View source for Learning Collocations in Portuguese L2

__NOTOC__
{{infobox|name=Ângela Costa
|username=angela
|contact=angela
|phone=+351-213-100-313
|fax=+351-213-145-843
}}

== Date ==

* 15:30, Friday, May 7<sup>th</sup>, 2010
* Room 336

== Speaker ==

* [[Ângela Costa]]

== Abstract ==

This work conducted with German, Spanish, English,  and Italian mother
tongue (L1) students (88 students), attending two levels of Portuguese as
Second Language wanted to assess which mechanisms do foreign students use
to learn collocations and which role does the L1 play in this process.

Participants were asked to translate 20 collocations in their L1 into
Portuguese and the reverse task. As expected, the decoding (L1 to L2) task
had better results (90%) than the inverse one (65%) demonstrating that
collocations are relatively transparent combinations (non-idiomatic) from
the decoding point of view, but are simultaneously unpredictable and not
semantically motivated from the encoding perspective.
As for the mechanisms used to solve the encoding task, the use of
linguistic transference seems to be related to the success of the task.
Spanish students had the best results (83%) and mostly used transference
(76%), while Italian students had the worst results (72%) and used others
mechanisms (40%). Italian students may be considering collocations as
language specific, while Spanish students admit more similarities between
languages and use literal translations.
Although the most common strategy used to overcome the lack of
collocational knowledge is transference, other
mechanisms (ex. over-generalization, simplification) were detected.


[[category:Seminars]]
[[category:Seminars 2010]]