Collocation is usually defined as two or more words which coâoccur and must be learned as an integral whole. L2 learners should have a rich collocational.
On The Use of English Collocations by Iranian Postgraduate Learners of ESP
Goudarz Alibakhshi (Allameh Tabataba’i University)
Alibakhshi, Goudarz.(2014). On The Use of English Collocations by Iranian Postgraduate Learners of ESP. Studies in Foreign Language Education, 28 (2), pp.329-348.
Collocation is usually defined as two or more words which co‐occur and must be learned as an integral whole. L2 learners should have a rich collocational competence to communicate effectively and fluently. Despite the importance of collocations in second language learning and teaching, no study has yet been carried out to investigate the Iranian postgraduate students’ collocation knowledge of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). Therefore, this study explored the impact of type of test (receptive vs. productive) on the students’ performance in collocation tests. Also, the collocation knowledge of the students was investigated across different fields of study and different collocation categories. For the purposes of this study, 100 ESP master students majoring in different fields of study were selected randomly from three national universities located in Yasouj and Isfahan provinces. The participants took a collocation test including a receptive multiple‐choice test and a productive translation test. Both grammatical and lexical collocations were examined in the study. The results indicated that the participants had more difficulty with the productive test rather than the receptive test. Furthermore, the overall collocation knowledge of the students was significantly different across different fields of study and various collocation categories. It could be concluded that increasing knowledge of accurate collocational patterns, especially the productive collocation knowledge, is necessary for Iranian ESP postgraduate students.
328 Goudarz Alibakhshi
Ⅰ. Introduction Many second language acquisition researchers (Wilkins, 1972; Schmitt, 2000; Alsakran, 2011) supported the importance of learning and teaching vocabulary and argued that vocabulary is at least as equally important as language structure and they are fundamentally linked. However, vocabulary knowledge is more than just knowing the meanings of given individual words; it also involves knowing the words that to co‐occur with them (Shokouhi & Mirsalari, 2010). Sinclair (1991) proposed the idiom principle which refers to the fact that there are regularities in how words co‐occur with each other. In other words, there is a kind of systematicity in language which is mainly linguistic in nature and constraints vocabulary choice in discourse. Firth (1951) refers to these co‐occurring words or collocations as the habitual places of words. That is, where we find one of the collocating words we can expect to find the other. Nesselhauf (2005) believes that collocations are lexeme combinations which are restricted arbitrarily. Anderson and Nagy (1991) claimed that students have to know how the words are put together. The knowledge of collocations of a word is one of eight types of word knowledge which are necessary for language learners to know (Nation, 1990). Bogaards (2000; 2001) pointed out that testing second language vocabulary knowledge should involve all aspects of what is implied by lexical knowledge including knowledge of collocations. Like general English, in English for specific purposes (ESP) contexts, where the purposes and content of the language courses are fixed by the specific needs of a specific group of learners (Richards & Schmidt, 2002), great emphasis has been laid on the role of. Woolard (2000) also believes that a focus on collocation must become a major priority in English for Academic Purposes. Within science, medicine, and commerce, language proficiency is determined largely by the students’ mastery of the common collocations particular to each field. Wu (2003) claimed that EFL/ESL learners should have the knowledge and ability to recognize which words co‐occur frequently within a specific context. In English as Foreign Language (EFL) settings, students tend to use individual words form collocations but they are not often exposed to these words in the form of collocations
