著者

笠原 究

出版者

全国英語教育学会

雑誌

ARELE : annual review of English language education in Japan (ISSN:13448560)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.21, pp.91-100, 2010-03

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The purpose of the study is to investigate whether learning a two-word collocation is superior in retention and retrieval of meaning to learning a single word. The focus is on the effect of a two-word collocation consisting of a known word and a new word for learners, such as school janitor. This study employed 39 high school students. They were asked to remember the Japanese meanings of 20 low-frequency English words, half of which were turned into two-word collocations by attaching high-frequency cues. In short, they tried to remember the Japanese equivalents of 10 single words and 10 two-word collocations. Two types of recall test were conducted. Test 1 presented all the items as single words by removing the cues from the two-word collocations (without the cue condition). Test 2 presented all the items as they were on the list (with the cue condition). Both of the tests were given to the same participants just after the learning phase and one week later. The main results were: (a) two-word collocations showed better retention of meaning than single words and, (b) two-word collocations showed better results in the recall tests with cues in the retrieval phase, whereas the opposite results were obtained without cues in the retrieval phase. Some pedagogical implications were drawn from these findings.