A corpus-based study of lexical collocations

Abstract

The practical contribution of this research work is an investigation of the collocational competence of second year EFL undergraduate students at Université des Frères Mentouri (Constantine). The study focuses on lexical collocations, namely, VERB+NOUN. It aims at measuring the collocational competence of learners of English as a Foreign Language, pinning down the underlying causes of errors, and making some recommendations to remedy the situation by identifying the main areas of difficulty. It is hypothesised that Second year EFL undergraduate students at Université des Frères Mentouri (Constantine 1) would have a low level of mastery in respect to the usage and comprehension of V+N collocations. It is also hypothesised that the aforementioned learners would not be adequately aware of the importance of using collocations. In addition, the study hypothesises that the essays of second year EFL undergraduate students at Université des Frères Mentouri (Constantine 1) would fail to use Verb + Noun collocations appropriately. The sample is sixty six EFL students.The teachers will be able to design appropriate material to raise their learners‟ awareness of the concept of collocation, and, therefore, improve their level. The British National Corpus, collocation checker, and Oxford Online Collocation Dictionary are the tools chosen to measure Algerian learners‟ collocational competence. The findings confirm the hypotheses emphasising Algerian EFL learners‟ unawareness of the importance of collocations. In addition, the findings show that the influence of the mother tongue, along with some other factors (approximation and synonymy), are the primary causes of errors.