Korean High School Learners’ Knowledge of Adjective-Noun and Verb-Noun Collocations by L1-L2 Congruency and L2 Proficiency

Abstract

While single word items have more often been the unit of interest for second language (L2) vocabulary learning, there has been less attention paid to how L2 learners may demonstrate knowledge of collocations. L2 high school learners were asked to retrieve collocations according to different degrees of congruency (i.e., incongruent vs. congruent) that are shared between L1 and L2 collocations. For this purpose, a receptive collocation test (RCT), counterbalanced for incongruent and congruent collocations, and adjective-noun (AN) and verb-noun (VN) collocations, was developed by matching normalized frequencies of the collocation items from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The 133 high school sophomores were found to have more problems with the incongruent collocations than with the congruent items. However, correct responses were more frequent for the incongruent VN collocations than those of the congruent VN collocations. The results demonstrate that synonymous collocates can also be the source of problems in learning collocations. The study also empirically demonstrates that L2 proficiency is the foundation for development of collocational knowledge. Implications on teaching collocations are presented in light of the obtained results.