Factors influencing Turkish EFL learners' collocation production

This study aims to detect the factors influencing Turkish learners' production of English collocations. Working specifically on verb + object noun combinations, the effect of three important factors were analyzed: restriction on the combinability of words, semantic transparency and L1 transfer. 76 writing exam papers by 11th graders at a public school were collected and built into a learner corpus. The corpus was tagged with Stanford English Tagger (3.2.0), and verb + noun collocations were automatically extracted using the AntConc 3.2.4w concordancer. Manually analyzing the data, a total of 111 collocations were listed, and 30 of them were marked as incorrect-use. The study found that students had slightly poorer performance in collocations with more restricted and less transparent constituents. In addition, L1 proved to have a minimum effect on incorrect collocation production. Learners seem unable to recognize that collocations are not free combinations but fixed phrases which need to be stored as single items.