nguồn nhân lực dồi dào có năng lực và có tài để phụng sự cho đất nước và nhân dân… …rất nhiều bãi đá ngầm san hô bị phá hủy, không còn là môi trường sống cho cá nữa.
…Tuy nhiên, bằng chế độ dinh dưỡng hợp lý cũng có thể khống chế căn bệnh này. Ở nước ta, từ ngày mở cửa kinh tế…
Use of synonyms Heart disease is one of the most popular disease of human beings. Cardiovascular is one of the popular diseases of human being... Cardiovascular trouble is one of the human common diseases. Being strongly affected by pollution and devastating fishing method...
common disease
cardiovascular problems destructive fishing methods
…many submarine coral reefs have been destroyed and no longer fish's habitat.
underwater coral reefs
…healthy, suitable diet can help controlling the disease.
appropriate diet/regimen
The unnamed soldiers died for freedom of their countrymen. Those unname soldiers had sacrificed themselves for their countrymen to live in freedom. L1 transfer …so that there could heave a talented and potential human resource to help other people and develop the country In order to have a rich talented, potential, full of ability human resource to serve country and citizens... ...a lot of underground coral reef has been destroyed, which limits living environment for fishes. …many underground rock of coral are damaged and are not environment of fish.
unknown soldiers
Many rocky field underwater and coral reef are destroyed … …However, suitable nutrient system can control this disease. …However, with a proper nutrition system can constrain this disease. In our country, since economy-door open day… In our country, from the beginning of opened-economic day…
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a rich resource of able and talented people
underwater coral reef
diet/regimen
Since the government opened the economy / the economy was opened
...mối quan hệ tương phản giữa môi trường và phát triển luôn là bài toán đặt ra cho các nhà kinh tế… Thomas Edison tin rằng bệnh điếc của ông đã làm tăng thêm sức tập trung của ông ấy. Bạn không nên làm hỏng tình bạn hữu chỉ vì một món tiền nhỏ. ...Mèo con đi học chẳng mang thứ gì. Chỉ mang một chiếc bút chì. Và mang một mẩu bánh mì con con.
...chuyên trang du lịch của báo The Guardian (Anh Quốc) đã bình chọn bánh mì Sài Gòn… ...bánh mì Sài Gòn thuộc 10 món ăn đường phố ngon và hấp dẫn du khách nhất thế giới.
...bài Mèo con đi học của Phan Thị Vàng Anh là tác phẩm duy nhất món bánh mì được xuất hiện… Việc phá rừng, phá hủy tầng ozone hay thải các chất phóng xạ ra biển đều gây ra ô nhiễm môi trường toàn cầu. …bằng chế độ dinh dưỡng hợp lý cũng có thể khống chế căn bệnh này.
...the contrast relation between environment and development always be considered as a mathematic problems for economists...
paradoxical relationship
Thomas Edison believed that his deaf disease had strengthen his focus ability.
- deafness - hearing loss
Thomas Edison believed that is his deaf disease increasing more his concentration. You should not break the friendship because of a small money. You should not make a damage for your friend ship because of only small money. ...Petty cat don't bring anything to school. Only bringing one pencil. And bringing with a small bread. Baby cat goes to school with nothing. A pencil is in his hand only. And just with a small bread. Bring nothing Kitty attends school. Except one little pencil. And one little bread. ...the major tourist page of the Guardian (UK) voted for Sai Gon bread… …the tourism page of the Guardian (England) voted Sai Gon bread… Sai Gon bread was voted to be one among ten most attractive street food in the world... Banh Mi Sai Gon (Saigon Bread) 10 most delicious and attractive street food in the world. …the little small cat go to school of Phan Thi Vang Anh is the only work bread food is appeared.
Word coinage The destruction of forest and ozone layer or radio-active emition to oceans can lead to the global pollution Deforestation, ozone destroyment or radioactive emition are all cause global pollution of environment. …it is possible to prevent this disease by sensible nutritional diets.
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small amount of money
small/tiny piece of bread
The Travel section
(top 10) most delicious and tasty street foods that attract tourists around the world
the emission of radioactive substances …destruction of ozone layers or emission of radioactive waste… nutritious diet
Những người chiến sĩ vô danh kia đã chết để đồng bào họ được sống trong tự do. Vì thuốc không hiệu quả nên công ty dược phẩm đã ngỏ lời xin lỗi và rút lại vắc-xin.
Nhân tài là nguyên khí quốc gia… Việc phá rừng, phá hủy tầng ozone hay thải các chất phóng xạ ra biển đều gây ra ô nhiễm môi trường toàn cầu… Thái Lan là nước duy nhất ở Đông Nam Á chưa bao giờ bị cai trị bởi một cường quốc Âu Châu. Vì thuốc không hiệu quả nên công ty dược phẩm đã ngỏ lời xin lỗi và rút lại vắc-xin.
Rất khó chụp hình sao Kim vì nó thường xuyên bị che bởi những đám mây dày đặc. …thì món ăn phổ biến nhất Sài Gòn có số phận khá "hẩm hiu"… ...món ăn đường phố ngon và hấp dẫn du khách nhất thế giới. ...Mèo con đi học chẳng mang thứ gì. Chỉ mang một chiếc bút chì. Và mang một mẩu bánh mì con con. …dù là tuổi đi học nào nhất là ở Sài Gòn và các đô thị miền Nam - cũng
Those noname soldiers dead in order that their countrymen can live in freedom.
unknown soldiers
Because of uneffected medicine the pharmacy company... Because of uneffective medicines, so pharmacist company gives respectful apology and returns their vaccine. Formal confusion Talent people are life-sustaining element of a country… Cutting down forest, destroying ozone layer or releasing radioactivity into seas all cause global environment pollution… Forest devastating, ozone layer destroying or radiation substance emitting causes the global pollution. Thailand is the only country in South East Asia which has never been dominated by a Europe developed country. Thailand is the only country in South East Asia which has never been dominated by a developed Europe country. Since the medicine doesn't work effectively, the pharmacy company apologized and took back the vaccination. Since the medicine did not work effectively, the pharmacy company apologized and took it back. It is difficult to take a photo of Venus because it is usually veiled by densely fog. It is hard to take picture of Venus because it is usually veiled by densely clouds. …Banh mi Sai Gon which is the most popular food in Sai Gon has a unfortune fate. ... 10 most delicious and tasteful street food which attracts tourists most in the world. Little cat went to school, bringing nothing except for: A small pencil. And a small load of bread.
…the medicine was not effective…
...Althoug ages of school - for instance in Saigon and the south city also at least once time eat bread.
cities/towns in the South of Vietnam
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talented people environmental pollution
radioactive substances
a powerful European country
the pharmaceutical company
dense clouds
unfortunate fate
tasty street food
a small loaf of bread
ít nhất một lần gặm bánh mì. …thì món ăn phổ biến nhất Sài Gòn có số phận khá "hẩm hiu" khi ít được văn nhân thi sĩ đưa vào tác phẩm …rất nhiều bãi đá ngầm san hô bị phá hủy, không còn là môi trường sống cho cá nữa. Bị tác động mạnh bởi nạn ô nhiễm và các phương thức đánh bắt cá mang tính hủy diệt Mối quan hệ tương phản giữa môi trường và phát triển luôn là bài toán đặt ra cho các nhà kinh tế… ...chuyên trang du lịch của báo The Guardian (Anh Quốc) đã bình chọn bánh mì Sài Gòn thuộc 10 món ăn đường phố ngon và hấp dẫn du khác nhất thế giới.
…thì món ăn phổ biến nhất Sài Gòn có số phận khá "hẩm hiu" khi ít được văn nhân thi sĩ đưa vào tác phẩm.
No matter what age you are, especially when you live in Sai Gon and south town you certain ate bread at least one time. …the most popular food in Saigon Saigon bread - is partially pitiful because it is not brought into literature work much.
Others …many coral oust ranges were destroyed, unabling fish from living.
literary works
Underwater coral reefs
(Many coral supplants are destroyed) by the heavily impact of pollution and fishing determinant devastation...
destructive fishing methods
the contrary relationship between environment and development is always the asked problem for economists...
a problem / dilemma
…the diligent travelling web of The Guardian (U.K) selected banh mi Sai Gon as one of the ten most delicious and attractive street foods to tourists in the world. …the diligent travelling web of The Guardian (UK) selected it as one of the ten most delicious street foods attracting visitors best in the world.
the Travel section
…the dish is popular in Saigon to have dim name as poet let into poem. …the most popular food in Sai Gon is bread which has a bad view when it appears a little in interature term.
an unfortunate fate
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