The Investigation of Collocational Errors in University Students' Writing Majoring in English

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the collocational errors in EFL college learners' writing. A total of 68 sophomores University students in Hamadan city participated in this study. Thirty-eight assignments and thirty-eight in-class practice were collected and analyzed for collocational errors. The unacceptable grammatical and lexical collocational errors were identified based on the modified version originally proposed by Benson, et al. (1986) and Chen (2002). The BBI Dictionary of English Word Combinations, the British National Corpus, were employed to analyze the participants' collocational errors and to provide suggestions for correction. Moreover, a questionnaire was administered to explore the participants' perceptions of difficulty in collocations. The results of the questionnaire showed that the participants' perceptions of collocational types were different from the collocational error types the participants made in their writing samples. Ignorance of rule restrictions was the major source of collocational errors. EFL students make collocational errors in their writing because of the interference of their mother tongue, lack of the collocational concept, the interlingual or intra lingual transfer, paraphrase and their shortage of their collocational knowledge. These can be the possible reasons for explaining why EFL students frequently make unacceptable collocations in their writing.