Verb-Noun Collocation Proficiency and Academic Years

Abstract

Generally vocabulary and collocations in particular have significant roles in language proficiency. A collocation includes two words that are frequently joined concurrently in the memory of native speakers. There have been many linguistic studies trying to define, to describe, and to categorise English collocations. It contains grammatical collocations and lexical collocations which include nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverb. In the context of a foreign language environment such as Iran, collocational proficiency can be useful because it helps the students improve their language proficiency. This paper investigates the possible relationship between verb-noun collocation proficiency among students from one academic year to the next. To reach this goal, a test of verb-noun collocations was administered to Iranian learners. The participants in the study were 212 Iranian students in an Iranian university. They were selected from the second term of freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years. The students' age ranged from 18 to 35.The results of ANOVA showed there was variability in the verb-noun collocations proficiency within each academic year and between the four academic years. The results of a post hoc multiple comparison tests demonstrated that the means are significantly different between the first year and the third and fourth years, and between the third and the fourth academic year; however, students require at least two years to show significant development in verb-noun collocation proficiency. These findings provided a vital implication that lexical collocations are learnt and developed through four academic years of university, but requires at least two years showing significant development in the language proficiency.

Effect of tasks on learners’ understanding of collocations and its influence on the writing performance of L2 learners

“…When compared to the use of typical (structured) exercises, the study's technique appears to have extraordinary value in developing the natural and spontaneous employment of collocations. It also endorses findings from Ebrahimi-Bazzaz, Abd Samad, Bin Ismail, and Noordin (2014) that verb-noun collocational knowledge may be developed more quickly and easily when taught in formal educational settings as this study indicates. This further confirms a study by Zhang and Sukying (2021) on the impact of many exposures in the incremental process of vocabulary learning by indicating that the growth of collocational knowledge depends on the number of contacts with the target words in context .…”

Receptive and Productive Knowledge of Lexical Collocations in Thai University Learners of English

“…This is perhaps because the fourth-year learners have more experience in learning vocabulary knowledge, which is consistent with previous findings suggesting that understanding the aspects of vocabulary knowledge requires sufficient language experience (e.g., Hayashi & Murphy, 2011;Schmitt & Zimmerman, 2002, Nontasee & Sukying, 2021a. Diao (2004) also found that senior students showed better collocation competence than freshmen students, likely due to the senior students having more exposure to English, and other studies have also reported that students' knowledge of collocations improves through their academic years (Al-Zahrani 1998;Ebrahimi-Bazzaz et al, 2014;Gitsaki, 1999). The results also indicate that, overall, collocational competence for both first-and fourth-year students is unsatisfactory and students showed poor collocational knowledge in general.…”