1 Introduction

The importance of linguistic conventionality is discussed, particularly the role of collocations in language. Collocations are key to native language acquisition and second language proficiency, serving as the foundation for natural, idiomatic, fluent, and efficient language use. The study focuses on investigating and teaching second-language collocational knowledge, exploring the impact of different teaching methods on collocation learning. Explicit and implicit teaching methods are the primary subjects of research, with explicit teaching considered advantageous. Although empirical studies on explicit teaching are limited and often overlook learner differences, this study proposes an English-Chinese contrastive collocation teaching approach, aiming to provide insights for explicit teaching research.

2 Literature Review

The English-Chinese contrastive teaching method is based on contrastive linguistics, aiming to help learners master idiomatic language expressions by revealing differences between English and Chinese. The Cognitive Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis suggests that explicit cognitive comparisons between English and Chinese may yield better teaching outcomes. Existing research offers mixed views on the effectiveness of contrastive teaching in collocation learning, with most studies focusing on surface-level comparisons. This study employs an empirical approach to examine the effects of surface-level and deep-level English-Chinese contrastive teaching modes on the collocation memory of second-language learners at different proficiency levels, addressing three research questions: 1) Whether contrastive teaching is more beneficial for low-proficiency learners' collocation memory; 2) Whether contrastive teaching is more beneficial for high-proficiency learners' collocation memory; 3) Whether there are differences in collocation memory between learners of different proficiency levels under the two contrastive teaching modes. The findings will provide insights for explicit collocation teaching and enrich applied research in contrastive linguistics.

3 Research Design

The study design investigates the impact of English-Chinese contrastive teaching modes on the collocation memory of second-language learners at different proficiency levels. Participants include 150 first-year liberal arts students from a university in East China, divided into high- and low-proficiency groups of 75 each. The study consists of three phases: pre-test, teaching intervention, and post-test, primarily assessing delayed memory retention. Teaching materials include 15 sentences containing target collocations selected from the British National Corpus, meeting specific collocation frequency and strength criteria. Two types of low-context sentence translation tests were administered to evaluate participants' productive and receptive collocational knowledge. During the experiment, three groups received different teaching modes: the traditional PPP model, the surface-level contrastive group, and the deep-level contrastive group. After the post-test, semi-structured interviews were conducted with some participants to understand their perceptions of the contrastive teaching modes. Data were analyzed using SPSS 19.0.

4 Research Findings

The study analyzes in detail the effects of English-Chinese contrastive teaching modes on the collocation memory of second-language learners at different proficiency levels. Results show that both low- and high-proficiency learners performed significantly better in the post-test than in the pre-test across all teaching modes, demonstrating the effectiveness of the instructional approaches. For low-proficiency learners, the deep-level contrastive group showed the best learning outcomes, with an average learning rate of 52.4%, significantly higher than the control and surface-level contrastive groups. Among high-proficiency learners, the deep-level contrastive group also performed best, with an average learning rate of 56.4%, significantly higher than the control group. Additionally, differences between proficiency levels were more pronounced in the deep-level contrastive group, suggesting that this mode is more effective for high-proficiency learners. Interview results supported these findings, with learners in the deep-level contrastive group providing more positive evaluations of the teaching effectiveness.

5 Discussion

The study found that both English-Chinese contrastive teaching modes significantly improved collocation memory for low-proficiency learners, with the deep-level contrastive group showing greater effectiveness. Learners in the deep-level group exhibited more durable memory retention due to higher levels of cognitive processing. For high-proficiency learners, the deep-level contrastive mode was notably effective, while the surface-level mode showed limited impact, possibly because high-proficiency learners already possess effective memorization strategies. In the surface-level contrastive group, memory performance differences between high- and low-proficiency learners were insignificant, whereas significant differences emerged in the deep-level mode, likely due to its structural alignment with high-proficiency learners, enabling easier deep-level associative memory construction.

6 Conclusion and Implications

Empirical findings indicate that English-Chinese contrastive teaching modes significantly enhance learning for low-proficiency learners, while the deep-level mode is more effective for high-proficiency learners. Surface-level contrastive teaching is suitable for low-proficiency learners, whereas deep-level contrastive teaching is more effective for high-proficiency learners. The English-Chinese contrastive teaching method is an effective explicit vocabulary teaching approach and should be tailored to learners' proficiency levels.