Lexical Collocation Use by Korean EFL College Learners

Abstract

This study investigated Korean EFL college students' lexical collocation use. The specific research questions were as follows: 1) Which factors affect the collocational competence?; 2) Which collocation types are the most problematic to Korean EFL college learners?; 3) What are the possible causes of collocational errors? 133 subjects and 6 interviewees participated in this study. They were divided into three groups according to their English proficiency and were asked to complete the two tests: a collocation test and a vocabulary test. The results of the study showed that there were considerably high correlations between English proficiency and lexical collocation competence and between vocabulary knowledge and lexical collocation competence. Among the five types of lexical collocation in the collocation test, it was found that the most problematic lexical collocation type of all three groups was adverb and adjective type, whereas the least problematic collocation was noun and verb type. The qualitative analyses of the participants' answers and the interview data showed that most of the collocation errors were caused by L1 transfer or substituting the synonyms of collocates.