Chapter 1 the study of collocations

1.2  Collocations in L2 Acquisition Research 
 
 
There have been a number of studies in L2 acquisition research that 
investigated how the knowledge and use of collocations by students at different 
levels of proficiency affect their communicative competence and language 
performance, and so established the importance of collocations in L2 learning. 
 
In her effort to identify the main factors in L2 acquisition for academic 
achievement, Saville-Troike studied a group of nineteen non-English speaking 
elementary school students who were subsequently taught and tested in 
English.  The longitudinal study revealed that the most usual verbal interaction 
patterns consisted of the use of English routines such as 'don't do' and 'that's 
mine' (Saville-Troike 1984:207) and that vocabulary knowledge in English is the 
 
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most important aspect of L2 competence for academic achievement (Saville-
Troike 1984:216).  Students progressed from simply repeating after the teacher, 
to nodding or shaking the head, to using single words, and finally to using 
phrase and sentence patterns.  These patterns and routines can be considered as 
collocations since they are word combinations, and hence Saville-Troike's study 
shows that collocations are essential for communicative interaction even from 
the initial stages of L2 acquisition. 
 
In an experiment carried out by Bahns and Eldaw (1993), a translation 
and a cloze task were used to test German post-secondary learners' active 
knowledge of 15 English verb-noun 'lexical collocations' (i.e. collocations that 
included words belonging to open-class categories, and excluding words such 
as prepositions, articles or conjunctions).  The German collocations used in the 
translation test were direct equivalents of the English collocations.  In the cloze 
test there were 15 sentences each sentence containing one verb-noun collocation 
with the verb missing.  The analysis of the data revealed that the subjects 
produced more than twice as many errors in their translations of the nouns in 
the noun-verb collocations as in their translation of general lexical words, while 
in the cloze test nearly 52% of the responses were grammatically or 
collocationally unacceptable to a native speaker of English.  The results show 
that for advanced ESL students collocations present a major problem in the 
production of correct English.  The results also indicate that the learners' 
knowledge of collocations does not expand in parallel with their knowledge of 
general vocabulary, since they could not identify the specific verb-noun 
 
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collocations, although they could use general lexical items.  Also, the learners' 
inability to paraphrase collocational phrases suggests that "a knowledge of 
collocations is essential to full communicative mastery of English" (Bahns & 
Eldaw 1993:109).  Bahns and Eldaw suggest that the results of their study are 
due to the fact that collocations are not taught explicitly in the classroom and 
therefore learners do not pay any attention to learning them (p. 109). 
 
Verb-noun collocations were also tested by Aghbar (1990) in a writing 
task based on the assumption that the use of formulaic language should be 
considered in assessing native and non-native English proficiency.  Aghbar 
defines formulaic language as language chunks that are used and learnt 
together.  He reports that "collocations are the less obvious examples of 
formulaic language", possibly because they are not fixed in the same way that 
idioms and proverbs are (Aghbar 1990:2).  The writing test consisted of 50 
sentences, appropriate for formal written contexts, with each sentence 
containing one formulaic verb-noun expression.  In each of these expressions 
the verb was missing and the participants had to provide the verb most likely 
to be used in a formal written context.  The results showed that ESL students 
did well where 'get' was the desirable word.  However, they used 'get' even 
when other more specific and more appropriate verbs were needed.  For 
example, 'This is an opportunity for you to _______ knowledge in your field of 
study' could be filled with 'get' but also with other more appropriate verbs such 
as 'acquire', 'accumulate', 'gain', 'demonstrate', 'display' etc.  The reason for the 
poor ESL performance in the test was the "lack of acquisition of those language 
 
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chunks that make discourse fluent and idiomatic" (Aghbar 1990:6).  The results 
also showed that the performance of American students was similar to that of 
ESL students, thus proving that even the native undergraduates' knowledge of 
the collocations used in formal written language was inadequate. 
 
Similarly, 200 undergraduate third and fourth year Jordanian students 
majoring in English performed poorly in a multiple choice test conducted by 
Fayez-Hussein (1990), who aimed to assess the students' ability to collocate 
words correctly in English.  The multiple choice test consisted of 40 sentences, 
with each sentence containing an incomplete collocation (i.e. idioms, fixed 
expressions, restricted collocations).  The collocations tested were mainly noun-
noun, adjective-noun, and verb-noun phrases.  The students' performance on 
the test (only 48.4% of the collocations were answered correctly) was found 
unsatisfactory.  Almost half of the incorrect responses were found to be due to 
negative transfer from L1, e.g. in item 5 'By the weekend the death _________ 
had reached 95', 51% of the subjects chose 'death number' instead of 'death toll'. 
 Unfamiliarity with the structure of the particular idioms and fixed expressions 
was another major factor for incorrect responses, e.g. in item 21 'The first 
voyage of a new ship is referred to as a __________ voyage', 45.5% of the 
subjects selected 'primary voyage' instead of 'maiden voyage'.  Finally, the 
students' tendency to use generic terms instead of specific ones accounted for 
38.3% of incorrect responses, e.g. in item 29 'After the current repairs of the 
city's water supply system, ________ water will be safe for drinking', 48.5% of 
the subjects chose 'pipe water' instead of 'tap water'.  Fayez-Hussein lists a 
 
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number of reasons for the students' inadequate knowledge of English 
collocations: the neglect of lexicon in the teaching and learning of English as a 
foreign language, the students' insufficient reading experience (which is 
assumed to restrict their knowledge of vocabulary, synonyms, lexical 
restrictions, etc.), the reduction and simplification that takes place in the 
teaching of a foreign language (which can encourage students to use 
oversimplified generalisations), and the subjects' overuse of guessing strategies 
in answering the test items.  The latter could have also been encouraged by the 
format of the test, i.e. multiple choice test items. 
 
The lack of emphasis which most syllabuses place on vocabulary has 
been reported as the main reason for the frequency of learners' lexical errors 
(e.g. collocational errors, over-use of a few general items) by Channell (1981).  A 
group of eight advanced students of English were asked to fill in a 
'collocational grid' which had the adjectives 'handsome, pretty, charming, 
lovely' as its vertical axis, and the nouns 'woman, man, child, dog, bird, flower, 
weather, landscape, view, house, furniture, bed, picture, dress, present, voice' 
as its horizontal axis.  The test showed that the students failed to mark a large 
number of acceptable collocations, even though they were very familiar with 
the words involved in the test.  Channell concludes that it is essential that 
learners realise the potential of words they know and of the new words they 
learn, and she recommends that syllabuses should take into account two things 
about every new word the learner needs to learn: how it relates to other words 
 
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with similar meaning, and which other words it can be used with and in which 
contexts (Channell 1981:116). 
 
An analysis of the writing of four Arab college ESL students by Elkatib 
(1984) showed unfamiliarity of collocation as well as overuse of a few general 
lexical items to be among the eight main types of lexical errors that were 
recorded.  In a further analysis of the collocational errors, Elkatib observes that 
the learners knew the basic meaning of the lexical item but they did not know 
its collocative patterns, which resulted in the use of erroneous collocations such 
as 'beautiful noise', 'shooting stones', 'I increased a hundred marks', 'do 
progress'.  Elkatib concludes that new words should be presented in company 
with their most typical collocations in the form of example sentences or of 
collocation grids like the ones proposed by Channell (1981).  The importance of 
such a practice derives from the fact that "students often fail to realise the 
potential even of words they know well, because they use them only in a 
limited number of collocations of which they are sure" (Elkatib 1984:50). 
 
The analysis of frequent words and their collocations was used in order 
to assess the writing proficiency of primary school students in Singapore 
(Ghadessy 1989).  Writing samples of grade three (8-9 years old) and grade six 
(11-12 years old) students were analysed using the KWIC (key-word in context) 
method.  It was found that grade three students used content words (i.e. nouns, 
verbs, adjectives and adverbs) more frequently than grade six students, who 
showed a more frequent use of function words (i.e. articles, pronouns, 
prepositions, etc.) (Ghadessy 1989:113).  According to Ghadessy, the frequent 
 
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use of function words is indicative of a more advanced use of collocations, 
grammatical patterns and cohesive devices on the part of grade 6 students 
(Ghadessy 1989:114).  Ghadessy reports that looking at the collocations students 
use is a valid way of investigating what happens during their development 
towards a full linguistic communicative competence, i.e. by looking at the 
collocations of nouns, one can draw conclusions about the development of the 
students' ability to use premodification and postmodification of nouns.  For 
example, in Ghadessy's study all students used premodification (e.g. ‘tall tree’, 
‘tennis ball’, ‘shady tree’) more frequently than postmodification (e.g. ‘the tree 
that...’, ‘’a tree near the place that...’, ‘the tree which...’), which appeared mainly 
in the writings of grade six students.  Therefore, it appears that 
postmodification is a more complex skill that develops at later stages of L2 
learning, and as such it may be used as an indicator of a more advanced level of 
language acquisition. 
 
The use of collocations in the writings of native and non-native college 
freshmen was examined by Zhang (1993).  Samples of written essays, as well as 
a fifty-item blank filling test containing 21 types of collocation (11 grammatical 
and 10 lexical ones), were analysed in order to examine any associations 
between collocational knowledge (as this was measured by the blank filling 
tests) and writing quality, on the one hand, and the use of collocations in the 
students' essays and writing quality on the other.  The results show that 
collocational knowledge is a source of fluency in written communication, and 
also that the quality of collocations in terms of variety and accuracy is 
 
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indicative of the quality of college freshmen writing.  An interesting result in 
Zhang's study is that the use of more grammatical collocations (e.g. SV to Inf) 
and fewer lexical collocations (e.g. Verb Adverb) (see section 1.5. for definitions) 
was found to be characteristic of the writing in native Good writers and non-
native Poor writers (Zhang 1993:168).  Zhang considers this result indicative of 
the development that takes place as non-native speakers develop from poor 
writers to good writers to native-like writers.  Even though Zhang did not test 
subjects from different proficiency levels, he anticipates that learners at the 
lower levels of English proficiency use more grammatical collocations, and 
fewer lexical collocations in their writing, and whatever collocations they do 
use are poor in variety and accuracy.  As learners progress to intermediate 
levels they produce a greater variety of collocations and fewer collocational 
errors, but they are still dependent on the prefabricated routines they have 
acquired, and thus they use more lexical collocations than grammatical ones.  
At higher levels of English proficiency learners have a better knowledge of 
grammatical collocations and they are able to use the analysed parts to create 
new ones, resulting to fewer lexical collocations and more grammatical ones 
(Zhang 1993:169).  Zhang's study suggests that there is some kind of 
development in collocational knowledge as L2 learners proceed from low 
language proficiency to more advanced language proficiency. 
 
In an investigation of possible ways of facilitating L2 vocabulary 
learning, Cohen and Aphek (1981) concluded that intermediate level students 
find tasks with contextualised words (average 77% correct) easier than tasks 
 
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involving lists of words, which in turn are easier for beginners (average 84% 
correct) (Cohen & Aphek 1981:225).  Thus, teaching words in their collocations 
could be beneficial for intermediate level students but not for elementary 
students. 
 
Overall, the use of correct collocations in the reviewed studies was found 
to be indicative of a higher level of language proficiency, and the lack of 
collocational knowledge was found to impair language performance.  Even 
though the above studies pursued similar goals, i.e. to reveal that a limited 
knowledge of collocations inhibits language performance and that the teaching 
of collocations in L2 classroom is necessary, they present a number of 
limitations.  Some of the studies were limited to the examination of a small 
number collocations, usually belonging to the same pattern (verb-noun 
collocations in Bahns & Eldaw 1993; Aghbar 1990; adjective-noun collocations 
in Channell 1981).  The use of elicitation procedures differed from study to 
study, making their results difficult to compare (translation and cloze test in 
Bahns & Eldaw 1993; blank filling in Aghbar 1990; collocational grid in 
Channell 1981; multiple choice test in Fayez-Houssein 1990; analysis of written 
performance in Ghadessy 1989; Elkatib 1984; essay writing and blank filling in 
Zhang 1993) (for a critique of the use of multiple choice tests and open-choice 
tests in the investigation of collocational knowledge see Aghbar & Tang 1991).  
Some studies contained only a small number of subjects (8 subjects in Channell 
1981; four in Elkatib 1984; nineteen in Saville-Troike 1984; Cohen & Aphek 
1981).  There is no common theoretical framework for the study of collocations, 
 
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i.e. they are mainly descriptions of the problems that learners have with 
collocations (word combinations, routinized patterns, phrase patterns, etc.).  
With the exception of Zhang's (1993) study, where a number of collocational 
patterns are identified and systematically tested, the rest of the studies lack 
systematicity and methodology in the selection of the collocations they tested, 
which were based mainly on native speaker intuitions.  Due to these limitations 
the study of the acquisition of collocations is still in need of systematic and 
methodologically sound research, while a common framework for the study of 
collocations is yet to be established. 
 
The following section outlines the different approaches to the study of 
collocations in an attempt to construct a theoretical framework as the basis of 
the present study.