COLLOCATIONS FROM FUNDAMENTAL LINGUISTIC RESEARCH TO TEACHING METHODOLOGY

Abstract

The present article arms to review the most relevant approaches to the study of collocations with the purpose of enhancing the teaching of vocabulary, collocations and idiomatic expressions in a Japanese language class. The study of collocations has developed in recent years with cross-language comparisons across a large spectrum of linguistic families, and the ways of defining collocations have also become richer and more nuanced. As language teachers become more aware that enhancing vocabulary knowledge is key for both reading comprehension and smooth self-expression, the importance of teaching collocations was also recognized. Quantitative and qualitative studies based on students' tests, and English essays, in the case offoreign kamers from various cultures of English as L2, as well as studies performed on the kamers ofvarious non-European languages have shown that collocations are important from the very beginning of language leaming and should be incorporated in the instruction and testing of the respective languages. On the other hand, Japanese scholars define collocations in a broader sense, by contrast withfixed expressions like proverbs, as being flexible combinations of more than two words, which can be conjugated or modified freely, and consider them suitable for intermediate or advanced kamers to improve their spoken language ability. However, we shall argue that by focusing on verb collocations first we can introducé from the very beginning the collocations of important and multivalent verbs like kakeru, kakaru, ireru, deru, etc.