Coursebooks or the BNC? Teaching English Verbs and Their Dependent Prepositions
Main Article Content
Abstract
The study compares English dependent prepositions of the verbs agree, apply, and die shown in English language coursebooks and a corpus. It also suggests English prepositional verbs and their dependent prepositions that are suitable for teaching to L1 Thai learners and a method that should be employed for the instruction. The data were collected from four English language students’ books used by many upper secondary schools in Thailand and the British National Corpus. The findings demonstrate that the coursebooks offer nearly all of the most frequent dependent prepositions of the verbs with scant sentence examples and collocations, while the corpus reveals more dependent prepositions with numerous sentence examples and collocations. Further, the corpus data provide many noun collocates that can be arranged into themes according to their semantic preferences. It is advisable that the coursebooks and corpus data should be used in Thai EFL class to complement each other. The most frequent constructions should also be taught as phraseology through indirect access to data-driven learning, with suggested inductive activities and examples of simplified key word in context concordances.
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
References
Asma, T. (2010). Transfer of simple prepositions from Standard Arabic into English: The case of third-year LMD students of English Language at Mentouri University-Constantine [MA thesis]. Mentouri University-Constantine.
Bahn, J. (1993). Lexical collocations: A contrastive view. ELT Journal, 47(1), 56-63.
Baldwin, T. (2005). Looking for prepositional verbs in corpus data. In Proceedings of the 2nd ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on the Linguistic Dimensions of Prepositions and Their Use in Computational Linguistics Formalisms and Applications, 115–126, Colchester, UK.
Barlow, M. (1996). Corpora for theory and practice. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 1, 1–37.
Bestgen, Y., & Granger, S. (2014). Quantifying the development of phraseological competence in L2 English writing: An automated approach. Journal of Second Language Writing, 26, 28–41.
Biber, D., Johanssou, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman grammar of spoken and written English. Pearson Education Ltd.
Bullon, S., & Leech, G. (2007). Longman Communication 3000 and the Longman Defining Vocabulary. In Longman Communication 3000 (pp. 1-7). Pearson Longman. Accessed 1 April 2022. https://www.lextutor.ca/freq/lists_download/longman_3000_list.pdf
CASS. (n.d.). The British National Corpus 2014. Retrieved September 20, 2022, from https://cass.lancs.ac.uk/bnc2014/
Catalán, R. (1996). Frequency and variability in errors in the use of English prepositions. Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, 17, 171-187.
Celce-Murcia, M., & Larsen-Freeman, D. (1999). The grammar book: An ESL/EFL teacher’s course. Heinle & Heinle.
Cowan, R. (2008). The teacher’s grammar of English with answers: A course book and reference guide. Cambridge University Press.
Evans, V., & Dooley, J. (2021). Upstream 6: Student’s book. Aksorn Charoen Tat Act. Co., Ltd.
Foley, M., & Hall, D. (2003). Longman advanced learners’ grammar: A self-study reference & practice book with answers. Longman.
Gabrielatos, C. (2005). Corpora and language teaching: Just a fling or wedding bells? TESLEJ, 8(4), 1–35.
Goldstein, B., Ceri, J., & Vicki, A. (2015). Eyes open 3: Student’s book. Rung Silp Printing Co., Ltd.
Hampe, B. (2002). Superlative verbs: A corpus-based study of semantic redundancy in English verb-particle constructions. Gunter Narr Verlag.
Hardie, A. (2012). CQPweb – combining power, flexibility and usability in a corpus analysis tool. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 17(3), 380-409. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.17.3.04har
Hong, A. L., Rahim, H. A., Tan, K. H., & Salehuddin, K. (2011). Collocations in Malaysian English learners’ writing: A corpus-based error analysis. 3L; Language, Linguistics and Literature, The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies, 17(special issue), 31-44.
Huddleston, R., & Geoffrey K. P. (2002). The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge University Press.
Humphries, D., & Phoocharoensil, S. (2011). Examining the English complex prepositions “according to”, “because of”, and “due to” in Thai university student writing. Thoughts, 1, 48-73.
Humeid, A. (2013). Compound prepositions used by Iraqi EFL university students. International Journal of English Linguistics, 3(2), 98-114.
Hunston, S. (2002). Corpora in applied linguistics. Cambridge University Press.
Johns, T. (1986). Micro-concord: A language learner’s research tool. System, 14(2), 151-162.
Kay, S., Jones, V., Brayshaw, D., & Michalowski, B. (2021). Focus 2: Students’ book. Pearson Education Indochina Co., Ltd.
Kennedy, G. (2008). Phraseology and language pedagogy: Semantic preferences associated with English verbs in the British National Corpus. In F. Meunier & S. Granger (Eds.), Phraseology in foreign language learning (pp. 21-41). John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Lee, K. D. (2012). English prepositions. Kyomunsa.
Lekawatana, P. (1969). A contrastive study of English and Thai. English Language Center.
Liu, D., & Jiang, P. (2009). Using a corpus‐based lexicogrammatical approach to grammar instruction in EFL and ESL contexts. The Modern Language Journal, 93(1), 61-78.
McEnery, T., Xiao, R., & Tono, Y. (2006). Corpus-based language studies: An advanced resource book. Taylor & Francis.
O’Keeffe, A., & McCarthy, M. J. (Eds.). (2022). The Routledge handbook of corpus linguistics. Routledge.
Ostyn-Rudzka, B. (2003). Word power: Phrasal verbs and compounds a cognitive approach. Mouton de Gruyter.
Oxford University Press (n.d.). In Oxfordlearners.com dictionaries. Retrieved May 1, 2022, from https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com
Pongpairoj, N. (2002). Thai university undergraduates’ errors in English writing. Journal of Language and Linguistics, 20(2), 66-99.
Quan, Z., Grant, L., & Hocking, D. (2022). Comparing concordances of language patterns and words by ESL intermediate learners: A preliminary experiment with two mobile concordancers. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 1-27. https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2022.2081581
Rastall, P. (1994). The prepositional flux. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 32, 229–231.
Rayson, P., Berridge, D., & Francis, B. (2004). Extending the Cochran rule for the comparison of word frequencies between corpora. In 7th International Conference on Statistical Analysis of Textual Data (JADT 2004) (pp. 926-936).
Saeedakhtar, A., Bagerin, M., & Abdi, R. (2020). The effect of hands-on and hands-off data-driven learning on low-intermediate learners’ verb-preposition collocations. System, 91, 102268.
Santos, M. (2017). New world 6: Student book. McGraw-Hill.
Seilhamer, M. F. (2011). The prepositions verbs associate with: A corpus investigation of collocation in prepositional verbs. NUCB Journal of Language Culture and Communication, 13(1), 21-43.
Sinclair, J. M. (1991). Corpus, concordance, and collocation. Oxford University Press.
Sumonsriworakun, P., & Pongpairoj, N. (2017). Systematicity of L1 Thai learners’ English interlanguage of dependent prepositions. Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 6(2), 246-259.
Willis, D. (1990). The lexical syllabus: A new approach to language teaching. Collins ELT.
Yu, T., & Yoo, I. W. (2010). Korean university students’ use of prepositional verbs: A corpus-based study. English Teaching, 65(4), 403–424.