A Study Of Collocational Competence Of Senior High School Students In English Writing

EFL senior high school teachers have given due weight to collocation knowledge ofEnglish, and they have striven to explore useful and effective teaching methods such aslexical chunk-based and Context-based teaching methods. Nevertheless, students’ lexicalcollocation ability is still undesirable according to the Error Analysis of L2learners basedon Corpus studies such as CLEC. There are still a large number of mistakes on lexicalcollocation in students’ writing. therefore, it is desirable to explore senior high schoolstudents’ collocational ability empirically.The present study aims to investigate what types of collocation learning strategiesstudents use, and what differences there are between productive and receptivecollocational knowledge, and to give some suggestions for future teaching.One hundred-eighteen first year senior high school students participated in the study,with seventy-eight females and forty males. Their average age was between sixteen toseventeen. All of them had been exposed to English learning for about five to seven years.The instrument consisted of a questionnaire (for collocation learning strategy) andcollocation ability tests (pre-test and post-test), and the results were analyzed using SPSS16.0. In the questionnaire, strategies fell into five groups (determination strategy, memorystrategy, cognitive strategy, meta-cognitive strategy and social/affective strategy).Collocation ability test had50items including two major types of test items, i.e. sentencecompletion and multiple choice (for nouns, verbs, adjectives collocation), in bothproductive and receptive dimensions.The results of the study showed that the memory strategy is the lowest out of the fivetypes of collocational learning strategy, and there’s slight difference between productiveand receptive knowledge. It is argued that teachers should attach importance to theteaching of collocation and pay attention to the effects of instruction on collocationknowledge. Several pedagogical implications were discussed and suggestions for futureresearch were presented.