A Study on the Collocation Ability of Korean High School Students and Teaching Strategies

The study focuses on collocation capability of Korean high school students and teaching strategies. It particularly attends to the following three issues: 1) To investigate lexical collocation competence of Korean high school students: adjective+noun, verb+noun, and adverb+adjective types. 2) To find out in what type of lexical collocation each proficiency group has more difficulty. 3) To suggest possible strategies to promote the collocation ability of EFL learners. The study first finds out that the collocation ability of Korean high school students was very low. It then shows that the most problematic lexical collocation type was adverb+adjective type whereas the least problematic one was verb+noun type. The study also reveals that most high school teachers participating in the survey have not implemented collocations in class even though they have recognized its importance. Rather, their major vocabulary teaching methods have been simply using word lists in the textbook. On the basis of the results finding from this study, the present study makes some suggestions in terms of collocation teaching strategies. The suggestions include making a good use of corpora and collocation dictionary, comparing-contrasting-explaining differences between similar pairs of collocation, and examining the motivations of collocations in comparison or contrast with their counterparts in learners’ L1.