Title:
AN ANALYSIS OF THE FREQUENCY OF ACCEPTABLE AND UNACCEPTABLE COLLOCATIONS AMONG IRANIAN EFL LEARNERS

Authors:
Seyed Ramin Khorshid and Akbar Rahimi Alishah

Abstract:
Although it is broadly recognized that collocations are vital features of second language acquisition, some of previous studies have reported Iranian EFL learners like other EFL students having difficulties to learn and use the English language collocations. This study is carried out to analyze the frequency of acceptable and unacceptable collocations among Iranian EFL learners. 107 students majoring in English and literature in Qazvin, Iran were selected as participants for this study. Their age ranged from 19 to 25 years both male and female, selected through convenience sampling. In this study, a questionnaire that involves 30 multiple-choice items, which was made up according to Benson’s collocational approach (lexical and grammatical collocation), was used. All the collocations were selected from Oxford collocation dictionary. The data was analyzed by SPSS. The results showed that the most unacceptable lexical collocations are produced by Iranian EFL learners is in Noun + Verb 73.6% and the most acceptable lexical collocations which they can produce is in Verb + Noun 84.9%. In addition, the most unacceptable grammatical collocations used is in Noun + preposition 56.6% and the most acceptable grammatical collocations which they used is in Noun + To-Infinitive 79.6%. The result of the study suggest that learners are most likely to face difficulties producing acceptable collocations comprising of Noun + To-Infinitive and Verb + Noun respectively.

Keywords:
collocation, lexical collocation, grammatical collocation, unacceptable/acceptable collocation

DOI:
http://dx.doi.org/10.37500/IJESSR.2021.4308