A Collocational Analysis of Korean High School English Textbooks and Suggestions for Collocation Instruction

A Collocational Analysis of Korean High School English Textbooks and Suggestions for Collocation Instruction

Under the textbook-driven approach to English education in the Korean setting, the importance of the English textbook can not be overemphasized as the main source of learning materials Recently, with the development of computer-based language corpora, the recognition of the importance of collocations and the availability of computerized databases of words have caused a resurgence and facilitation in the instruction of collocation. The primary purpose of the present study is to identify the characteristics of lexical collocation and the extent of its use in high school 10th-grade textbooks. From an the analyses, it is revealed that the language materials reflect various constructed collocation in the case of adjective+noun and noun+noun collocations in a natural context. However, verb+noun and adverb+verb collocations are not fully reflected. This is true for delexicalized verbs, and verb and adjective intensifiers. Also the language materials do not provide sufficient support for the lexical syllabus, even though all textbooks may be somewhat adequate in terms of vocabulary size. Finally, based on the analyses of the texts, the suggestions for English collocation instruction are made in the lexical approach.