Putting in the Last Piece: A Comprehensive Profiling of Learners' Collocational Competence

Abstract

This study aims to provide a comprehensive profile of collocational competence, a key component of one's overall linguistic competence. For the maximum of ecological validity, we elicited naturalistic oral/written production data from 84 Chinese intermediate EFL learners and performed a 2×2 fashion of analysis on their performance in each of the six aspects, namely, collocation accuracy rate, collocation associative strength, collocation density, collocation diversity, and two relevant lexical levels. The findings not only show learners' various inadequacies compared to native speakers, but also reveal the substantial discrepancies between their implicit and explicit collocational knowledge. Our result largely bears out Wray's Dual Model, and some pedagogical implications are suggested accordingly, including a learning mode shift from bottom-up to top-down to remedy the situation.