Korean EFL Learners’ Productive Collocation Knowledge and Its Relationship to Their Writing Proficiency

Abstract

The primary purpose of the current study was to investigate Korean university students’ productive collocation knowledge and examine its relationship to the students’ writing proficiency. Seventy four Korean university students, who were mostly freshmen majoring in English at a university located in Seoul, participated in the study. The productive collocation test (PCT) was administered to the students to assess the collocation knowledge and it was found that the verb-noun collocations were harder to retrieve and use than the adjective-noun collocations in general. Besides, the unpredictability from L1 and the existence of various synonyms were identified as the source of difficulties in retrieving and using the collocations. In an attempt to investigate the relationship between the students’ productive collocation knowledge and their writing proficiency, a one-way ANOVA was conducted and it was found that the students with more productive collocation knowledge tended to have high writing proficiency overall. In addition, the result of a hierarchical multiple regression analysis revealed that the students’ productive collocation knowledge could account for their writing proficiency significantly when controlling for their grammatical knowledge and productive vocabulary size. The knowledge of verb-noun collocations, in particular, was found to be significantly related to the students’ writing proficiency.