Shusaku Nakayama (Osaka University of Economics and Law, Japan)
Abstract
In this study, I sought to develop a list of high-frequency collocations in spoken contexts, with the aim of helping learners especially at a lower level to succeed in communication. To make a completed collocation list worthwhile for them, I focused solely on five parts of speech, nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions, and excluded meaningless collocations such as “in the” or “of a,”. Besides, I limited components of each collocation to include those on a list of high-frequency words in spoken contexts, namely, the New General Service List – Spoken; this list consists of 721 high-frequency words and provides at most 90% coverage for unscripted spoken English. In extracting collocations, I adopted three different statistical criteria: the frequency of occurrence, the strength of word associations, and the directionality of components in a collocation. The completed collocation list comprises 1,213 different collocations.
Research (In person, 25 minutes)
Vocabulary
Primarily of interest to teachers of young or very young learners
About the Presenter
Shusaku Nakayama is an assistant professor at Osaka University of Economics and Law. He has been teaching English as a foreign language for around 10 years in Japan. His research interests include textbook analysis, vocabulary analysis, and interlanguage analysis.
