ARTICLE
TITLE

Learners Collocation Use in Writing:Does Proficiency Level Have an Influence?

SUMMARY

Knowledge of collocation is important in enabling learners to use a language fluently. When learners can demonstrate a good command of collocation use as they write, this results in greater fluency and proficiency. The present study is a case study that investigated the collocational knowledge of ESL learners across different proficiency levels. Specifically, the extent to which the learners produce lexical collocation in writing is examined in the study. To this end, a writing task (an essay) was administered to elicit the written output of the learners. The procedure involved a total of n=120 undergraduate ESL learners (limited, modest, and proficient learners) studying at a public university in Malaysia. The essays collected in the study were analysed and compared in terms of the lexical collocation frequencies and categories. The results first revealed that the higher proficient students wrote slightly higher lexical collocations than their counterparts. The second finding, however, indicated that there is no significant difference in the proportion of lexical collocation (>.05) written by the students, regardless of their proficiency levels. Thirdly, the results demonstrated that students of higher proficiency levels were able to write their essays with slightly more lexical collocation categories in comparison to lower proficiency level learners. Nonetheless, the students did not tap into all six lexical collocation categories in their writing. The findings of the study provide insights into the lexical collocation knowledge of Malaysian ESL undergraduates across various proficiency levels.

 Articles related

Fatemeh Ebrahimi-Bazzaz,Arshad Abd Samad,Ismi Arif bin Ismail,Nooreen Noordin    

When native speakers of English write, they employ both grammatical rules and collocations. Collocations are words that are present in the memory of native speakers as ready-made prefabricated chunks. Non-native speakers who wish to acquire native-like f... see more


Nawal Gholami,Mohammad Taghi Farvardin    

Few studies have investigated the effects of input-based and output-based instructions on collocational knowledge of EFL learners. Therefore, this study aimed to examine the effects of these instructional approaches on Iranian EFL learners’ productive kn... see more


Miao Haiyan    

This paper investigates age of acquisition (AoA) effects and the acquisition of delexicalized verbs and collocations in Chinese EFL learners, and explores the underlying reasons from the connectionist model for these learners’ acquisition characteristics... see more


Abbas Ali Zarei,Maryam Mousavi    

This study investigated the effects of three types of feedback on Iranian EFL learners’ recognition of lexical collocations. 78 pre-intermediate students from among 90 were selected to participate in this study. A KET (Key English Test) was used in order... see more


Elaheh Hamed Mahvelati,Jayakaran Mukundan    

Many researchers stress the importance of lexical coherence and emphasize the need for teaching collocations at all levels of language proficiency. Thus, this study was conducted to measure the relative effectiveness of explicit (consciousness-raising ap... see more