Faculté des Lettres et des Langues

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Browsing Faculté des Lettres et des Langues by Author "Biskri, Yamina"

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    The Effect of Lexical Collocation Awareness-Raising on EFL Students’ Oral Proficiency Case study: First Year LMD Students, Department of English, University of Guelma
    (2012) Biskri, Yamina
    The present research aims at investigating the use of English lexical collocations and their relation to oral proficiency of first year EFL students. Since collocational competence is an essential requirement for the overall mastery of English, students should be trained to notice which words co-occur together in order to speak a foreign language the way its native speakers do. Thus, we hypothesize that lexical collocation awareness-raising makes first year students of English sound natural and proficient. Data for the study were collected from 50 first year students at the department of English, university of Guelma. This empirical study was carried out during the academic year 2010 -2011. The study sample was composed of two groups: an experimental group which was made aware of lexical collocations and a control group which was not trained at all .Firstly, two questionnaires were administered to both students and teachers. The results obtained reveal that most students as well as most teachers were not familiar with the concept of collocations. In addition, students mismatched English words and their miscollocations were caused by different factors, mainly lack of collocational knowledge and mother tongue interference. To confirm that students had limited knowledge of lexical collocations, we relied on a collocation test. Then, we administered a pre-oral test and a post oral test .The former intended to determine students’ use of lexical collocations , whereas the latter aimed at finding out the impact of collocation awareness-raising implemented during treatment on the subjects’ ability to speak proficiently. To determine the nature of relationship between lexical collocation use and oral proficiency, the correlation coefficient (r) is calculated. It reveals a significant positive correlation between the study variables. In addition, the results obtained in the pretest and post test were analyzed and compared. The latter showed an improvement in oral proficiency and collocational knowledge in favour of the experimental group participants. Conclusions drawn from this work led to submit suggestions to help EFL teachers strengthen the collocational knowledge of their students, especially providing diverse collocation awareness-raising activities and strategies to improve students’ oral proficiency.