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2. PHD Thesis / Tesis PHD
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Title:	The Construction Of Collocations In The Writing Of Iranian Postgraduate Students: A Case Study
Authors:	Firooz Namvar (P37484)
Supervisor:	Nor Fariza, Dr.
Keywords:	Writing Of Iranian Postgraduate Students Collocations In The Writing Of Iranian Students Collocation (Linguistics)-Case studies
Issue Date:	30-May-2013
Description:	It is widely acknowledged that collocations play an important role in second language learning, particularly for learners at the intermediate and advanced levels. Learning collocations improves the four skills of language, in particular the writing skill. This study intended to examine the influence of first language (L1) and foreign language learners’ cultural background on the production of collocations. A review of studies on collocations revealed that the influence of cultural background on production of collocations has not been investigated yet. Guided by the Constructionist theory, Greene (1994), states that an understanding of the ethnic, geographical and political background of a group of people is a better way to understand an individual based on his or her socio-cultural context. Thirty Iranian postgraduate students participated in this study and their academic writings were analyzed to determine the collocations they produced and to identify the basis for their difficulties in producing collocations. A focus group interview was also carried out to get in depth information on the influence of L1 and cultural background of the learners where production of collocations is concerned. The findings revealed that students produced 349 collocations. The total number of grammatical collocations is 88 and the total number for lexical collocations is 261. The results showed that learners have difficulties with both lexical and grammatical collocations in their writing. Among the grammatical collocations subtypes, it was found that verb+preposition was the most difficult for the participants to produce because they used inappropriate prepositions. As for the lexical collocations subtypes, verb+noun type was the most difficult for the participants to produce. The findings showed that L1 influence appeared to have a strong effect on the learners’ production of collocation. In addition, as language and culture are not separable, the cultural differences between the L1 and target language resulted in the students producing odd and unacceptable lexical collocations from the perspective of native speakers, but these collocations should not be considered as wrong collocations because they have cultural basis. The findings showed that students produced nine collocations which were produced by the influence of cultural background of the students. Based on Green’s Constructionist theory (1974), these different varieties of collocations express cultural conceptualizations of their speakers. Collocations also display how speakers may strive to find accurate equivalents in English for these conceptualizations. Therefore, the type of English used by Iranian learners should be considered with regard to the Persian cultural conceptualizations not in terms of the cultural conceptualizations by another variety of English, such as American or British English. The results also indicated that learners are not aware of the type of collocations that they produced.,PhD
Pages:	204
Call Number:	P325.5.C56 .N339 2013
Publisher:	UKM, Bangi
Appears in Collections:	Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Fakulti Sains Sosial dan Kemanusiaan

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