Abstract
The aims of the present study are to explore wrong English collocations made by some Indonesian English learners and to find out the causes of the wrong collocations. Twenty seven wrong English lexical collocations and nine wrong grammatical collocations collected from the students’ translation and writing assignments have been examined. After comparing the patterns of English collocations and the Indonesian collocations it is found out that the erroneous English collocations are attributed to four causes: (1) learners’ lack of knowledge of collocation, (2) differences of collocations between English and Bahasa Indonesia, (3) learners’ low mastery of vocabulary and (4) strong interferences of the learners’ native language.It is suggested that the students should be informed that collocation, like grammar, is one aspect of not only English but all other languages that should be learnt if they want their English sound natural and mastery of vocabulary can contribute to the constructing of correct collocations.
Highlights
In learning a foreign language a learner is faced with a variety of problems
After comparing the patterns of English collocations and the Indonesian collocations it is found out that the erroneous English collocations are attributed to four causes: (1) learners’ lack of knowledge of collocation, (2) differences of collocations between English and Bahasa Indonesia, (3) learners’ low mastery of vocabulary and (4) strong interferences of the learners’ native language.It is suggested that the students should be informed that collocation, like grammar, is one aspect of English but all other languages that should be learnt if they want their English sound natural and mastery of vocabulary can contribute to the constructing of correct collocations
If the foreign language being learnt is still related to the learner’s native language the learner normally will find many similarities between the forreign language and his/her native language So the problems he/she will face are not so serious but when the two languages are not related like Bahasa Indonesia, the national language of the Republic of Indonesia, a language that belongs to Austronesian family and English, one that belongs to Indoeuropean family, the problems may become more serious and complicated
Summary
In learning a foreign language a learner is faced with a variety of problems. The problems are concerned with every aspect of the language: phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and even pragmatics. Example, Ali drives his bike to college is grammatically correct (Ali as the subject is singular followed by a verb in present tense with suffix –s and because Ali is male the use of his is correct and since drive is a transitive verb the presence of the bike as the object is obligatory and to college functioning as adverb modifies the verb drive) but sounds foreign to the ears of native speakers of English because is is not normal to combine drive and bike In other words it is collocationally incorrect
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