Factors affecting receptive and productive knowledge of collocations of tertiary level learners of English in Turkey

Being an essential component of vocabulary knowledge and contributing to native-like fluency, collocational knowledge deserves to be explored. This study explores the factors that affect receptive and productive collocational knowledge of tertiary level EFL learners in Turkey. For gathering data, two vocabulary knowledge tests (i.e., receptive and productive) and two collocational knowledge tests (i.e., receptive and productive) are employed. In addition, a questionnaire about language exposure and use activities is utilized. First, the correlations between single-word knowledge and collocational knowledge, at both receptive and productive levels are investigated. Second, the effects of five factors (congruency with Turkish, collocational frequency, node word frequency, type of collocation and mutual information scores) on collocational knowledge are examined. Third, the effects of participants' personal language exposure/use and their individual differences (age, gender and year of formal English instruction) on collocational knowledge are inspected. The findings show that vocabulary and collocational knowledge are correlated at both knowledge levels. The participants tend to have higher knowledge of both single-words and collocations at the first 1,000 level than the second and third 1,000 levels. Among the five factors that affect collocational knowledge, congruency with L1 is found to be the best predictor of collocational knowledge. The investigation of questionnaire results suggests that learners tend to have higher knowledge of collocations when they are exposed to more amounts of language input. Overall, the findings suggest that collocational knowledge is affected by and correlated with different factors and the awareness of these factors offers some implications and suggestions.