A Corpus-based Study of Korean University Students Competence of English Lexical Collocation

The purpose of this study is to investigate Korean university students capability of English lexical collocation. In order to explore Korean students collocational competence, the following research questions were raised: (1) How well do Korean university students understand English lexical collocation: verb+noun type and use it? (2) Is there any correlation between their collocational competence and TOEIC scores? (3) Is there any correlation between their collocational knowledge based on the collocation test and t-scores of the verbs: seek, throw, treat, take? The subjects were a total of 35 university students. Four English verbs: seek, throw, treat, and take were selected and tested. The results were as follows. First, the average score was relatively low as 0.3738. The subjects general English competence correlated significantly with their collocation knowledge. Second, the average scores of each verb were in the order of throw (0.5524), take (0.4286), treat (0.3714), and seek (0.1425). Third, the scores on questions concerned with each verb were considerably different, depending on nouns which the verb combines with. Nevertheless, the subjects widely understood the collocation use of take, compared with other verb use. Fourth, t-scores of corpus regarding each verb didn t correlate with the scores of each question. Finally, the subjects did not understand correctly the differences of use among verb synonyms. From the above results, it can be said that Korean university students ability of English collocation is very limited. This is probably due to their method of studying vocabulary, which is just memorizing vocabulary without understanding their actual use in authentic context. Thus, more systematic vocabulary methodology and related textbooks should be developed to improve the collocation ability of EFL learners.