| Author(s) | Riyad F. Hussein |
| Affiliation | Associate Professor, College of Education, Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan |
| Title | Collocations Revisited |
| Source | Journal of King Saud University. Languages & Translation. Volume 10, No 1. (1998/1418) |
| Abstract | Abstract. The present study is aimed at investigating students' ability to collocate English words correctly and finding out the strategies that they tend to use (transfer, synonymy, avoidance) when they are unfamiliar with the correct collocation. For this purpose, fifty junior and senior students majoring in English took part in this study. They were given a 40.item test and were required to fill in the blank in each item by choosing the correct word which collocated with the preceding or following constituent. The findings have shown that students are incompetent in their production of English collocations. Of the total number of collocations, only 39 % were rendered correctly. With regard to the percentages of various strategies, negative transfer ranked first 30%, followed by synonymy 22.2% and avoidance 8.8% respectively. |
