Developing and evaluating an online video-assisted collocation learning system for EFL students

ABSTRACT

The degree of collocational knowledge influences learners’ competence in the production of L2 speech and text. However, collocation learning is complex because learners might co-produce words incorrectly according to L1 inference. This study aims at the design of an online video-assisted collocation learning system, VACLS, that integrated video captioning and concordancing to foster collocational knowledge acquisition. English collocations with three patterns, namely verb–noun, verb–adverb, and verb–preposition, were selected as target collocations in VACLS. While learning with VACLS, the learners are able to watch videos with full captions and then looked for additional knowledge and instances of the target collocations via an online concordancer incorporated in VACLS. Besides the development of VACLS, effectiveness of the system and learners’ perception were also evaluated. 20 university EFL students in Taiwan enrolled the experiment. After 3 weeks of learning with the aid of VACLS, the learning outcome for collocation retention was significant and the participants with less initial collocational knowledge exhibited greater improvement in collocation retention after learning VACLS. Besides, these learners highly agreed VACLS is helpful for English collocation acquisition. Thus the VACLS can be useful for English educators and EFL/ESL learners.

KEYWORDS:

• Collocations acquisition
• video captioning
• concordancing
• video-assisted language learning
• video-assisted collocation learning system (VACLS)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan [grant number: MOST 107-2511-H-035-004-MY2, 108-2511-H-035-002-MY2, and 110-2221-E-035-075]

Notes on contributors

Wei-Wei Shen

Wei-Wei Shen is a professor of Feng Chia University and was a chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at the university and an advisory member & teacher trainer of English Language Education Board at Taichung City Council in Taiwan. She received her MA degree at Essex University and PhD at the University of Leicester in the UK. Her research interests include teaching English as a second/foreign language, vocabulary teaching and learning, cultural keywords and writing.

Jim-Min Lin

Jim-Min Lin received the BS degree in Engineering Science and the MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering, all from National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, in 1985, 1987, and 1992, respectively. From February 1993 to July 2005, he was an associate professor at the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Feng Chia University, Taichung City, Taiwan. Since August 2005, he has been a title of Full Professor at the same department. From August 2008 to July 2011, he served as the Chairman of the department. From March 2016 to March 2020, he served as the President of Chinese Information Literacy Association. His research interests include Operating Systems, Testable Design, Software Integration/Reuse, Embedded Systems, and Robot Assisted Language Learning.

Wai Khuen Cheng

Wai-Khuen Cheng received his B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Universiti Sains Malaysia in 2004 and 2009, respectively. He is currently serving as Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Information and Communication Technology (FICT) at Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR), Malaysia. His research interests include cloud computing, multi-agent system, social networking analysis, Internet of things, multi-criteria analysis and artificial intelligence.

Zeng-Wei Hong

Zeng-Wei Hong received B.S., M.S., and Ph.D degrees in computer science from the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Feng-Chia University, Taichung, Taiwan. He was an Assistant Professor and Associate Professor in Asia University, Taiwan during August 2007 to July 2015. From August 2015, he was an Assistant Professor in Faculty of Information and Communication Technology, UTAR, Kampar, Malaysia until July 2020. Now he is an associate professor at the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Feng Chia University, Taiwan. His current research interests include e-learning and software engineering.