Abstract
Collocational studies have recently attracted a great deal of interest. To date, hardly any study has tackled Arab EFL learners' competency in the use of verb–adverb collocations. This study explores the way advanced Arab EFL learners handle verb–adverb collocations using two learner's dictionaries. The subjects (N = 82) were required to look up 22 verbs, 12 frequent and 10 infrequent, and guess three adverb collocates of each verb. The results showed that even advanced EFL learners had considerable difficulty in providing extra adverb collocates of both frequent and infrequent verbs. Dictionary use was effective; the subjects performed significantly better especially with infrequent verbs. Many reasons were posited for this finding, foremost of which included the subjects' deficiency in collocational skills and the lack of sufficient clues in the definitions to facilitate dictionary users' correct use of collocations. Whereas knowledge of the meaning of the stimuli was found to be a significant contributing factor to the subjects' overall collocational competence, basic prior training in dictionary usage did not show any positive impact on their overall performance.
Highlights
Collocations are crucially important to language competency and fluency (Lewis 2000 and Wray 2002)
Contrasting findings may be found in the aforementioned works, there appears to be a consensus among researchers that the correct acquisition and use of collocations has proved to be highly challenging for most EFL learners regardless of their linguistic background
The primary aim of the present study is to assess the difficulties encountered by Arab EFL learners' in using electronic dictionaries for extracting and using verb–adverb collocational information correctly
Summary
Collocations are crucially important to language competency and fluency (Lewis 2000 and Wray 2002). Hausmann (cited in Busse 1995: 125) has rightly claimed that "learning a language is learning collocations". This notion has been echoed by compilers of the Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English (OCD) who point out that no piece of natural spoken or written English is totally free of collocations (2009: v). Contrasting findings may be found in the aforementioned works, there appears to be a consensus among researchers that the correct acquisition and use of collocations has proved to be highly challenging for most EFL learners regardless of their linguistic background (see Laufer 2011 and Sun and Wang 2003)
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