Measuring Receptive Collocational Competence Across Proficiency Levels

Abstract

The present study investigates (i) English as Foreign Language (EFL) learners' receptive collocational knowledge growth in relation to their linguistic proficiency level; (ii) how much receptive collocational knowledge is acquired as linguistic proficiency develops; and (iii) the extent to which receptive knowledge of collocations of EFL learners varies across word frequency bands. A proficiency measure and a collocation test were administered to English majors at the University of Burundi. The results of the study suggest that receptive collocational competence develops alongside EFL learners' linguistic proficiency, which lends empirical support to Gyllstad (2007Gyllstad ( , 2009 and Nizonkiza (2011), among others, who reported similar findings. Furthermore, EFL learners' collocational knowledge growth seems to be quantifiable, where both linguistic proficiency level and word frequency occupy crucial roles. While more collocational gains that EFL learners could potentially add as a result of change in proficiency are found at lower levels of proficiency, collocations of words from more frequent word bands seem to be mastered first, and more gains are found at more frequent word bands. These results confirm earlier findings on the non-linear nature of vocabulary growth (cf. Meara 1996) and the fundamental role played by frequency in word knowledge for vocabulary in general (Nation 1983(Nation , 1990Nation and Beglar 2007), which are extended here to include collocational knowledge.Keywords: receptive knowledge of collocations, English as Foreign Language, linguistic proficiency, word frequency IntroductionCollocations are lexical combinations preferred by native speakers of a language -in this case English -e.g. say a prayer, draw a conclusion, make a mistake, do justice, and lose count rather than *tell a prayer, *pull a conclusion, *do a mistake, *make justice and *drop count 1 , respectively. Collocations have increasingly attracted research attention over the past few years (Barfield and Gyllstad 2009). Scholars such as Pawley and Syder (1983) and Wray (2002), among 1 These examples were taken from Gyllstad (2007: 1-2 others, have convincingly demonstrated that collocations are important in second language (L2) and foreign language (FL) contexts as they help users to achieve fluency and thus sound nativelike. Pawley and Syder (1983: 192), for instance, state that " [t]he stock of lexicalized sentence stems known to the ordinary mature speaker of English amounts to hundreds of thousands". For them, these lexicalised and semi-lexicalised sentences, which are retrieved as wholes, facilitate fluency. This view is supported by empirical evidence from scholars who have attempted to examine the relationship between collocations and L2/FL proficiency, among other things. Boers, Eyckmans, Kappel, Stengers and Demecheleer (2006), for instance, have established a relationship between collocational competence and oral proficiency among EFL learners. Many other studies have also revealed that collocations can ...

Factors Impacting Collocation Recognition and Controlled Production by ESL Speakers

“…Although collocation acquisition is a life-long, largely intuition-based process in L2 (Siyanova-Chanturia & Martinez, 2014;Siyanova & Schmitt, 2008), existing research on collocations has identified a number of such factors, which can be classified into two domains. The first domain includes external non-collocation-specific factors: (1) extralinguistic, such as the age of onset and offset of learning English (Granena & Long, 2013;Han, 2004;Wray, 2002); length of residence in an English-speaking country (Bardovi-Harlig & Bastos, 2011;Groom, 2009;Nesselhauf, 2005); language input and output Durrant & Schmitt, 2010;Szudarski & Carter, 2016), and psychological-affective factors of culture and motivation (Li & Schmitt, 2010;Smith, 2005;Wray, 2008); and (2) interlinguistic, such as whether English is used as the predominant language for thinking and communication (Wang & Shih, 2011;Xu, 2015), English language proficiency (Groom, 2009;Laufer & Waldman, 2011;Nizonkiza, 2012Nizonkiza, , 2015Schmitt, 2013), and interlanguage interference (Irujo, 1986;Liao, 2010;Millar, 2011;Peters, 2016;Wolter & Yamashita, 2015).…”

“…English language proficiency. The majority of researchers connect collocational competence to overall level of L2 proficiency and agree that collocational errors might gradually decrease but never disappear even at the most advanced stages, and that limitations exist for both receptive and productive knowledge (Gitsaki, 1996(Gitsaki, , 1999Groom, 2009;Laufer & Waldman, 2011;Nizonkiza, 2012Nizonkiza, , 2015. However, the specific characteristics of collocational errors differ depending on proficiency level and the pattern is not straightforward.…”

“…For amount of use errors, Eyckmans (2009), Granger andBestgen (2014), andNizonkiza (2015) notice that less advanced learners tend to overuse certain high frequency collocations, while stronger but low frequency collocations are mostly underused. Accuracy/appropriacy of use errors comprise the largest percentage of collocational errors and concern the ability of L2 speakers to use the correct lexical and morphosyntactic (grammatical) form of collocations.…”

“…There are, however, a few researchers (Laufer & Waldman, 2011;Nizonkiza, 2012Nizonkiza, , 2015Talakoob & Koosha, 2017) who compared production and recognition and state that receptive knowledge usually outpaces production, particularly at the beginner and intermediate proficiency levels. Nizonkiza (2015) adds that receptive knowledge develops faster at the lower proficiency levels and then, as per Talakoob and Koosha's (2017) study findings, at a more advanced stage it slows down to a certain extent, at which time productive knowledge gains momentum.…”

“…Hoffmann and Lehmann (2000), for example, compare English L1 and L2 speakers' receptive knowledge and find that collocations with less frequent collocates are recognized more easily. Nizonkiza (2015) also studies collocation recognition, but focuses on the frequency of nodes. She chooses items for the collocation test from Nation's (2001) word list with the range of frequency bands from 2,000 to 5,000 times.…”