Corpus frequency as a criterion for grading lexical collocations

Vol.38,No.2(2017)

Abstract
This article aims at examining the validity of using frequency as a criterion for assigning Spanish collocations to successive levels of proficiency. To that end, the following aspects have been studied: (i) the opinion of teachers of Spanish as a foreign/second language as to the criteria that should be used to grade vocabulary; (ii) the proposals of such professionals in that regard; (iii) their intuition on collocational frequency; and (iv) the degree of difficulty that collocations graded at different levels pose to learners. The data needed in order to explore these four dimensions have been collected by means of questionnaires administered both to teachers and learners of Spanish. The results suggest that teaching professionals regard frequency as an important criterion for grading vocabulary and their proposals coincide to a considerable extent with frequency-based grading. The findings regarding teachers' intuition on frequency as well as the correlation between frequency-based grading of collocations and collocation difficulty are less conclusive.

Keywords:
collocations; teaching of Spanish as a foreign/second language; grading; frequency

Pages:
29–49
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