Abstract:
The practical contribution of this research work is an investigation of the
collocational competence of second year EFL undergraduate students at Université
des Frères Mentouri (Constantine). The study focuses on lexical collocations, namely,
VERB+NOUN. It aims at measuring the collocational competence of learners of
English as a Foreign Language, pinning down the underlying causes of errors, and
making some recommendations to remedy the situation by identifying the main areas
of difficulty. It is hypothesised that Second year EFL undergraduate students at
Université des Frères Mentouri (Constantine 1) would have a low level of mastery in
respect to the usage and comprehension of V+N collocations. It is also hypothesised
that the aforementioned learners would not be adequately aware of the importance of
using collocations. In addition, the study hypothesises that the essays of second year
EFL undergraduate students at Université des Frères Mentouri (Constantine 1) would
fail to use Verb + Noun collocations appropriately. The sample is sixty six EFL
students.The teachers will be able to design appropriate material to raise their
learners‟ awareness of the concept of collocation, and, therefore, improve their level.
The British National Corpus, collocation checker, and Oxford Online Collocation
Dictionary are the tools chosen to measure Algerian learners‟ collocational
competence. The findings confirm the hypotheses emphasising Algerian EFL
learners‟ unawareness of the importance of collocations. In addition, the findings
show that the influence of the mother tongue, along with some other factors
(approximation and synonymy), are the primary causes of errors.
