Employing Corpora in Solving Collocation Learning Difficulties Encountered by University Students

Abstract

This study aims to appraise the impact of employing corpora in solving collocation learning difficulties encountered by Sudanese undergraduates. To do so, the study adopted the mixed method approach to data collection. Specifically, four tools of data collection are adopted; a pre-test and post-test, student attitude questionnaire, and teacher interview. Second year students of Biomedical Engineering at Bayan College of Science and Technology were chosen as the population. 60 students (37males and 23 females) were selected as the study sample and then based on their performance on the pre-test, they were divided into two groups; the control group in which students were taught collocations (delexical verbs) through a traditional strategy, and the experimental group in which students were taught how to use the corpus and then taught the same collocations using British National Corpus (BNC). After the experiment, results of the post-test revealed that while the performance of the two groups was improved, the results of the experimental group were significantly better than that of the control group. The questionnaire was distributed to participants of the experiment for they can judge whether the corpus is effective in learning collocations. Results of the questionnaire proved that students showed positive attitudes towards using corpora in language learning, especially collocations. Concerning the interview, five EFL teachers from different Sudanese universities were interviewed. The interview results indicated that all the subjects showed positive attitudes towards employing corpora in language teaching and learning but nearly all of them do not use corpora practically in their classrooms. The study findings indicated that corpora have the potential of raising learners' collocational competence and hence their language proficiency. The findings also showed that using corpus-based strategies is better than using non-corpus-based strategies due to the authentic context that corpora provide. In addition, it is also indicated that EFL teachers should be trained on how to practically use corpora in their classrooms. Based on the study findings, it is recommended that teachers should use corpus-based strategies. Furthermore, EFL learners should be trained on how to exploit corpora and use them in language learning and investigation. Based on the findings, it is suggested that, more studies need to be conducted on utilizing corpora in learning the other types of collocations in English language. In addition to that, it is suggested that, as it is hard to find an English teacher using corpora in Sudan, more study should be carried out to investigate the underlying factors.