|
The collocational competence of EFL students in relation to their cognitive and affective predispositions.
Kacafírková, Petra ; Kucharská, Anna (advisor) ; Betáková, Lucie (referee) ; Šulová, Lenka (referee)
The dissertation deals with the collocational competence of English language students and its relation to the naturalness of language production. In addition to the theoretical foundations of the research, the main focus is first given to the definition of collocational competence, followed by the presentation of the research project itself - a teaching intervention with students from Charles University (n = 39) over the course of one semester. Students were divided into an experimental group with explicit collocation instruction and a control group where teaching was conducted in a traditional way. The primary aim was to explore whether instruction inspired by lexically-oriented approaches contributes to the successful development of collocational competence. At the same time, we monitored individual differences, such as foreign language aptitude, anxiety, motivation, and learning strategies, and their impact on the learning process. The results suggest that explicit instruction of language in general is beneficial for students with higher levels of anxiety and weaker foreign language aptitude. Systematic lexically-oriented instruction proved to be effective in enhancing collocational competence and also contributed to naturalness of written production regardless of individual differences. The...
|