L2 Collocational Knowledge by Congruency and Writing Proficiency of EFL University Learners

While less research has been conducted on the relationship between L2 collocational knowledge and L2 writing proficiency, the purpose of the present study was to examine the relationship between L2 learners' collocational knowledge and L2 writing ability. A receptive collocation test, counterbalanced for incongruent and congruent collocations, and adjective-noun (AN) and verb-noun (VN) collocations, was developed by matching normalized frequencies of the collocation items from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). When 68 university freshmen learners were tested for collocational knowledge and writing proficiency, they were found to have more problems with the incongruent collocations, but congruent AN collocations resulted in higher error rates than the incongruent AN collocations at a significant level. As in previous studies, the learners were found to experience more difficulty in acquiring incongruent collocations, but more noticeably, knowledge of synonymous collocates in the AN collocations was found to be another source of difficulty. With hierarchical multiple regression, the study also indicated collocational knowledge to be the primary significant contributor of L2 writing proficiency. The study underscores the importance of teaching collocations to help learners retrieve them more automatically in the process of L2 writing.