The goal of English education in Korea is to teach basic communicative competence. To accomplish this, grammar and vocabulary have been basic components in English education. Even though vocabulary has not been stressed as much as grammar in English, vocabulary is an incredibly important factor in conveying meaning.
English vocabulary is taught in the sense of pronunciation, spelling and meaning in Korea. Thus, the student may not understand phrases as they are learning individual vocabulary words in an isolated fashion. Teaching contextual vocabulary helps English learners understand how a word is related to another word and familiarizes them with other words that may co-occur. Some studies indicate that learning vocabulary in lexical phrases, which consist of more than two words, is greater than teaching single words.
Among the phrases, collocation should receive more attention. This aspect of English is not derived from guessing or logic, but rather from the habits of native speakers. And collocation is unique from other lexical phrases because they are absent from dictionaries. For this reason, colloquial English should be specifically instructed. To address this issue, this study develops teaching materials on English collocations through the analysis of elementary English textbooks, selecting choice verbs as head words and finding nouns as collocates of the head words.
Chapter two, the theoretical background, looks through theories of the lexical approach, a corpus and collocations. The lexical approach places great value on vocabulary and multi-word phrases. Recognizing these combinations can teach grammatical combination via induction. A corpus is a collection of pieces of language selected on a computer. Its merits are knowing words that come prior to and after a word and finding their collocations.
Chapter three develops the teaching materials on English collocation with a focus on sixth graders in order to improve their communicative skills. The vocabulary in this study comes from English textbooks. By comparing vocabularies with the frequency list of COCA, twenty verbs are selected as collocation head words. The next step is to find the noun collocates of these words by using COCA and JTW. Finally, these are used in full sentences to improve the communicative competence of students.
Chapter four presents teaching methods to accompany the materials developed in this study. The methods are a collocation grid, collocations dominos, completing collocations, translating Korean expressions into English collocations, choosing collocates, make a collocation note and making semantic maps of collocations.
Finally, chapter five summarizes the aforementioned three chapters, concludes the study, and proposes a direction for future studies.