| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立高雄第一科技大學 === 應用英語所 === 93 === In past decades, researchers have begun to value the importance of English collocations, and conduct studies on exploring learners' collocational knowledge. This study investigated students' knowledge of verb-noun collocations, exploring whether the knowledge of collocations of technological university students majoring in English increases with their academic years, examining the association between relative frequency of collocations and students' production of collocations, and categorizing collocational errors made by students.
The subjects were 178 English majors at the four academic years (freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior) at National Kaohsiung First University of Science and Technology in southern Taiwan. Their knowledge of collocations was measured by a researcher-designed fill-in-the-blank test that contained fifty items with five additional items for practice. Each item included a verb-noun collocation with the verb missing that subjects had to supply. Most items had 2-5 sentence contexts to constrain appropriate responses. The major findings are present as following.
1.The subjects' results of the test showed that a difference exists in mean scores among the four academic years, which means that collocational knowledge of the subjects increases with their academic years. Also, significant differences were found between seniors when compared to each of the other years.
2.As for the association between relative frequency of collocations and students' production of collocations, the results of the independent samples t-test showed that relative frequency of collocations in use as determined by the search engine Google.com was not a significant factor that influenced the subjects' knowledge of collocations.
3.The errors made by the subjects were categorized into the four types of collocational idiosyncrasy proposed by Lombard (1997): lexical transfer, phonological similarity, grammatical irregularity and semantic choice. An additional category was added for errors that could not be classified according to this system. The closely related lexical transfer and semantic choice accounted for most of errors, over 74%. The smallest proportions were phonological similarity and grammatical irregularity. The small size of the last categories were most likely because the test allowed only single verbs to be given as answers, so many grammatical irregularities were eliminated by this.
Although we see students' collocational knowledge increases with their academic years, their average scores showed that their knowledge of collocations was deficient as shown by the combined average of all years of 58.08%, which is less than the 60% normally accepted as a passing score in the Taiwan educational system. Therefore, it is suggested that teachers should incorporate more explicit information about collocations in their instruction. What is more important is that students need to become aware of collocations and learn collocations even outside of the classroom.
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