Titre
English lexical collocations: a challenge for Malian EFL learners
Domaine
Langues
Auteur.e.s
Sekou SISSOKO
.
Résumé
The teaching of English as a foreign language (TEFL) is still dominated by the use of grammar translation method
while little or no attention is given to English lexical collocations. Though, Malian EFL learners have enormous
difficulty in recognizing and producing English lexical collocations. We conducted a contrastive study between
Bamanankan, English and French on the level of their collocations in 2022 at the Université des Langues et des
Sciences Humaines de Bamako. The aim was to examine the receptive and productive collocation knowledge of Malian
EFL learners. 150 participants took part in the study and six types of lexical collocations were used: verb+ noun, noun+
verb, noun+ noun, adjective+ noun, verb +adverb, adverb+ adjective. Data were collected through a multiple choice
test, a translation task and a questionnaire and analyzed by SPSS software. The results revealed that learners' receptive
collocation knowledge is higher in Bamanankan with 85% than English as a foreign language with 38%. Their
receptive collocation knowledge in English is also higher than their productive collocation knowledge with 38% to
30% respectively. We concluded that the more EFL learners are exposed to collocation the better their collocation knowledge.
Numéro
3 (06 - 2023)