An investigation of advanced Iraqi learners' recognition of some English collocations

Abstract EN

This paper presents an investigation of advanced Iraqi learners' (hence forth AILs) recognition of some English collocations and the collocational errors they made as well as the degree of difficulty they have faced while conducting the test.

The subjects were 60 third year students at the Department of Translation at the University of Basra, College of Arts.

The research instrument was a self-designed Simple Completion Test that measured the subjects‟ recognition of two types of lexical collocations: free combinations, restricted collocations according to Howarth‟s (1998b) categorization.

It is hypothesized that the degree of difficulty for AILs is subject to an items‟ position in the collocational continuum, starting with free combination as the easiest type and restricted collocations as the most difficult ones.

Hence, the results indicated that, restricted collocations were challenging for the participants than free combinations and this is due to the subjects‟ insufficient knowledge of English collocations.

It is concluded that the errors made by AILs in recognizing the two types of collocations can be attributed to negative L1 transfer.