A case study on testing English grammatical collocation use of university students in Korea

Abstract

This paper explores the grammatical collocation use of adult learners at high-intermediate and advanced level. English being a foreign language in Korea, learners necessarily need linguistic knowledge of English. This paper focuses on English verbs and the following elements in particular. Considering that English verb-particle collocations represent English grammatical collocations, a set of multiple-choice written test of 96 items and a questionnaire was designed to test learners' knowledge and use of English verbs and their following particles. Seventeen undergraduate students at Seoul National University participated in the test. Despite their high English proficiency level, many of them showed the lack of knowledge and appropriate use of English verb-particle collocations.