engleski

Comparing collocational competence of selected first-year university students in Croatia

The awareness of the importance of the acquisition of lexical collocations in learning a foreign language has been growing. To develop collocational competence, non-native speakers must learn not only the meaning(s) of a word but also its collocational span. The present study examines productive and receptive knowledge of collocations of first-year university students in an attempt to determine their entry collocational competence. The participants in the study were first-year students at the Faculty of Economics and the University Department of Health Studies at the University of Split learning English as a foreign language. The questionnaire administered to the participants consisted of two parts: the first part aimed at gathering general participant data and the second was a collocational competence test. The test consisted of four groups of tasks: multiple choice, gap-fill, translation from Croatian into English, and translation from English into Croatian. Each task had five questions, which makes a total of 20 questions. The multiple- choice task tested the receptive collocational competence. The gap-fill and translation from Croatian into English tasks tested productive collocational competence. The last group of questions, i.e. English to Croatian translation, tested both productive and receptive knowledge since the participants had to recognise the meaning of the collocation in English (L2) and offer its translation into Croatian (L1). Based on the research results, conclusions on first-year university students’ collocational competence were drawn. The participants achieved better results at the receptive level than at the productive level, which is in line with the findings of other studies proving that the receptive collocational competence is higher that the productive collocational competence, and that the problem of collocations is mainly related to delivering the correct collocation. The overall results indicate limited collocational competence which, on the one hand can be due to the way English is being taught at schools and, on the other, due to interference from their mother tongue.

collocation ; collocational competence ; receptive and productive knowledge

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