University Students Collocational Knowledge about Prepositions with Nouns in the EFL Context

This paper reports on a case study that investigated Korean EFL university students knowledge about preposition collocations (PCs) and articulates effective methods for improving collocational knowledge for productive skills. Twenty university participants took a 75-item PCs test including three types of collocations in 2015: preposition + noun (PN), noun + preposition (NP), and preposition collocations in text (PCT). Firstly, descriptive statistics, and two-paired sample t-tests were conducted to analyze the data from the three PC subtests and questionnaires. The results indicate the general perceptions toward collocations are minimal. Students perceived the PC approach to be effective for enhancing their productive skills. Secondly, three types of PCs were statistically significant between pre- and post-test performance. Also students outperformed PN over NP, and PCT with the latter being the lowest. Students perceived NP collocations to be more complicated than PN collocations. L1 interference played a crucial role in students erroneous responses. Especially the percentage of errors in PCT was the highest. Overall students found it extremely difficult to choose the right preposition to collocate with nouns in spite of knowing the meaning of isolated nouns. Some effective methods for collocational knowledge were presented to help students improve their productive skills.