Abstract
Collocational competence is of critical importance to EFL learners’ language proficiency. Due to limited research on L1 influence on L2 learners’ development of receptive and productive knowledge of adjective + noun collocations, especially in the context of Vietnam, this study is an attempt to address these gaps by investigating whether Vietnamese learners could recognize and use congruent English adjective + noun collocations more accurately than incongruent ones. Data were collected from 72 English-major undergraduates in a Vietnamese university who completed three collocational tests: the Receptive Knowledge Test, the Productive Knowledge Test, and the paragraph-writing test. Results showed that, in contrast to language transfer theory, congruent collocations posed considerably more problems for the students in identifying the well-formed lexical combinations and using them accurately in writing. These findings highlight the importance of explicitly teaching congruent and incongruent collocations in EFL classrooms.
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