The Effect of Lexical Collocation Awareness-Raising on EFL Students’ Oral Proficiency Case study: First Year LMD Students, Department of English, University of Guelma
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Date
2012
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Abstract
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.