The Correlational Study of Online Bilingual Corpus Consultation and EFL Students' Learning of Verb-Noun Collocations

Efficiency in EFL learners' acquiring vocabulary knowledge depends on their intentional and also incidental learning of word meanings and uses in contexts. The aim of this study is to explore the pedagogical potentials of using online concordancing tools to consult bilingual corpora in facilitating this process. Focusing on learning verb-noun collocations and drawing on series of online tasks, this study employed a CQPweb tool and a Moodle-like learning system to collect quantitative data. The results show students' collocation knowledge is enhanced in every type of verb-noun collocations. Most importantly, their performances also improve in employing synonym verb-noun pairs and the verb-noun pairs that are non-congruent in English and Chinese languages. The paper ends by highlighting the necessity of explicitly incorporating online bilingual concordancing tools into vocabulary instructions and implicitly exposing learners to instances of collocation uses in bilingual corpora to promote learner autonomy in learning collocations.