Original scientific paper
Noun Collocations at the Receptive Level in Croatian as a Foreign Language
Adriana Ordulj
Abstract
The development of collocational competence in second/foreign language is a long and
complex process influenced by many factors. The most extensive research has been done
on collocations in English as a Second Language (ESL). Receptive knowledge is usually
examined with multiple-choice tasks and results regularly point to better development of
receptive over productive knowledge (Koya, 2003; Brashi, 2006; Jaén, 2007; Begagić, 2014).
The main goal of this research is to examine answer types in receptive knowledge tasks on
noun collocations, considering their frequency and subjects’ Croatian as Second Language
(CLS) proficiency level. This research, which focused on basic adjective + noun collocations,
was conducted on 70 CLS speakers of B1 and B2 proficiency level. Before compiling
the instrument, corpus analysis was performed in the hrWaC 2.1 corpus, which was also
used to count the frequency of collocations. In order to examine the receptive knowledge of
collocations in CSL, subjects completed a multiple choice task that, apart from the correct
answer, included three distractors that comprised false pairs from subjects’ first languages
(English, Polish, Spanish, and German) and Croatian adjectives of similar formation and
semantics. Results show that subjects of B2 proficiency level have better receptive knowledge
of more frequent noun collocations (80%) than subjects of B1 proficiency level. Answer type
analysis shows that subjects of B1 proficiency level chose distractors similar in formation
more often, whereas an almost equal percentage of false pairs was chosen by both CSL
proficiency levels, but only for collocations of lower frequency.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
220155
URI
Publication date:
1.12.2018.
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