Revisiting Vocabulary Knowledge: A Focus on Colligation

This paper examined Korean EFL students' knowledge of colligation - the grammar of words - of high-frequency vocabulary. Forty-six university students took a vocabulary quiz which asked them to translate Korean sentences into English by using 14 target words. The results of the quiz revealed that the students had a rather limited understanding of the grammar of the target words. Twenty-seven students were then interviewed to identify what made it difficult for them to use the words correctly in terms of colligation. Interviews showed that students have not made the most of their dictionary, thereby paying little attention to the grammar information the dictionary has to offer. It also turns out that their vocabulary learning usually occurs while reading, in which they rarely feel the need to know words comprehensively. The findings of this study suggest that students need to be helped to understand the importance of the ways in which words function at the grammatical level.