Learning vocabulary is the most important prerequisite for learning any
foreign language because you cannot communicate precisely without words. But very
many students are still asked to learn word lists with equivalents in their native
language.
"The learning of word lists is faulty not only because each word is usually
associated with its mother-tongue equivalent, but also because each word is linguistically
and situationally isolated. However, words are not learnable as isolates." (D.A.
Wilkins)
For example, if you want to formulate an idea in a foreign language you retrieve from your
memories quite easily words that express your concept in your mother
tongue. If you have been taught in terms of single word `core´ meaning solely by means of
translation equivalents and your teachers have not provided you with information about
collocational possibilities and restrictions, then you will very likely `translate´
collocations from your first language into the target language in an unacceptable form.
You will quite naturally combine words from the word pairs you have learnt from the word
lists, like pearls on a string. Unluckily the result is often very poor and may end up
with misunderstanding. Recent research shows that we learn language in chunks
which fall into categories like sentence heads, collocations, idioms,
phrasal verbs, metaphors, proverbs, etc. For example, have and get
derive meaning from their collocations as well as from
context.
Sentence head: "Could you please ... In reply to ..." | |
Collocation: "have a bath/ fit/ heart/ ..., awareness for the environment ..." | |
Context: "Could you open the door?" (request for information or action) |
The learner´s exposure to lexical items embedded in natural linguistic contexts will
develop her/ his sensitivity to the collocations native speakers prefer, for a collocation
is the "mutual expectancy of words" (Firth). Every learner, and also every
native speaker, has a far larger `passive´ than `active ´ vocabulary. Massive exposure
to the target language is instrumental for the learning of collocations. The semantic
structure of a language can only be provided by extensive reading. This is the reason why
I called my collocational dictionary The Advanced Reader´s Collocation
Searcher.
ARCS is an electronic dictionary in which words are listed in terms of
their firm and acceptable collocations. A collocation may be words which
are various parts of speech and which relate to each other in various ways, i.e. noun plus
adjective, verb plus adverb, verb plus noun object, verb plus noun subject, etc.
ARCS is on a CD-ROM with 40,000 nodes/ headwords with
real examples and synonyms, all possible German equivalents. The latter form a semantic
field. The file size is about 6 million words or over 3 thousand pages.
You can search for single words in English or/ and German.
And you can use Boolean searches as well. Because of the very great number of authentic
examples it can serve as a concordancer as well.
Horst Bogatz
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If interested in research, you may want to read the following
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