Developing Collocational Competence in EFL Classes Evidence of Nativeness in Algerian Intermediate Learners’Corpus

Abstract

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.