formulaic language

THESIS

THE PRODUCTIVE AND RECEPTIVE KNOWLEDGE OF COLLOCATIONS BY
ADVANCED ARABIC-SPEAKING ESL/EFL LEARNERS

Submitted by
Rayed A. Alsakran
Department of English

In partial fulfillment of the requirements
For the Degree of Master of Arts
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, Colorado
Summer 2011
Master‟s Committee:
Advisor: Douglas Flahive
Fabiola Ehlers-Zavala
Frederique Grim

ABSTRACT

THE PRODUCTIVE AND RECEPTIVE KNOWLEDGE OF COLLOCATIONS BY
ADVANCED ARABIC-SPEAKING ESL/EFL LEARNERS

Although it is widely acknowledged that collocations play an important role in the field of second language acquisition, a number of previous studies have reported students‟ lack of collocational competence and the difficulties they encounter in learning and using collocations. The present study examines the productive and receptive knowledge of lexical and grammatical collocations among advanced Arabic-speaking learners of English. Furthermore, it investigates whether the language environment (ESL or EFL) has an influence on the acquisition of collocations. It also explores whether there is a significant difference between participants‟ performance on three types of collocations: verb-noun, adjective-noun, and verb-preposition.
Data for this study were collected from 68 participants: 38 Saudi students at the
Institute of Public Administration in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and 30 Arab students in the
Intensive English program at Colorado State University. The participants‟ productive collocational knowledge was measured by three gap-filling tests: verb-noun and adjective-noun collocation tests where the initial letter of the collocant was provided and a verb-preposition collocation test where the meaning of the phrasal verb was supplied.
Their receptive collocational knowledge was measured by an appropriateness judgment

ii

test in which participants have to circle the number corresponding to the underlined part of a sentence that is

References: skilled students are at grammar, communication will cease without the words to convey meaning (McCarthy, 1990) O‟Dell (1997, cited in Milton, 2009) states that, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, vocabulary and lexis are absent from main books on the syllabus and theory of language vocabulary acquisition could take care of itself (Decarrico, 2001). Nonetheless, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, many voices started to defy the view that vocabulary can be (Decarrico, 2001). explained in Chapter II. Based on this argument, Nation (2001) introduced a common aspect of word knowledge, receptive knowledge and productive knowledge 1 common aspect was presented by Anderson and Freebody (1981) which classifies word Nation (2001) introduced a complete description of the range of word knowledge. He classified word knowledge into form, meaning, and use written discourse. Foster (2001), who was looking for formulaic language in informal natives‟ speech, found that 32.3% of speech consists of formulaic expressions. Furthermore, Howarth (1998), when looking at 238,000 words of academic writing, claims that 31–40% was composed of collocations and idioms show that formulaic language forms a large part of any discourse (Conklin & Schmitt, 2007) 2 decades (Gitsaki, 1999, Webb & Kagimoto, 2009) in the Latin verb „collocare‟ which means „to set in order/to arrange‟” (Martyńska, 2004, p.2) collocation (Gitsaki, 1999; Lien, 2003). In defining collocation, Firth argues that: “You shall know a word by the company it keeps.” He exemplifies this by using the English Abdul-Fattah, 2003). Subsequent researchers, who have studied the occurrence of collocation, dealt with its definition in various ways, as will be discussed in detail in Chapter II. Yet, there is still no precise non-controversial, fixed definition of a collocation (Fontenelle, 1994). 1988). Ellis (2001, cited in Nation, 2001) also takes a strong position on the importance of collocational knowledge by stating that it is the essence of language learning the same lines, McCarthy (1990) argues that collocation is “an important organizing principle in the vocabulary of any language” (p.12) how important the knowledge of collocations is and calls for perception and concern by both L2 instructors and students (Carter & MacCarthy, 1988) difficulties they encounter “in vocabulary learning in general and collocations in particular” (Al-zahrani, 1998, p approaches were an attempt by linguists (e.g., McIntosh, 1961; Halliday, 1966; Sinclair, 1966; Fodor, 1963; Cruse, 1986; Mitchell, 1971; Greenbaum, 1970) to answer the question