An error analysis of collocations in teaching English as a foreign language

The aim of this study is to discover the common mistakes made in grammatical collocations of English by foreign language learners whose mother tongue is Turkish. The study was conducted at Gazi University in Ankara, Turkey with ELT (English Language Teaching) preparatory class students in 2009-2010 academic year. The mistakes made in grammatical collocations of English were identified in the students' paragraphs and speaking performance. Next, depending on the mistakes, a gap-fill exercise was devised and given to the same participants to determine the common mistakes made by the majority of the group. Later, an error analysis of these common mistakes was conducted in terms of negative transfer from the mother tongue to the target language and generalization within the target language. The results have displayed that the participants make mistakes even in grammatical collocations which have high frequency in the target language and both negative transfer and generalization have a similar effect on the performance of the participants. In 2022-2023 academic year, the same gap-fill exercise, which is the third data collection tool in the study, was given to the ELT preparatory class students of the same university out of the researcher's curiosity. It has been discovered that almost the same types of mistakes are made even today. Consequently, it is suggested that foreign language learners should be taught target words in chunks; in other words, foreign language teachers should teach new words with the structure those words require to raise awareness in collocations and to enable their students to become more autonomous learners who are in the habit of using dictionaries and the corpus of the target language more and more. Key Words: collocations, grammatical collocations, error analysis, negative transfer, generalization