Successful Korean EFL Writers’ Collocational Strategy Use

The present study was conducted using semi-structured interviews to examine how successful Korean EFL writers have developed their collocational competence which previous research identified as promoting a better quality of writing. Four advanced level EFL students, enrolled in universities or graduate schools, participated in the study. The findings of the study show that they had persistently viewed memorization as the most effective collocational strategy with differences in the extent of use of memorization depending on the school levels they had been at. During middle school years, they memorized collocations because of teachers’ demands and their own motivation. While performing writing tasks during high school, they switched to other strategies which they considered temporary substitutes for memorization and used to compensate for the lack of memorized collocations. In universities, their awareness of the importance of collocations for producing good English writing prompted them to use substrategies under the memorization strategy: collection of collocations for memorization and search for their information in dictionaries, recording in notebooks of collocations and the sentences they were found in, use of Korean equivalents as cues for retrieving English collocations, and repeated retrieval of collocations. As a pedagogical implication, the study suggests that the advantages of memorizationstrategy should be discussed to help develop intermediate level EFL learners’ collocational competence.