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Contextualizing EFL Learners’ Proficiency in Using English Collocations

Paper · 2023 · Rohdearni Wati Sipayung and Erikson Saragih

Summary

The paper looks at how well Indonesian university students of English handle collocations, the conventional word pairings that grammar rules alone cannot predict. It also asks which kinds of collocations give them the most trouble. The authors use Howarth's classification, which places word combinations on a continuum from fully compositional to fully opaque: free combinations, restricted collocations, figurative idioms and pure idioms. Fifty English-education students in Medan took a self-built gap-filling test. Each of its 40 items embeds a target collocation in a short context of two or three sentences, and students supply the missing word. Answers were analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Difficulty follows the continuum:

  • Pure idioms were the hardest.
  • Free combinations were the easiest.
  • Restricted collocations and figurative idioms fell roughly level in between.

Students often answered inconsistently, and the authors attribute many errors to unhelpful transfer from Indonesian. The study matters because learners whose first language is typologically distant from English are underrepresented in collocation research. Its practical message is that frequent real use of collocations is the main path to mastering them.

Key points

  • Participants: 50 English-education students (19 male, 31 female, aged 20–23) from a university in Medan, each with at least six years of prior English schooling.
  • Instrument: a self-developed Simple Completion Test (SCT) of 40 free-response items, 10 per Howarth category.
    • The items centre on food and animal themes and are mostly adapted from a Longman collection of American idioms.
    • They are grouped into four sections by the word class of the gap: verbs (A), verb/adjective combinations (B), adjectives (C) and nouns (D).
  • Administration: in a regular classroom, with instructions given in Indonesian and guessing encouraged. Completion took about 35 minutes.
  • Difficulty ranking: pure idioms were hardest, free combinations easiest, and restricted collocations and figurative idioms were similar.
  • Error sources:
    • Errors are attributed mainly to L1 transfer.
    • Related work cited in the paper gives "produce money" in place of "make money" as an example of interference.
    • The same work notes that polysemous high-frequency verbs (take, go, make) cause frequent errors.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Howarth's four-way continuum sorts word combinations by how far their meaning follows from their parts, which turns a vague "idiom vs. not" question into a graded label.
  • I2. A test can be built from short multi-sentence contexts, each with a single gap and an equal number of items per category, so that failure rates can be read off per category.
  • I3. Errors such as substituting a near-synonym for the conventional verb ("produce" for "make" money) show that restricted collocations are lexical choices, not semantic ones.
  • I4. The observation that highly polysemous everyday verbs combine with nouns in constrained ways (take a rest, catch a cold, make a call) suggests that the noun, not the verb, carries the meaning.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): Tag multiword spans with the four classes so that frame building composes free combinations literally, treats restricted collocations as fixed predicates, and replaces pure idioms with a looked-up meaning.
  • I2 (learn): Build a stratified collocation probe set of the same shape to show whether the parser, frames and generation fail mainly on opaque idioms rather than on transparent combinations.
  • I3 (back): During generation from the meaning graph, choose light verbs and collocates from a collocation table keyed on the noun, rather than picking any synonym of the abstract predicate.
  • I4 (frames): Treat such light-verb constructions as frames headed by the noun ("rest", "cold", "call"), so that roles come from the event noun rather than a vague VerbNet sense of take or make.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

Also on the byline: Universitas Sumatera Utara · Universitas Simalungun.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksPsychology · 1,552 worksDevelopmental and Educational Psychology · 499 works

🧭 Topics 3Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 worksIdioms & multiword expressions · 217 worksGrammatical error correction & learner language · 156 works

Cite

Cite as Rohdearni Wati Sipayung and Erikson Saragih. 2023. Contextualizing EFL Learners’ Proficiency in Using English Collocations. JEELS (Journal of English Education and Linguistics Studies) 10.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.30762/jeels.v10i1.700

@article{sipayung2023contextualizing,
  title = {{Contextualizing EFL Learners’ Proficiency in Using English Collocations}},
  author = {Rohdearni Wati Sipayung and Erikson Saragih},
  journal = {JEELS (Journal of English Education and Linguistics Studies) 10},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.30762/jeels.v10i1.700},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.30762/jeels.v10i1.700}
}

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