An Investigation of Grammatical Collocations Among English Majors at Mu’tah University
- Details
- Category: English Language and Literature
- Published: Thursday, 10 May 2012 03:00
- Written by Bahjat Al-Halalmeh
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Abstract
An Investigation of Grammatical Collocations Among English Majors at Mu’tah University
Bahjat Al-Halalmeh
Mu’tah University, 2011
This study aims at investigating grammatical collocations with respect to:
1- familiarity of English majors at Mu’tah University with grammatical collocations and the sources of the problems of their use.
2- the most problematic categories of grammatical collocations suggested by Benson, M., Benson, E. & Ilson, R. (1997).
3- the differences between the students’ productive and receptive knowledge of grammatical collocations.
The sample of the study consisted of 50 Jordanian English majors from the fourth year level at Mu’tah University.
The data were collected through the use of two tasks: a fill-in- the blank test and a multiple choice test.
The results of the study are:
firstly, students majoring in English at Mu’tah University were not adequately familiar with grammatical collocations.
The participants attributed their poor knowledge of grammatical collocations to the lack of courses in the Department of English language at Mu’tah University about grammatical collocations.
Secondly, The most problematic grammatical categories were noun + that clause and adjective + that clause.
Thirdly, results showed that the participants’ competence of grammatical collocations was better than their performance.
In light of these results, the study suggested a number of pedagogical implications.
Courses that have collocations should be provided to students majoring in English at Mu’tah University.