The Repetition of Collocations in EFL Textbooks: A Corpus Study

The importance of repetition in the acquisition of lexical items has been widely acknowledged in single-word vocabulary research but has been relatively neglected in collocation studies. Since collocations are considered one key to achieving language fluency, and because learners spend a great amount of time interacting with their textbooks, the present study investigates verb-noun collocations found in the three most popular series of English textbooks for senior high schools in southern Taiwan. Our focus is verb-noun lexical collocations because these have been shown to be difficult for EFL learners. Repetitions of these collocations were identified by searching the textbook corpus using a proprietary computer-based program. The results show that these collocations were repeated from 3 to 5 times on average. Moreover, most collocations (80%) occurred only one to five times throughout the whole series of textbooks. Because of the low number of repetitions, it is concluded that textbook writers may need to re-evaluate the importance of repetition for collocations if their acquisition is a goal. Furthermore, it is suggested that EFL teachers provide explicit instruction to make up for the limited number of exposures to collocations in textbooks. (Contains 6 tables.) [This paper was published in: Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Symposium and Book Fair on English Teaching in the Republic of China, Taipei, November 10, 2007 (pp. 223-232).]