Explicit Lexical Collocation Instruction in Online Teaching

Introduction

When mentioning studying a foreign language, the four language skills: listening, speaking, writing, and reading were immediately reminisced. To advance these skills, a great wealth of vocabulary must be retained. Vocabulary is essential for the development of both receptive and productive skills. In addition, the linguist, David Wilkins (1972), declared that “without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed” (pp. 111-112). It can be explained that if foreign learners maintain some words, a simple sentence can be created but without vocabulary, the learners cannot communicate in this language. Teaching vocabulary, in contrast to teaching grammar, has been ignored and has mostly been instructed by integrating it with other language skills. In opposition, grammar has always been instructed separately which led to supposing an inferior role for vocabulary. Fortunately, thanks to the assumption related to the important role of vocabulary and the shifts of sands in language teaching, vocabulary instruction has been upgraded the position. However, while acquiring vocabulary, students face considerable difficulty involving using appropriate words in various contexts, especially in writing skill which is described as a complicated skill by most Vietnamese teachers (Nguyen, 2009). It is extremely hard for students to guess the meanings and determine which words can be combined. This challenge can be seen in the example of Bui (2021, p99) about some common combinations employed by Vietnamese students that “feel headache or feel stomachache, drink some medicine, a fast lunch, problems happen, She has yellow hair, We are meeting many difficulties, She smiled with me, I very like music, I often go to eat in a restaurant near my school” which are incorrect and came from the translation directly from Vietnamese to English. Thus, to assist students in “expressing precisely what they want to say” (Lewis, 2000, p. 49) as well as producing natural target language (Siik, 2006), introducing collocation in English language learning class should be accelerated.

There are numerous international studies carried out to highlight the importance of collocational knowledge in language learning, namely Hsu (2010), Chang (2011) and Nizonkiza (2017) as well as most collocation studies in Vietnam were concerned about collocation in general and for English major students and the non - English major students seemed to be ignored. Therefore, the concept of “collocation” especially “lexical collocation” seems to be a relatively novel concept in the Vietnamese language learning and teaching context. Little literature involving the influence of a specific kind of collocation on a feature of writing skill was explored. In the current study, the effect of explicit lexical collocation instruction on vocabulary use in non – English major students’ writing performance during online education due to COVID-19 was examined. What is more, to ensure the quality of the findings collected from the writing tests, this research was an attempt to explore students’ attitudes toward the explicit instruction of lexical collocation regarding their vocabulary use in writing performance during online learning. To this end, two research questions are raised below:

• RQ1. To what extent, does explicit lexical collocation instruction affect Vietnamese students’ vocabulary use in their writing on online teaching?

• RQ2. What are students’ attitudes toward the explicit instruction of lexical collocation regarding their vocabulary use in writing on online teaching?