Phraseology in Foreign Language Learning and Teaching (review)

Notice of Errata

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the role of phraseology in second language (L2) acquisition in Western Europe and North America, while there has long been a similar research interest in Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union (Cowie, 1998). It is hypothesized that phraseology plays an important role in L2 acquisition (Wray, 2002). Meunier and Granger's edited collection Phraseology in Foreign Language Learning and Teaching investigates the role of phraseology in an often-neglected area, namely foreign language (FL) learning and teaching.

The book is organized into four sections. Section I, 'Extracting and Describing Phraseological Units,' consists of a set of corpus studies. The first chapter (Kennedy) examines the content-word collocates of eight high-frequency verbs in the British National Corpus, finding that these collocates are not associated together arbitrarily but share certain common features and reflect underlying semantic preferences and grammatical processes. Kennedy also discusses why the role of phraseology has been neglected in language pedagogy. The second chapter aims at finding a systematic method of selecting and classifying collocations. For this purpose, Handl proposes a multi-dimensional framework together with two notions – collocational direction and collocational weight – for a refined representation of collocations in learners' dictionaries. In chapter 3, Osborne traces the reasons for four types of learners' grammatical errors and shows that these errors are triggered by phraseological effects. Employing a contrastive approach, Neff van Aertselaer in chapter 4 compares the use of interactional phrases by novice Spanish EFL learners with that of novice native English writers as well as expert writers of English and Spanish. This research design enables the author to distinguish among a range of effects on learners' phraseological errors, including EFL developmental factors, novice writer factors, and the influence of the first language (L1). Chapter 5 assesses the influence of the L1 on learners' production of both correct and incorrect multi-word units. For this purpose, Paquot employs the integrated contrastive model, which enables her to identify L1-related effects among other factors. Furthermore, two types of less-documented transfer are also discussed: transfer of frequency and transfer of register.

Section II, 'Learning Phraseological Units,' focuses on a less-investigated area in L2 phraseological research – the learning aspect. In chapter 6, Wray investigates the role of memorization in the learning of formulaic language. She suggests the possibility of employing the deviation profiling technique with a memorization task for testing and evaluation. In chapter 7, Coxhead addresses the issue of which phrases teachers should teach in English for academic purposes and what pedagogical approach should be used; she also describes the problems that students encounter in using formulaic sequences from a learner's perspective. In chapter 8, Wible addresses a barely touched issue in the field, namely how to use the increasing digital input for the learning of multi-word expressions and what kind of digital input should be used, using Collocator, a tool designed by Wible and his colleagues.

Section III, 'Recording and Exploiting Phraseological Units,' explores the problems of formula representation in learners' dictionaries, the focus of the first two chapters, and textbooks, the focus of the third. Chapter 9, by Siepmann, points out that fully transparent collocations are often neglected in traditional learners' dictionaries and suggests the idea of representing transparent collocations in the onomasiological dictionary, which allows learners to search for a word or a collocation starting from a concept. Pecman, in chapter 10, similarly identifies problems in learners' dictionaries; she proposes the design of a flexible bilingual electronic dictionary offering a dual approach – semasiological and onomasiological – to collocations. In chapter 11, which concludes Section III, Gouverneur examines the representation of the phraseological patterns of two frequent verbs, to make and to take, in a corpus of textbook materials. Given the inconsistency in the selection of these patterns across different textbooks, the author calls for an improvement in the treatment of phraseology in textbooks.

In Section IV, 'Concluding Remarks,' Granger and Meunier...