The productive knowledge of the use of collocations of Maltese learners of English

Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyse collocational competence of Maltese learners of English. It is widely acknowledged that collocations play an important role in the field of Second Language Acquisition. According to Kjellmer for a language to be mastered ‘collocations are essential, indispensible elements […] with which our utterances are very largely made” (Kjellmer, 1987: 140). A number of studies report learners’ lack of collocational competence and difficulties they encounter in learning and using collocations. This is further backed up by McCarthy who noted that “even very advanced learners often make inappropriate or unacceptable collocations” (McCarthy, 1990: 13). Over the years, studies on second language learners’ knowledge and acquisition of collocations have increased, with greater integration of learner corpus (e.g Durrant & Schmidt, 2010; Yamashita & Jiang, 2010; Webb & Kagimoto, 2011 and Wolter & Gyllstad, 2011, 2013). This study was designed to analyse the learners’ ability to produce collocations with the high-frequency verbs have, make and do. It will also look at lexical and grammatical collocations. Lexical collocations consist of merely content words such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and with an inclusion of prepositions, infinitives, or clauses. On the other hand, grammatical collocations comprise of the main word, such as a noun, an adjective, or a verb plus a preposition. The study will explore the productive knowledge of the use of collocations by the Maltese learners of English and indentify problems learners have with the four of collocations: verb + noun, verb + preposition, verb + preposition + noun and verb + noun + preposition. The focus of the study is not on the frequency of the above mentioned collocation combinations used in the written examination scripts of the Maltese learners, but rather on the correct and incorrect use of these collocations in the written texts. The Corpus of Learner English (CLEM v2.0) was used in this study. This contains 2,238 texts and 933,063 words in total. It also consists of written data collected from national examination scripts. The latter were used to select the language essay component. The study is based on the use of collocations in written scripts, and written data from CLEM was used for this purpose. The written data found in CLEM consists of Secondary Education Certificate (SEC), Intermediate Matriculation (IM) and Advanced Matriculation (AM) English examination scripts. The results of the analysis revealed that some Maltese learners of English have limited knowledge of different types of collocations. The findings also revealed that they have more difficulties with the verb + noun collocations. The candidates performed far better on the verb + noun + preposition and verb + preposition + noun collocations. The study concludes with pedagogical implications, limitations and suggestions for future research.