Chapter 1 the study of collocations

2.5  The Aims of the Present Study 
 
 
The limited research in the development of L2 vocabulary, and the 
availability of English collocations for a study of development, as these are 
operationalised in this study (see Chapter 1), provided the rationale for this 
 
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study which aimed to investigate whether there are patterns in the 
development of collocational knowledge in L2 learners. 
 
Describing developmental 'stages' in the acquisition of collocations (i.e. 
the stages that the learner goes through before the correct English collocations 
are fully acquired) is not feasible in an investigation of vocabulary learning.  
For example, in the investigation of the acquisition of English interrogatives 
(Cazden et al. 1975) the end product (i.e. a well-formed interrogative 
conforming to English grammar rules) was evident and the researchers had to 
describe the stages learners go through in the acquisition of English 
interrogatives.  In vocabulary acquisition, however, and in particular in the 
acquisition of collocations, the end product is not as obvious.  For example, 
when the learner uses 'bad milk', the end product cannot be confidently 
determined.  It is possible that the learner is trying to say 'sour milk', or even 
that 'the milk is off'. 
 
Due to the above limitation, this study aimed to explore 'patterns' or 
'acquisition/difficulty/accuracy orders' rather than 'stages' of development in 
the acquisition of collocations.  Thus, development in the acquisition of 
collocations is in the form of sequences or implicational steps of correctly used 
English collocations by learners at different proficiency levels. 
 
For the purposes of the present study, ESL learners from three different 
proficiency levels were tested in their free and cued production of collocation 
types as these are operationalised in the BBI and other studies on collocations 
(see Biskup 1992; Zhang 1993).  The proficiency level of the selected L2 learners 
 
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was based on the assumption that collocations are important for the early 
stages of language acquisition and for the following years of vocabulary 
development (Greenbaum 1974).  Thus, the subjects in this study were at post-
beginner, intermediate, and post-intermediate levels of proficiency. 
 
The correctly used collocations were sequenced to reveal implicational 
orders from 'easy' or 'early acquired' collocation types to 'difficult' or 'late 
acquired' types.  In this way any systematic patterns of development in the 
acquisition of collocations would emerge.  As a result of the foregoing, there are 
two hypotheses tested in this study: 
 
 
i)  There are stable patterns of development of collocational  knowledge across 
language proficiency levels. 
 
 
ii)  There are stable patterns of development of collocational  
knowledge 
within language proficiency levels. 
 
 
The next chapter describes the methodology of this study.  
 
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