This book highlights research that expands on our knowledge of second- language collocation acquisition. It presents original findings based on the largest collocation database to date, encompassing over 8,000 collocations: verb + noun, adjective + noun, and noun + noun. These collocations, collected from a one-million-learner corpus, were not confined to English as a foreign language (EFL) learners at a particular proficiency level, but also included learners at three levels. As such, the book provides a panoramic view regarding L2 collocation acquisition, not only in terms of learners’ acquisition of different types of collocations, but in terms of the developmental patterns in L2 collocation learning. One major discovery is that there is a collocation lag as learners’ proficiency levels rise, which is associated with vocabulary increase, in particular semantic domains—a remarkable insight for second-language acquisition researchers, English teachers and EFL learners alike. The findings reported shed new light on how collocations are acquired by EFL learners, offering guidance on how they can best be taught. In closing, the book discusses pedagogical aspects that arise from considering how learners can be helped with collocation learning.

This book provides pedagogical suggestions for both teachers and learners.

Collocations are combinations of words which frequently appear together. Using them makes your English sound more natural.

Corpora are well-established as a resource for language research; they are now also increasingly being used for teaching purposes. This book is the first of its kind to deal explicitly and in a wide-ranging way with the use of corpora in teaching. It contains an extensive collection of articles by corpus linguists and practising teachers, covering not only the use of data to inform and create teaching materials but also the direct exploitation of corpora by students, both in the study of linguistics in general and in the acquisition of proficiency in individual languages, including English, Welsh, German, French and Italian. In addition, the book offers practical information on the sources of corpora and concordances, including those suitable for work on non-roman scripts such as Greek and Cyrillic.

This book, likely the first of its kind in the English language, explores Chinese for specific and professional purposes (CSP) in terms of theorizing and developing practical applications for language teaching and learning. While research in language for specific purposes is thriving for languages such as English, there has been comparatively little such research conducted for Chinese. This volume attempts to fill the gap by bringing together practitioners from a broad international scholarly community, who share common interests yet diverse orientations. Seventeen papers are included, and address four broad thematic categories: (1) academic Chinese, (2) business Chinese, (3) Chinese for medicine and health care, and (4) Chinese for other broadly defined services and industries (diplomacy, tourism, wine-tasting, etc.). Representing the state of the art in CSP research, the book offers an indispensable guide for anyone interested in theoretical and practical issues in this area of applied Chinese language studies.

Check Your Vocabulary workbooks are aimed at non-native speakers who want to build essential vocabulary and learn to speak fluent and natural-sounding English. For example, in English we use different words to describe different types of food when they go bad. We can describe meat as rotten, cheese as mouldy, milk as sour and butter as rancid - but we would not say sour meat, or rotten milk. Knowing how words are naturally used together is known as collocation. A good knowledge of these word combinations greatly improves the style of written and spoken language for non-native speakers. Knowledge of collocations is often tested in exams such as IELTS, TOEFL and TOEIC. Containing a range of word games, quizzes and exercises, this workbook will help intermediate learners to develop core language skills in a challenging, yet entertaining way.