Investigating the Collocational Competence of Polish and Yemeni Learners of English as a Foreign Language

One of the difficulties EFL learners frequently experience in English is the choice of words to achieve native-like competency. The present study investigates the collocational competence of Polish and Yemeni learners of English as a foreign language. The thesis opens with a review of the literature on collocations in English from a linguistic perspective, followed by a presentation of studies devoted to investigations of collocational competence in a cross-linguistic perspective. The purpose of the empirical study is to investigate the collocational competence in Polish and Yemeni advanced learners of English at the university level. Eighty subjects participated in the present study, 40 Polish and 40 Yemeni advanced learners of English. Two elicitation tasks were conducted: blank-filling and multiple-choice tests which consisted of 30 test items each, containing verb-noun collocations with verbs missing or to be selected. Results obtained from the elicitation tasks showed that, in spite of the fact that the participants are advanced learners of English, their level of collocational competence shows a variety of problems. The Polish participants did better than the Yemeni group with statistically significant differences between the two groups. Recognition knowledge of collocations was better than the recall one, but there were interesting irregularities in that regard in the two elicitation tasks. The Polish group’s mean scores on the recognition and the recall tests (17.88, 14.12, respectively) were significantly higher than the Yemeni means (13.13, 9.38). The native-target language congruency in the collocations seemed to affect the learners' collocational performance on the tests. The following nine types of errors were identified in the Polish and Yemeni results: interference errors (L1 transfer and literal translation) (24.9%), (29.2%); near synonyms (10.7%, 10.6%); avoidance (9.6%, 5.3%); idiomaticity (18.5%, 18.7%); overgeneralization (14.4%, 9.7%); approximation (2.5%, 2.7%); paraphrase (1.7%, 0.5%); usage of irrelevant collocations (4.3%, 7.2%); and the use of de-lexicalized verbs (13.4% and 16.1% respectively). Following these findings, some implications for improving second/foreign language learners' collocational knowledge are formulated to enhance their proficiency in the target language, such as raising their collocational awareness and explicit teaching and learning of collocations