Noun Collocations at the Receptive Level in Croatian as a Foreign Language

Abstract

The development of collocational competence in second/foreign language is a long and complex process influenced by many factors. The most extensive research has been done on collocations in English as a Second Language (ESL). Receptive knowledge is usually examined with multiple-choice tasks and results regularly point to better development of receptive over productive knowledge (Koya, 2003; Brashi, 2006; Jaén, 2007; Begagić, 2014). The main goal of this research is to examine answer types in receptive knowledge tasks on noun collocations, considering their frequency and subjects’ Croatian as Second Language (CLS) proficiency level. This research, which focused on basic adjective + noun collocations, was conducted on 70 CLS speakers of B1 and B2 proficiency level. Before compiling the instrument, corpus analysis was performed in the hrWaC 2.1 corpus, which was also used to count the frequency of collocations. In order to examine the receptive knowledge of collocations in CSL, subjects completed a multiple choice task that, apart from the correct answer, included three distractors that comprised false pairs from subjects’ first languages (English, Polish, Spanish, and German) and Croatian adjectives of similar formation and semantics. Results show that subjects of B2 proficiency level have better receptive knowledge of more frequent noun collocations (80%) than subjects of B1 proficiency level. Answer type analysis shows that subjects of B1 proficiency level chose distractors similar in formation more often, whereas an almost equal percentage of false pairs was chosen by both CSL proficiency levels, but only for collocations of lower frequency