Should we teach EFL students collocations?

Abstract

German advanced EFL students' productive knowledge of English collocations consisting of a verb and a noun were investigated in a translation task and a cloze task. In the translation task, it was found that, although collocates made up less than a quarter of the total number of lexical words, more than half of the unacceptably translated lexical words were collocates. Thus, for advanced students collocations present a major problem in the production of correct English. Furthermore, since subjects did not express the collocational phrases significantly better in the translation task, where it was possible to paraphrase, than in the cloze task, we concluded that one cannot easily paraphrase one's way around collocations in order to avoid the problem which they present. Finally, it was found that some collocations in the translation task were successfully paraphrased by many students while others were rarely successfully paraphrased. It was concluded that EFL teaching should concentrate on those collocations which cannot readily be paraphrased.