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Collocational Differences Between L1 and L2: Implications for EFL Learners and

Collocational Differences Between L1 and L2: Implications for EFL Learners and Teachers Karim Sadeghi Collocations are one of the areas that produce problems for learners of English as a foreign language. Iranian learners of English are by no means an exception. Teaching experience at schools, private language centers, and universities in Iran suggests that a significant part of EFL learners’ problems with producing the language, especially at lower levels of proficiency, can be traced back to the areas where there is a difference between source- and target-language word partners. As an example, whereas people in English make mistakes, Iranians do mis- takes when speaking Farsi (Iran’s official language, also called Persian) or Azari (a Turkic language spoken mainly in the north west of Iran). Accordingly, many beginning EFL learners in Iran are tempted to produce the latter incorrect form rather than its acceptable counterpart in English. This is a comparative study of Farsi (Persian) and English collocations with respect to lexis and grammar. The results of the study, with 76 participants who sat a 60-item Farsi (Persian)- English test of collocations, indicated that learners are most likely to face great obstacles in cases where they negatively transfer their linguistic knowledge of the L1 to an L2 context. The findings of this study have some immediate implications for both language learners and teachers of EFL/ESL, as well as for writers of materials. Les collocations constituent un des éléments qui posent des problèmes pour les apprenants d’anglais comme langue étrangère. Les Iraniens qui apprennent l’anglais n’y font pas exception. Mon expérience comme enseignant dans des écoles, des centres privés d’enseignement des langues et des universités en Iran, donne à penser qu’une partie significative des problèmes qu’ont les apprenants d’anglais langue étrangère à produire la langue, notamment les débutants, dé- coule de la différence entre des pairs de mots (collocations) de la langue source et la langue cible. Par exemple, les deux formes du verbe faire en anglais (make and do) sont sources d’erreur pour les locuteurs de farsi (la langue officielle de l’Iran, aussi appelée perse) ou l’azéri (une langue turque parlée principalement dans le nord-ouest d’Iran). Ainsi, plusieurs élèves iraniens qui débutent leurs études en anglais se tromperont de forme en anglais car ils auront choisi celle qui reflète l’usage dans leur langue maternelle. Cet article est une étude comparative de collocations en farsi (perse) et en anglais par rapport au vocabulaire et à la grammaire. Les résultats de l’étude, qui a impliqué 76 participants ayant passé 100 KARIM SADEGHI une évaluation à 60 items portant sur des collocations farsi/anglais, indiquent que les apprenants seront aptes à se heurter à des obstacles en transférant les connaissances linguistiques de leur L1 au contexte de leur L2. La portée des résultats de cette étude s’étend aux apprenants et aux enseignants en ALE/ALS, ainsi qu’aux auteurs de matériel pédagogique. Introduction It has long been established that differences in the structures of first and second languages may produce interference problems for L2 learners, and the similarities between them will probably (but not always) contribute to facilitation of learning (Corder, 1981). Following World War II, when it was believed that the best teaching materials for foreign languages should draw on a careful comparison of a “scientific description of the language to be learned” with “a parallel description of the native language of the learner” (Fries, 1945, p. 9), and when the discipline of contrastive analysis “was considered as the panacea for language teaching problems” (Keshavarz, 1999, p. 1), many studies were conducted to investigate the differences be- tween a native language and a target language, which was usually English (Yarmohammadi, 1965; Oller & Ziahosseiny, 1970; Buteau, 1970). One potential area of contrast that has not, however, been given due attention by researchers is the differences and/or similarities between two languages in terms of collocations. Multi-word expressions including col- location, although “an important component of fluent linguistic production” (Hyland, 2008, p. 4), are a problematic aspect of L2 learning that has been largely neglected in SLA research (Nesselhauf, 2003; Shei & Pain, 2000). According to Xiao and McEnery (2006), although research on collocation has recently seen a growth of interest, “there has been little work done on collocation … [in] languages other than English” and “less work has been undertaken contrasting the collocational behaviour … in different lan- guages” (p. 103). Although the findings of a few studies on contrastive analysis of collocations between some languages have appeared in the litera- ture (Bartning & Hammarberg, 2007, between Swedish and French; Xiao & McEnery, 2006, between Chinese and English; Wolter, 2006, between English and Japanese; Nesselhauf, 2003, between German and English), no published research seems to be available with respect to collocational differences or similarities between English and Persian. Indeed, a search of the Iranian Research Institute for Scientific Information and Documentation database, which files the abstracts of all master’s and doctoral theses produced by Iranian researchers at home or abroad, returned no results. My own experience as a high school teacher, language center tutor, uni- versity lecturer, and teacher trainer in various locations in Iran strongly suggests that a good number of syntactic and semantic errors by learners TESL CANADA JOURNAL/REVUE TESL DU CANADA 101 VOL. 26, NO 2, SPRING 2009 (and sometimes their teachers) may stem from a discrepancy between col- locational patterns in the L1 and the language that they are struggling to master. Because according to Nesselhauf (2003), comprehension of colloca- tions does not normally produce problems for learners so that identifying learners’ problems “must mean analyzing their production of collocation” (p. 224), this study was an attempt to understand whether collocational differences between two languages (i.e., Persian and English) might lead to inaccuracies in the production of the target language for low-, mid-, and high-proficient EFL learners (namely, Iranian high school students and uni- versity learners majoring in EFL). Another equally important aim of the study was to determine the proportion of collocational errors directly caused by L1 interference. More precisely, the study was conducted to answer the following research questions. 1. Do collocational differences between Persian and English lead to inaccuracies in the production of the latter? 2. What proportion of collocational errors in the L2 (English) are directly caused by L1 (Persian) interference? Although the collocational patterns investigated here draw on Persian as the L1, the findings may be generalizable to other contexts, especially where the learners’ L1 has much in common with the L1 here (i.e., Persian) as in Arabic, Azari, Kurdish, Turkish, and Urdu. After clarifying the meaning of collocation and indicating its importance in learning a foreign language, I present the method used to answer the above questions and discuss the findings. I also provide implications for language learners and their instructors and educational authorities. The Meaning of Collocation The word collocation is a relatively new addition to the lexicon of English. It first emerged in the writing of Jesperson (1924) and Palmer (1925) and was formally introduced to the discipline of linguistics by Firth (1957, cited in Hyland, 2008); it was further developed and publicized by Halliday and Sinclair during the 1960s (Krishnamurthy, Sinclair, Jones, & Daley, 2004). Collocation has been technically defined slightly variably by scholars, and as Gairns and Redman (1986) noted, “There are inevitably differences of opinion as to what represents an acceptable collocation” (p. 37). Cruse (1986), for example, defined it as “sequences of lexical items which habitually co- occur, but are nonetheless fully transparent in the sense that each lexical constituent is also a semantic constituent” (p. 40). Cruse distinguished col- locations and idioms, reminding readers that in collocations (such as heavy rain or heavy smoker) there is a kind of semantic cohesion such that “the constituent elements are, to varying degrees, mutually selective” (p. 40) and that in “bound collocations” like foot the bill, “the constituents do not like to be separated” (p. 41). 102 KARIM SADEGHI Similarly, Carter (1998) used the term collocation to refer to “a group of words which occur repeatedly in a language” (p. 51) with the patterns of co-occurrence being either lexical (where co-occurrence patterns are probabilistic) or grammatical (where patterns are more fixed) with catego- rical overlaps in numerous instances. Colligation is a similar term that shows a general relation between the constituents in a construction as that between an adjective and a noun in He is a chain smoker (Matthews, 2007). For Carter, any lexical item of English (or node) can theoretically keep company with any other lexical item (or its cluster), but with varying degrees of probability; however, only those clusters with a high probability of co-occurrence with the node make a collocation. Carter categorized collocations further into four types moving from looser to more determined: unrestricted, semirestricted, familiar, and restricted. A more general and non-technical definition has been given for collocation by the Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English (Lea, 2002): “the way words combine in a language to produce natural-sounding speech and writing” (p. vii). Krishnamurthy et al. (2004) and uploads/Geographie/ 417-431-2-pb.pdf