Developing Collocational Competence of International Relations Students: A Corpus-Based Approach

The specific objective of this study was to extract the most frequent collocations from a corpus of news items in order to design teaching materials for students majoring in international relations. Up to now, far too little attention has been paid to collocational competence and its role in teaching foreign languages. However, collocational competence being a part of the communicative one demands a thorough and systematical development to sound naturally and accurately. It becomes even more critical with regard to professional communication. Specialists in any field are supposed to be good communicators knowing how to best combine words in a flow of speech. The research was conducted in four stages. At the first stage, the authors gave a descriptive analysis of international relations terms. They specified some major domains covered by this branch of knowledge. They also identified the main sources of international relations terminology. Among them were news sites that the authors justified as being the most available and popular source of updating the specific vocabulary. Data for the study were collected using corpus linguistics methods. This method is particularly useful in studying large corpora of texts. The authors defined all the key notions relevant in the framework of the corpus research: a corpus, a corpus sample, and a corpus manager. To achieve the practical outcome of the first research stage the authors compiled a corpus of texts available on the news sites. At the second stage, the authors extracted 30 most frequent words through the function WordList at the corpus manager AntConc. The words were included on the basis of the threshold rate that was calculated by a proportion method. The third stage concerned theoretical approaches to the study of collocations. From their perspective, different definitions to "collocation" were given. The solution was then assayed for using the definition under the statistical approach underpinning frequency as the main characteristic of collocations. They were extracted via the function Clusters. The 30 words became the core elements in collocations. Through the semantic and syntactic analyses, the authors created a list of 575 collocations. Finally, at the fourth stage of the study, the authors designed teaching materials. They used the extracted collocations as the target lexis for assignments. The most obvious finding to emerge from this study is that corpus linguistics methods may scaffold and facilitate the process of developing collocational competence. The materials and suggestions provided may be of assistance to all educators.

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