Croatian EFL learners’ collocational competence: Congruent and incongruent collocations

The purpose of this review is to identify the appropriate strategies or methodologies that can help address those problems related to collocational competence amongst English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. The topic of collocational competence needs to be explored given that having collocational competence would advantage language learners to attain second or foreign language fluency. Collocational competence is in fact a reliable indicator of high language proficiency level. Numerous studies that explored collocational competence found that most learners are still facing difficulties in mastering different types of collocations. This problem seems unending despite major advancements in teaching technologies. Therefore, new and exciting ways of learning and teaching collocations that cater to students’ individual needs and that are useful for teachers should be devised. A scoping review protocol was established for this study. A total of 21 articles from 2010 to 2020 were qualitatively synthesised. Of the 21, nine articles on corpus-based methodology, eight articles on traditional methods of teaching collocations and three articles discussing other relevant learning and teaching strategies that focus on solving the problem of lack of collocational competence were isolated and analysed. The findings suggested that implementing an indirect corpus approach in language classrooms may be the most suitable and practical approach that can cater to almost all levels of proficiency whilst consuming a limited amount of resources. The use of corpora in language classrooms is beneficial as it also offers reliable references for learners to explore and for teachers to adopt and teach. Keywords: Scoping Review; ESL; EFL; Collocations; Collocational Competence

The use of music in the process of English language teaching and learning is a well-established practice. In fact, the use of authentic, contemporary language examples from popular songs has been proposed by many (Murphey, 1990; Lopez-Sanz, 2013; Kerekes, 2015) as a tool to enhance learners’ collocational competence, contextual understanding, and overall linguistic proficiency in English. This research aims to examine the frequency and types of collocations in a selection of song lyrics, to analyse their translation equivalents, and, by doing so, to explore the pedagogical potential of lexical collocations in song lyrics for practical applications in the process of teaching and learning English. Utilizing a corpus of 195 songs by Taylor Alison Swift, the analysis involves a comparison of lexical collocations in English and their translation equivalents in Bosnian. The findings reveal that apart from the relatively high frequency of lexical colocations, there are also certain patterns that can be observed, such as the consistent preference for adjective-noun pairings across and the total absence of adverb-verb combinations. From a contrastive perspective, the finding is that many collocations change in form and complexity during translation with a certain number of English examples losing their collocational patterns when translated to Bosnian. Such differences can make learning English collocations more challenging and demanding. However, this research underscores the value of integrating popular music into language curricula, advocating for innovative, engaging approaches to teaching English, in particular for Bosnian EFL learners, through modern, more relatable content.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/soc/0871/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

This study investigates the Iranian EFL learners' Knowledge of Lexical Collocation at three academic levels: freshmen, sophomores, and juniors. The participants were forty three English majors doing their B.A. in English Translation studies in Chabahar Maritime University. They took a 50-item fill-in-the-blank test of lexical collocations. The test included five types of collocations: verb-noun, adjective-noun, noun-verb, adverb-adjective, and verb-adverb. Descriptive statistics, t-test, and One-way ANOVA were employed in the data analysis. According to the results, Iranian English majors are weak in lexi cal collocations, answering just more than 50% of the questions. A significant difference was found among the performance of the students at three academic levels, but there was no significant difference between boys and girls in their knowledge of lexical collocations. While noun-verb collocation was revealed to be the easiest type of collocation, adverb-adjective collocation proved to be the most difficult type. These findings have immediate implications for language learners, EFL teachers, and material designers.

The goal of the article is to examine the dependency between collocational competence and other competences and language skills of a foreign language learner. The paper begins with an explication of the notions of collocation and collocational competence. It further presents the results of an analysis of the relevant research on collocational competence. Based on publications of researchers from all over the world, the research question which has been formulated concerns the dependency between a well developed collocational competence and the level of proficiency in reading, listening, writing and speaking. And conversely, the analysis seeks to find out if the language skills above automatically develop learners’ collocational competence. Finally, the article shows the influence of collocational competence on language reception and production, and discusses some methods which may improve foreign language learners’ collocational competence

Collocational competence largely contributes to vocabulary knowledge and hence to language proficiency. The present study examines the collocational competence of Arab undergraduate students who study English in a foreign language (EFL) environment. Focusing on lexical collocations, the study addresses four questions; (1) What is the learners’ level of collocational competence?, (2) How does their collocational competence develop with increased language exposure?, (3) Does their collocational competence vary based on the word class of the collocates?, and (4) What are the types of collocational errors they produce? Using a specially designed test, the collocational competence of 90 Arab undergraduate learners at three academic levels in a private Saudi university was assessed. Findings showed that the collocational competence of learners was notably unsatisfactory despite the fact that English is the medium of instruction at the University. It was also found that collocational competence improves with increased language exposure but at a slow rate, and that learners were more confident in their use of verb + noun collocations than adjective + noun collocations. The study also revealed that learners produce more intralingual than interlingual errors of collocations. The findings are discussed in relation to the literature on collocational competence and pedagogical implications are presented.

Introduction. The development of students’ collocational competence is one of the main goals of foreign language teaching in a linguistic university. Achieving this goal is possible through the use of corpora. However, the implementation of the methods for the development of students’ collocational competence based on corpora requires the selection of teaching content and the development of learning stages that combine classroom and distant, online and offline learning forms and allow students to work independently with the data of linguistic corpora. The purpose of the study is to develop methods for the development of students’ collocational competence based on corpora. Materials and methods. The study involved 2nd year students (N=44) studying “Linguistics” (profile: “Theory and Methods of Teaching Foreign Languages and Cultures”) and “Pedagogical Education” (profile: “English Language”) programmes at Derzhavin Tambov State University (Russian Federation). In order to test the methods effectiveness for the experimental group, a selection of collocations was carried out and a hybrid learning methods was developed, which includes project activities (classroom and distant) and consists of three stages. Participants in the control group studied a practical English course using traditional printed teaching aids. The subject of control was students’ collocational competence. To process the obtained results, Student’s t-test was used. Research results. The study shows that both teaching methods are quite effective for the development of collocational competence of linguistic university students (control group: t = 12.82, p ≤ 0.005; experimental group: t = 15.64, p ≤ 0.005). At the same time, statistical processing of data when comparing the results of the experimental cut between the control and experimental groups proved the effectiveness of the author’s methods of teaching collocations based on corpora (t = 2.54, p ≤ 0.005). Conclusion. The novelty of the study lies in the formulation of methods for the development of students’ collocational competence based on corpora, which consist of three stages and includes classroom and distant, online and offline forms of education. The results obtained can be used in the development of methods for a foreign language teaching in general and lexical competence in particular on the basis of corpora, as well as in the development of methods for foreign language teaching based on other modern ICTs.

English has become the dominant global language, and the accurate use of collocations is a key component of language proficiency. In Cambodia, the role of collocation knowledge in English writing remains underexplored. This qualitative study employed a descriptive design to examine grammatical collocation use among 13 Cambodian students through their essay writing. The primary aim was to identify both the types of grammatical collocations produced and the errors made in their usage. The analysis revealed that the most commonly used collocation type was Preposition + Noun, followed by Noun + Preposition. Less frequent patterns included Noun + To-infinitive and Adjective + Preposition, while Adjective + That-clause and Verb + Adverb were rarely found. In terms of accuracy, Preposition + Noun yielded the highest number of errors (12), followed by Noun + Preposition (5). Other types showed minimal or no errors. These findings highlight the students’ struggles with common collocation forms, particularly those involving prepositions. The most frequent source of error was interlingual transfer (88.45%), indicating influence from the native language. Other contributing factors included the learning environment (84.60%), intralingual transfer (53.80%), and communication strategies (50%). The study underscores the need for explicit instruction in collocation use, particularly in high-error patterns like Preposition + Noun. Addressing error sources such as native language interference can enhance students’ collocational competence in academic writing.

No wonder that knowledge of how words pair in L2 has been a missing part in many EFL classes and a peripheral element in many syllabi in Algeria. Virtually, many of the current teaching practices still seek to focus learners’ attention on the role of grammar in the acquisition process under the assumption that grammar has a generative power of language and learners can in turn produce L2 by mastering the different grammatical structures. This tendency resulted in considering lexis, mainly collocations, as subservient to grammar. As a result, learners’ writing has become grammatically well-polished but replete with idiosyncratic wording due to lexical mistakes and deficiency in collocations. Hence, this paper aims at assessing the extent to which developing EFL learners’collocational competence through an explicit contrastive approach can help them produce native- like natural writing. To undertake this research, an experimental and control group of first year English majors were recruited. The former was taught collocations explicitly through a contrastive approach, while the latter was taught English with no focus on collocations. Data were collected from corpora produced by these students in pre and post-tests. Analysis of the findings indicates that pointing out to EFL learners the difference of collocational restrictions between L1 and the target language promotes this learners’collocational competence. Besides, downplaying grammatical mistakes and emphasizing collocational accuracy inside the classroom is very likely to result in learners producing strongly collocated words in their writing. In the light of these findings, the present research paper concludes with some pedagogical implications.

Collocational competence, the ability to use grammatical and lexical collocations accurately, is a crucial aspect of language proficiency, closely linked to natural and fluent language use. Despite its importance, non-native speakers often struggle with collocations, particularly in productive tasks such as writing. This study examines the frequency, types, and errors of collocations among B2-level English language students at the University of Zenica, as defined by the Common European Framework of Reference (2001). A corpus of 150 student essays (76,319 words) was compiled. Collocations were extracted, classified, and analysed based on Benson et al. (2010). The results indicate that lexical collocations (3.3%) were more frequent than grammatical collocations (2.68%), confirming the first hypothesis. However, grammatical collocations exhibited a higher error rate (6.53%) compared to lexical collocations (5.15%), supporting the second hypothesis. Error analysis revealed that negative L1 transfer was the main cause of grammatical collocation errors, while synonymy and analogy contributed significantly to lexical errors. The findings also indicated that students tend to rely on familiar collocations, showing limited experimentation with less common structures. The study has pedagogical implications, suggesting that contrastive analysis, exposure to authentic materials, and creative writing activities could enhance students’ collocational competence. Addressing L1 interference and verb-preposition collocations through targeted instruction could further improve accuracy. These insights contribute to a deeper understanding of collocational competence in EFL learning, offering practical strategies for improving teaching methods and student writing skills.

Collocation has a fairly prominent role in English Language. For non-native speakers, the years learning English does not mean non-native speakers are able to apply collocation correctly. Non-native speakers will face great difficulty in collocation because they have limited quantity of doing much exposure and their learner differences such as motivation. This current study critically reviews Mansoor Ganji’s (2012) work which investigated the influence of Gender and Years of Instruction on Iranian EFL learners’ Collocational Competence. Ganji’s found that Iranian English majors were weak in lexical collocation in spite of English had been taught at least 6 years and teachers seemed not to pay attention to collocation teaching in Iran. This study is descriptive qualitative. This study shows that teachers teach collocation both implicitly and explicitly. However, most of students are still weak in collocation. This study also shows that lack of exposure influences students’ collocational competence.

The collocational competence of undergraduate students of English at a university in northeastern Thailand and their perceptions of collocational difficulty were investigated in this study. The participants were 153 2nd-, 3rd-, and 4th-year students of English selected through a convenient sampling method and via their consents to take part in the study. The participants who were enrolled in the second term of academic year 2017 were administered a collocational competence test which comprised 35 fill-in-the-blank items with optional alternatives. They were to answer a Likert's type questionnaire of 5 rating scales (Reliability co-efficient = 0.96) probing their perceptions of the difficulty of collocations in parallel with each test item. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and One-Way ANOVA was computed to test the hypothesis. The results indicated that on the whole the participants had a 'moderate level' of collocational competence. They were not significantly different in terms of their collocational competence when it comes to their different years of studies. The participants perceived collocations as fairly difficult with the idiomatic collocations reported as being the most difficult category. The findings were discussed in relation to the theoretical difficulty of collocations and suggestions for pedagogy and further research were offered.

Collocations in the Croatian language have been described in detail (Blagus Bartolec 2014). However, research on collocational competence in Croatian as a first or foreign language is still sparse. Previously, only the factors that influence the collocational competence of Croatian native speakers (NSs) were investigated, showing that NSs have the best knowledge of collocations with high frequency and associative strength (Ordulj and Cvikić 2017). The most extensive research on collocational acquisition in Croatian as a foreign language (CFL) in heterogeneous groups was done by Ordulj (2017). This research showed that participants with lower proficiency had very poor collocational competence, while participants with higher proficiency showed an equal knowledge of noun collocations in the nominative case and in oblique cases. This paper aims to deepen previous findings and to examine productive knowledge of noun collocations based on their frequency, associative strength, morphological features, and the proficiency level of Polish students of Croatian. Collocations used in this research were collected from essays written by students of Croatian at B1 and B2 CEFR (2005) proficiency levels. The hrWaC corpus was used to count the frequency of collocations, and the associative strength of collocational constituents was assessed by native speakers of Croatian. The respondent sample comprised 27 students of Croatian in Krakow, Poland, who were divided into two proficiency level groups: lower (2nd and 3rd year of studies) and higher (4th and 5th year of studies). The influence of morphological features on collocational knowledge was tested with two fill-in-the-blank tasks containing collocations in the nominative and oblique cases. The analysis of productive tasks showed that morphological features do not influence collocational knowledge at the lower or higher proficiency level. In both cases participants produced the best results in tasks with collocations of high frequency.

Importance. The development of linguistic students’ collocational competence is one of the main goals of foreign language teaching at a university. Corpora is one of the modern digital technologies that can be used to achieve this goal. However, there are a number of problems in the methods of collocational competence development based on corpora, the consideration of which will affect the effectiveness of the implementation of these teaching methods. The purpose of the study is to determine the psychological and pedagogical conditions for the effective collocational competence development based on corpora. Research methods. On the basis of a theoretical analysis of the scientific and methodic literature and systematization of the conceptual approaches of researchers, psychological and pedagogical conditions were identified, with the help of a comparative analysis and synthesis of empirical data, the effectiveness of taking into account psychological and pedagogical conditions for the collocational competence development based on corpora was theoretically substantiated. Results and Discussion. Psychological and pedagogical conditions for collocational competence development based on corpora are identified and substantiated, which must be taken into account when developing a methods for teaching collocations. These conditions include: a) motivation of students to develop collocation competence based on corpora; b) the development of information and communication technologies competence of a foreign language teacher; c) students’ foreign language proficiency at level B1; d) adherence to the identified stages of project activities. Conclusions. The collocational competence development based on corpora should be carried out while following the entire complex of identified psychological and pedagogical conditions. The results obtained can be used to improve the effectiveness of collocation teaching methods based on corpora.

This study investigated first language (L1) influence on the acquisition of second language (L2) collocations using a framework based on Kroll and Stewart (1994) and Jiang (2000), by comparing the performance on a phrase‐acceptability judgment task among native speakers of English, Japanese English as a second language (ESL) users, and Japanese English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. The test materials included both congruent collocations, whose lexical components were similar in L1 and L2, and incongruent collocations, whose lexical components differed in the two languages. EFL learners made more errors with and reacted more slowly to incongruent collocations than congruent collocations. ESL users generally performed better than EFL learners (lower error rate and faster speed), but they still made more errors on incongruent collocations than on congruent collocations. Interestingly, however, the L1 effect was not apparent on the ESL users' reaction time. The results suggested that (a) both L1 congruency and L2 exposure affect the acquisition of L2 collocations with the availability of both maximizing this acquisition; (b) it is difficult to acquire incongruent collocations even with a considerable amount of exposure to L2; and (c) once stored in memory, L2 collocations are processed independently of L1. Possible differences in acquiring congruent and incongruent collocations are discussed.

<p>This review article examines the concept of collocational competence in learning English as a foreign language, considering its theoretical foundations, definitional development, empirical research, and pedagogical implications. Drawing on Firth’s principle that word meaning is shaped through its typical co-occurrence patterns and Halliday’s concept of lexicogrammar, collocational competence is situated within contemporary theories of phraseology. The paper synthesizes findings from corpus-based studies and classroom research, which demonstrate that collocational knowledge plays a crucial role in the development of idiomaticity, fluency, and overall communicative competence across diverse educational contexts. Existing research consistently shows that collocational competence develops more slowly than vocabulary size, and that even advanced learners experience difficulties in the productive use of conventionalized word combinations. Verb–noun collocations, low-frequency and semantically opaque combinations, as well as collocations that are incongruent with learners’ first-language patterns, are particularly problematic. These findings confirm that collocational knowledge does not emerge spontaneously through exposure to language alone but requires targeted and systematic pedagogical intervention. The paper further highlights the importance of explicit, corpus-informed, and strategy-based instruction, which has proven significantly more effective than implicit learning. Successful approaches include working with authentic corpora, developing noticing and memory strategies, and integrating collocations into tasks focused on real-life language use. At the same time, key methodological and conceptual challenges are identified, including inconsistent definitions, a limited number of longitudinal studies, and insufficiently contextualized assessment models. The study concludes by emphasizing the need for integrated curricular frameworks and mixed-method assessment approaches that link collocational competence to communicative outcomes across different proficiency levels.</p>