A Study Of The Development Of Collocational Competence In EFL Learners

Many teachers give little or no class attention to collocation, assuming students will learn English collocations as their general vocabulary knowledge increases. Although research demonstrates that collocational competence plays a very important role in language perception and production of native and non-native speakers of English, and that collocational ability of learners is not on a par with their lexical knowledge of other kinds unless it is explicitly taught, yet few people have ever proved the teachability of collocational knowledge through experiments.This study investigates some factors affecting learning of collocation and intructional effects on learners' collocational knowledge by addressing the following research questions: (1) What kinds of lexcial simplication students tend to operate in their lexical competence? (2) Is there a relationship between collocation strategy and collocation competence? (3) Does receptive knowledge of collocation lag behind productive knowledge? (4) Can instruction in collocation show significant increases in learners' knowledge of collocation?Seventy-six second year English majors from two natural classes participated in the 8-week classroom-based study. There are 38 students in each group, 3 males in the experimental group and 4 in the control group. Their average age was between 20 and 21. All of them had been exposed to English learning for about seven years. The result of ANOVA showed no significant differences between the two groups (F (1, 74) = .33, p = .57). The experimental group received additional instruction in collocation within normal class time while the control group received regular syllabus-oriented instruction only.Before the experiment, a questionnaire for collocation strategy and a collocation test (made up of cloze and sentence composition tests) were administered to the two groups in normal classes respectively. At the end of the study the subjects took the collocation test again, with some variation in sentence composition test only. Descriptive and inferential statistical analysis were performed to address the questions raised above.The results of this study show that transfer and synonymy were the most favoured strategies adopted in their learning of collocation; learners' collocation knowledge was correlated with determination strategy, one of the five categories of strategy investigated in the questionnaire; classroom instruction led to gains in collocational knowledge. It is argued that teachres should give consideration to the importance of collocation and the effects of instruction on collocation knowledge growth. Several pedagogical implications were discussed and suggestions for future research were then presented.