Abstract
The present study examines productive knowledge of collocations of tertiary-level second-language (L2) learners of English in an attempt to make estimates of the size of their knowledge. Participants involved first-year students at North-West University who sat a collocation test modelled on that developed by Laufer and Nation (1999), with words selected from the 2000-, 3000-, and 5000-word bands (Nation 2006) and the Academic Word List (Coxhead 2000). The achieved scores were analysed in light of Schmitt’s (2003, in Xing and Fulcher 2007) cut-off point for an acquired word-frequency band (80%), as well as Nation’s (1990) suggested threshold of productive knowledge at tertiary level (at least the 3,000 most frequently used words). Results indicate that the participants do not master the 3000-word band and therefore fall slightly short of expectations. Only the 2000-word band is mastered by most of these first-year student participants, with some of them not entirely mastering this band. On the basis of these results, pedagogical consequences are discussed in terms of how to help students reach the minimum threshold of productive knowledge that is needed to cope with the academic challenges at tertiary level.
Highlights
Research interest in vocabulary has risen substantially over the past three decades, with findings showing that vocabulary is an integral component of second-language (L2) or foreign-language (FL) proficiency
The present study has measured the productive knowledge of collocations of first-year students at North-West University
We plan to compare these collocation scores with those of the Test of Academic Literacy Levels (TALL) to investigate whether knowledge of collocations develops in correlation with academic literacy
Summary
Research interest in vocabulary has risen substantially over the past three decades, with findings showing that vocabulary is an integral component of second-language (L2) or foreign-language (FL) proficiency (cf. Daller, Milton and Treffers-Daller 2007, Meara 2002, Zareva, Schwanenflugel and Nikolova 2005). L2 learners’ familiarity with collocations has been investigated on both the receptive level (Eyckmans 2009, Gyllstad 2007, 2009, Keshavarz and Salimi 2007) and the productive level (Boers et al 2006, Bonk 2001, Eyckmans, Boers and Demecheleer 2004, Gitsaki 1999, Nizonkiza 2012b) by means of collocation tests It is still unclear which is the best way to test collocations, since they are complex in nature and the studies that have been conducted on them seem to be entirely descriptive (Schmitt 1998).
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