The present study analysed 2344 lexical collocations manually extracted from spontaneous L2 English speech produced by 60 Chinese learners of English. A clear pattern of improvement in their oral collocation usage was observed across proficiency levels. The implications of the findings for language assessment and learning will be discussed.
Collocation, known as words that commonly co-occur, is a prominent category of formulaic language. There has been growing consensus among second language acquisition (SLA) and language testing researchers that collocation use is essential to effective verbal communication and a strong indicator of L2 proficiency and pragmatic competence (Schmitt, 2010; Voss, 2012; Wray, 2002). A lexical collocation concerns the co-occurrence of two or more content words that contribute almost equally to its whole meaning. Misuse of lexical collocations or lexical deviation, according to many linguists, is more likely to obscure meaning than structural deviation (Barnbrook, 2007; Bolinger, 1976; Sinclair, 1991). Psycholinguistic research has also suggested that lexical deviation in L2 speech may cause more processing difficulty than structural deviation for native-speaker listeners (Millar, 2011). The present study analyzed 2344 lexical collocations extracted from spontaneous L2 English speech produced by sixty Chinese learners of English at four proficiency levels. The speech was collected in two distinctive contexts of language use: 1) conversing with an interlocutor on daily topics and 2) giving a mini-lecture on an academic topic. The extracted collocations were double-coded for semantic accuracy, grammatical accuracy, transparency, restrictedness, and fluency. It was found that the learners used verb-noun (44%), adjective-noun (25%), and noun-noun collocations most frequently. Their overall collocational performance tended to be stronger in the mini-lecture than in the conversation. Most importantly, a clear pattern of improvement in collocational performance was observed across the four proficiency levels. The implications of the findings for language assessment and learning will be discussed.
