Collocational Errors in Iranian EFL Learners’ Writing

Collocations have a significant role in EFL teaching and learning as they develop the EFL learners’ proficiency with lexis. Erroneous use of collocations has brought a controversy over the effect of cross-linguistic influence (i.e. L1 transfer) and that of insufficient collocation knowledge of English as a foreign language. This study focuses on collocational errors in writing among elementary and intermediate EFL Iranian learners. The main purposes of this study are: 1) to describe and categorize the collocations used by the EFL learners in writing 2) to explain and contrast the occurrence of the major types of collocational errors committed by the EFL learners based on their level of proficiency 3) to identify the area of difficulty including L1 transfer or insufficient collocation knowledge encountered by the EFL learners utilizing Contrastive Analysis and Error Analysis. The corpus of the study was topic-free writings written by 66 EFL learners considering their level of proficiency. For analyzing the data Ellis’s model (1997), through which identification and interpretation of the classified errors was done based on grammatical features, was utilized. In order to classify the data, eight frequent collocation patterns consisting prep+ N, V+ N, Adj+ N, Adv+ Adj, Adj/V+ prep, V+ Adj and N+ prep were used. As a qualitative study, descriptive analysis of the data contributed to describing the number of collocations used by the EFL learners, collocational errors and contrasting the error types in the texts. The findings of the study indicated that majority of collocational errors were due to the participants’ L1 transfer (122 errors out of 148 of the collocation errors were for L1 transfer). Pedagogically, syllabus designers and curriculum developers can benefit from the findings of this study to identify and predict the sources of collocational errors and plan appropriate strategies and materials for promoting EFL learners’ language competency.