On Second Language Learner Acquisition of English Collocations

Collocations are words that commonly co-occur, such as 'jury' and 'verdict.' Collocational fluency is an essential aspect of second language fluency. Learning a language via collocations improves upon the efficacy of language acquisition because it essentially kills three birds with one stone: students learn vocabulary, collocations, and also subconsciously absorb the grammar patterns of language through mastery of these chunks of language. This is, in fact, similar to the way native speakers learn language and an efficient way to become fluent.

This book will detail efforts to create and then apply a methodology to develop a large-scale high-frequency collocation list and custom-tailored collocation resources for Japanese, Chinese, and Korean learners to study directly and for practitioners to utilize as reference materials to create additional resources.

Presented in this book is a novel approach taken to fill a major gap in the research and to create large-scale resources that were previously unavailable. Therefore, this book should be considered a valuable contribution to research that aims to help second language learners more effectively achieve fluency in English as a second language.

Dr. James Martin Rogers is an associate professor at Meijo University. He has published over 50 publications on English as a second language-related topic, including publications in top-tier journals such as Studies in Second Language Acquisition, English for Specific Purposes, and Language Teaching Research. He has also led or been part of research teams that have received over 30 million yen worth of Japanese government grants to do educational research. Dr. Rogers is also the creator of multiple language-learning smartphone applications that have been downloaded over 200,000 times. His research interests include corpus linguistics, vocabulary acquisition, collocation, and C.A.L.L.