Tài liệu A survey into the teaching of lexical collocations in academic writing at faculty of english linguistics & literature - USSH

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY – HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES FACULTY OF ENGLISH LINGUISTICS AND LITERATURE A SURVEY INTO THE TEACHING OF LEXICAL COLLOCATIONS IN ACADEMIC WRITING AT FACULTY OF ENGLISH LINGUISTICS AND LITERATURE – UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES – HO CHI MINH CITY A thesis submitted to the Faculty of English Linguistics & Literature in partial fulfillment of the Master‟s degree in TESOL By DANG THI VAN DI Supervised by NGUYEN THI KIEU THU, Ph.D. HO CHI MINH CITY, AUGUST 2014 STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP I hereby certify my authorship of the thesis submitted today entitled: A SURVEY INTO THE TEACHING OF LEXICAL COLLOCATIONS IN ACADEMIC WRITING AT FACULTY OF ENGLISH LINGUISTICS AND LITERATURE, UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES – HO CHI MINH CITY in terms of the statement of Requirements for the Thesis in Master‟s Program issued by the Higher Degree Committee. The thesis has not been submitted for the award of any degree or diploma in any other situation. Ho Chi Minh City, August 2014 Đặng Thị Vân Di i RETENTION AND USE OF THE THESIS I hereby state that I, Đặng Thị Vân Di, being the candidate for the degree of Master in TESOL, accept the requirements of the University relating to the retention and use of Master‟s Theses deposited in the Library. In terms of these conditions, I agree that the original of my thesis deposited in the Library should be accessible for the purpose of study and research, in accordance with the normal conditions established by the library for the care, loan or reproduction of the thesis. Ho Chi Minh City, August 2014 Đặng Thị Vân Di ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe a great debt of gratitude to those who have helped me complete this thesis. First and foremost, I would like to express my gratefulness to my teacher and supervisor, Dr. Nguyễn Thị Kiều Thu, for all her kindness, encouragement, and valuable guidance. In this thesis process, her support and endless advice guided and led me through times of difficulty. I am greatly indebted to the Board of Administrators of the Faculty of English Linguistics and Literature, whose facilitation and assistance greatly contributed to the implementation of this thesis. My sincere thanks also go to my colleagues at the Faculty, especially Ms. Lâm Như Bảo Trân, Ms. Bùi Huỳnh Thủy Thương, Ms. Hồ Thị Thúy Kiều, Ms. Nguyễn Thị Hằng and many others for their constant care, support, and willingness to help and share experience. This study would not have been completed without the affectionate consideration from my close friends, Ms. Lê Hoàng Anh, Ms. Lê Thị Minh Hiếu, Ms. Trần Thị Bích Ngọc, Ms. Lưu Nguyễn Hà Vy, and Ms. Nguyễn Phan Quỳnh Thơ. Their care, support, encouragement, and understanding were sources of motivation for my effort to complete the thesis. Last but not least, my passionate love and heartfelt are extended to my late father, my loving and caring mother, and my brother who nurtured my love for English and teaching, strengthened my motivation, and gave me encouragement, especially in times of trouble. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP ...................................................................................... i RETENTION AND USE OF THE THESIS .......................................................................ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................iii TABLE OF CONTENTS .................................................................................................... iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ............................................................................................vii LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................viii LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................................. x ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................ xi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................... 1 1.1 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY .......................................................................... 1 1.1.1 The Academic Writing Course ........................................................................... 1 1.1.2 The Lexical Approach......................................................................................... 2 1.1.3 Collocation .......................................................................................................... 3 1.2 AIM OF THE STUDY............................................................................................... 5 1.3 THE RESEARCH QUESTIONS ............................................................................... 6 1.4 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY........................................................................... 7 1.5 TERMINOLOGY ...................................................................................................... 7 1.6 SCOPE OF THE STUDY .......................................................................................... 8 1.7 ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY ........................................................................ 8 CHAPTER 2 REVIEW OF LITERATURE ............................................................... 10 2.1 THEORETICAL ISSUES ON COLLOCATIONS ................................................. 10 2.1.1 Definition of Collocation .................................................................................. 10 2.1.2 Categorization of Collocations ......................................................................... 15 2.1.2.1 Grammatical Collocations ......................................................................... 16 2.1.2.2 Lexical Collocations .................................................................................. 16 2.2 COLLOCATIONS IN EFL...................................................................................... 18 2.2.1 The significance of Collocations in EFL .......................................................... 18 2.2.2 Collocations and Vocabulary Teaching ............................................................ 20 2.2.3 Collocations and Writing .................................................................................. 21 2.2.4 The Teaching of Collocations ........................................................................... 24 iv 2.2.4.1 How to Teach Collocations ........................................................................ 25 2.2.4.2 What Collocations to Teach ....................................................................... 30 2.2.4.3 Assessment of Collocational Competence ................................................. 31 2.2.5 Types of Collocational Errors ........................................................................... 32 2.2.6 Causes of Making Collocational Errors ............................................................ 33 2.3 ERROR ANALYSIS ............................................................................................... 36 2.4 THE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK ................................................................... 38 2.5 SUMMARY ............................................................................................................. 41 CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY .................................................................................. 42 3.1 CONTEXT OF THE STUDY.................................................................................. 42 3.2 RESEARCH QUESTIONS ..................................................................................... 43 3.3 RESEARCH DESIGN ............................................................................................. 44 3.3.1 Participants ........................................................................................................ 44 3.3.1.1 Student Participants ................................................................................... 44 3.3.1.2 Teacher Participants ................................................................................... 46 3.3.2 Research Materials ............................................................................................ 48 3.3.2.1 Coursebooks ............................................................................................... 48 3.3.2.2 AW Final Writing Papers........................................................................... 49 3.3.2.4 COCA ........................................................................................................ 50 3.3.3 Research Instruments ........................................................................................ 53 3.3.3.1 Coursebook Analysis ................................................................................. 53 3.3.3.2 Error Analysis ............................................................................................ 54 3.3.3.3 Questionnaire ............................................................................................. 55 3.3.3.4 Interviews ................................................................................................... 60 3.4 DATA COLLECTION PROCEDURE.................................................................... 64 3.4.1 Lexical Collocational Error Identification ........................................................ 64 3.4.2 Questionnaire Administration ........................................................................... 68 3.4.3 Coursebook Analysis ........................................................................................ 68 3.4.4 Interview Conducting........................................................................................ 69 3.5 DATA ANALYSIS PROCEDURE ......................................................................... 70 3.5.1 Lexical Collocational Error Analysis................................................................ 70 3.5.2 Questionnaire .................................................................................................... 71 3.5.3 Coursebook Analysis ........................................................................................ 71 v 3.5.4 Interview ........................................................................................................... 71 3.6 SUMMARY ............................................................................................................. 71 CHAPTER 4 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION .............................................................. 72 4.1 DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION ............................................................... 72 4.1.1 The Teaching Practices of Lexical Collocations .............................................. 72 4.1.1.1 Coursebooks ............................................................................................... 72 4.1.1.2 Instructions of Lexical Collocations .......................................................... 73 4.1.1.3 Assessment ................................................................................................. 78 4.1.2 The Learning of Lexical Collocations .............................................................. 80 4.1.2.1 Students‟ Perception of Collocations ......................................................... 80 4.1.2.2 Types of Lexical Collocational Errors ....................................................... 85 4.1.2.3 Causes of Lexical Collocational Errors ..................................................... 88 4.1.3 Summary ........................................................................................................... 93 4.2 MAJOR FINDINGS ................................................................................................ 94 4.3 SUMMARY ............................................................................................................. 98 CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS ................................. 99 5.1 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................ 99 5.2 RECOMMENDATIONS ....................................................................................... 100 5.2.1 Recommendations to Teachers ....................................................................... 101 5.2.2 Recommendations to Students ........................................................................ 105 5.2.3 Recommendations to EF Administrators ........................................................ 106 5.2.4 Recommendations for Future Research .......................................................... 106 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................ 108 APPENDIX 1: SYLLABUS FOR ACADEMIC WRITING........................................... 117 APPENDIX 2: FINAL TEST PAPER IN ACADEMIC WRITING ............................... 123 APPENDIX 3: QUESTIONNAIRE ................................................................................ 125 APPENDIX 4: INTERVIEW WITH AW STUDENTS .................................................. 127 APPENDIX 5: INTERVIEW WITH AW TEACHERS .................................................. 127 APPENDIX 6: SAMPLE AW FINAL TEST PAPERS .................................................. 128 vi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AW Academic Writing BNC the British National Corpus CA Contrastive Analysis CLT Communicative Language Teaching COCA the Corpus of Contemporary American English EA Error Analysis EF the Faculty of English Linguistics and Literature EFL English as a Foreign Language EGP English for General Purposes ELT English Language Teaching ESL English as a Second Language ESP English for Specific Purposes LA the Lexical Approach MI Mutual Information OCD Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English USSH the University of Social Sciences and Humanities – Ho Chi Minh City vii LIST OF TABLES Table 2.1: Eight Types of Grammatical Collocations ............................................16 Table 2.2: Seven Categories of Lexical Collocations .............................................17 Table 2.3: The Revised Six Categories of Lexical Collocations ............................17 Table 2.4: Sources of Collocational Errors .............................................................35 Table 3.1: Sampling of AW Teachers.....................................................................47 Table 3.2: The Coding of Five AW Teachers .........................................................47 Table 3.3: A comparison between COCA and other Corpora (by Davies (2008)) .50 Table 3.4: A comparison of collocates between COCA and BNC (Oxford University Press, 1998) ...........................................................................................51 Table 3.5: The Procedure of EA (adopted from Gass and Selinker (2008)) ..........55 Table 3.6: The Function of Questionnaire Items ....................................................59 Table 3.7: The Function of Questions in the Interview ..........................................62 Table 3.8: Synthesis of Research Instruments and their Functions ........................63 Table 3.9: The Identification of Headwords in Lexical Collocations.....................65 Table 3.10: A Record of Coursebook Content........................................................68 Table 4.1: Students‟ Statement of the Classroom Instruction of Lexical Collocations in AW .................................................................................................74 Table 4.2: Teaching Strategies of Lexical Collocations .........................................76 Table 4.3: AW Teachers‟ Criteria of Good Pieces of Writing ............................... 79 Table 4.4: AW Students‟ Understanding of the Term „Collocation‟ ......................81 Table 4.5: AW Students‟ Receptive Knowledge of Lexical Collocations .............82 Table 4.6: Sources of AW Students‟ Collocational Knowledge ............................83 Table 4.7: AW Students‟ Opinions about the Role of Collocations .......................83 viii Table 4.8: Lexical Combinations Produced by AW Students ................................ 85 Table 4.9: AW Students‟ Errors in Lexical Collocations .......................................86 Table 4.10: Summary of Sources of Lexical Collocational Errors Made by AW Students ...................................................................................................................92 Table 4.11: Summary of the Results .......................................................................93 ix LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2.1: Synthesis of Issues Related to the Teaching of Lexical Collocations in Academic Writing ...................................................................................................40 Figure 3.1: The COCA Search Interface.................................................................66 Figure 3.2: Sample COCA Search Result ............................................................... 67 Figure 3.3: The Summarization of the Data Collection Procedure.........................70 x ABSTRACT Collocation nowadays has been acknowledged as a requisite in EFL and has gained considerable attention from both researchers and teachers. However, little research has been conducted on the teaching of lexical collocations in a writing course to English majors, especially in the context of EFL in Vietnam. In addition, errors in collocations have always been found in learners‟ written production of language. The current study, therefore, aimed at investigating the current teaching of lexical collocations in Academic Writing at EF, USSH in terms of two aspects: (1) classroom teaching practices (coursebook contents, classroom instructions, and course assessment criteria) and (2) the learning situation among AW students (perception of collocations, types of errors, and causes of errors). Four instruments – error analysis, coursebook analysis, questionnaire, and interview – were devised in order to acquire data to understand the teaching of lexical collocations. Findings of the study indicated that the teaching practices of lexical collocations in AW were limited, together with a lack of focus on lexical collocations in coursebook contents and assessment criteria. Furthermore, the current situation of learning lexical collocations in AW was not positive through students‟ unclear perception of the issue, and a number of errors categorized into six types – in which verb-noun combinations were the key contributor. It was also revealed that the negative influence of their first language and approximation were the major causes of these errors. Recommendations were thus formulated to integrate the teaching and learning of lexical collocations into AW and other language skills courses at EF, to provide training to teachers, and to implement future studies on the issue. xi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION This chapter provides the introduction to the study. The chapter includes (1) background to the study, (2) aim of the study, (3) research questions, (4) significance of the study, (5) terminology, (6) scope of the study, and (7) the overall structure of the study. 1.1 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY 1.1.1 The Academic Writing Course Since the credit-based system was adopted in Faculty of English Linguistics and Literature (EF), University of Social Sciences and Humanities (USSH) in 2006, there have been changes implemented to the curriculum of the Faculty. New courses with new requirements were designed so as to meet the increasing demands in the teaching and learning of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). One of the new courses is Academic Writing (AW). The course is required for all English majors, which is taken after the students have successfully passed fundamental language skills courses in the very first semesters. AW takes up four credits, which is equivalent to 60 periods or twelve 5-period class meetings. Seen as an intermediate course prior to students‟ selection of their own specialization, the course aims at enhancing students‟ writing skills for academic purposes. Staged at an advanced level, the course prepares the students for upcoming courses with more demanding requirements, particularly those which require a high amount of academic writing. Focusing on English writing for academic purposes, the course entails various skills and genres. The students learn how to write topic sentences and thesis statements, outline and organize their paragraphs and essays, connect the ideas and parts of the piece of writing, and write different kinds of paragraphs and essays. The two coursebooks Reason to write – Strategies for success in academic writing by Cohen and Miller (2003), and Writing academic English by Oshima and Hogue (1991) clearly highlight writing skills and mechanics. 1 The students‟ performance is evaluated based on their written production during and at the end of the course. One midterm test (of which results account for 30 percent of the students‟ total scores) and one final test (70 percent) are obligatory, together with writing assignments throughout the course. The midterm and final test papers usually comprise two parts: one on theories involved with academic writing, and the other with paragraph or mostly essay writing (for further details of the course, see Appendix 1). In other words, the students, throughout the course, are required to write a number of compositions which show both their writing and language skills. 1.1.2 The Lexical Approach There have been quite a number of approaches to language teaching, each of which has its own focus and requisite. The most popular approaches in English Language Teaching (ELT) nowadays could be counted as the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and Task-Based Learning. In addition, an alternate approach to language teaching has been developed: the Lexical Approach. The Lexical Approach (LA) was first described by Michael Lewis in 1993. It is a new approach in ELT built from the belief that the most important aspect of language learning and teaching should be vocabulary, not grammar or structures, like what some previous methods (such as the grammar-translation method) hold. To put it differently, the approach highlights grammaticalized lexis rather than lexicalized grammar. The core of LA is collocation, which is usually apprehended as the regular co-occurrence of words in a language. This is believed to play an important part in language learning and communication. There used to be quite a number of objections to LA during the time it was first introduced. However, the approach has found its way to EFL classrooms over time and has proved itself effective in language teaching and learning (Lewis, 2000a). In spite of the increasing popularity of LA, the communicative language teaching (CLT) is still having a predominant role, which focuses on learners‟ interactions in order to achieve communicative proficiency and fluency. Despite such a fact, the 2 two approaches have at least one thing in common: the heart of the two approaches is communication and learners‟ competence to communicate fluently, because LA also “places communication of meaning at the heart of language and language learning” (ibid., p. 15). Even though the two approaches are more or less alike in their focus, it appears that CLT does not lay its emphasis on prefabricated chunks. There is a belief, in LA, that lexical words and phrases are “main carriers of meanings”, and that learning words and phrases also brings together all the elements that used to be separately treated – grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation (ibid.). Such a combination will greatly assist learners in turning the language to which they are exposed to what they can apply in communication. In the context of Vietnam in general and EF in particular, the approach is still new and thus hardly followed by teachers of English. More specifically, English prefabricated chunks are rarely taught by teachers, partially for most of the classroom time is spent on the practice of English language skills – reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Also, it could be said that teachers are not fully aware of the importance of lexis in language learning, which is one of the motives that drove the researcher to carry out this study. 1.1.3 Collocation Since the description of LA in the 1990s, researchers‟ and teachers‟ viewpoints on vocabulary teaching and learning have been changed: the focus of learning and teaching once on grammatical structures was shifted to vocabulary. However, the focus is not merely turned on individual words, but on the combinations of words in language use. That is to say, an important part of language learning is the ability of proper use of lexical phrases, or chunks. One type of these lexical chunks is collocation, for example word combinations like bitter criticism, or rekindle friendship, etc., which is regarded as the core of LA. 3 Collocation, in effect, has become one of the major concerns in the field of foreign language teaching and learning. To be more specific, collocation is a common phenomenon in the English language and its significance in EFL has also been recognized. Brown (1974), Bahns and Eldaw (1994), Lewis (1993), Farghal and Obiedat (1995), and Howarth (1998) were apparently the first researchers to have investigated the increasing requisite of collocation in English teaching and learning. All of these researchers agreed upon the role of collocation as promoting learners‟ language competence, especially in vocabulary, and their communicative competence. Also, collocation is regarded as a criterion to distinguish native speakers from non-native ones (Schmitt, 2000; Nation, 2001; Brashi, 2006; Nesselhauf, 2005; Bazzaz & Samad, 2011). These studies arrived at the conclusion that the knowledge of collocation is absolutely necessary to EFL learners and that the teaching of collocation should be promoted in EFL courses. However, it is a proven fact that EFL learners have often made a huge number of errors in collocation in their production of written and spoken English due to the lack of collocational knowledge (Bahns and Eldaw, 1994; Farghal and Obiedat, 1995; Brashi, 2006; Hsu, 2007; Huang, 2001; Li, 2005; Parastuti, 2005; Sun & Shang, 2010; Darvishi, 2011). Some errors like *1expensive price or to *learn knowledge are usually identified in EFL learners‟ written and spoken production. It is to say that attention has not been directed to collocation, and that it has not been properly and effectively integrated into EFL teaching. As a matter of fact, the aforementioned researchers have suggested that teachers should improve their learners‟ knowledge of collocations2, firstly by raising their awareness of collocations through the identification and correction of collocational errors, introduction of some collocations, etc. 1 The use of an asterisk (*) henceforth is an indication of a collocational error. The single form of the word “collocation” refers to the general phenomenon in which words collocate with each other, while the plural form indicates individual cases of collocation. 2 4 It is an observable fact that the students at EF, especially those who regularly have to submit their written exercises and assignments, frequently commit errors in collocation. The production of collocations in writing seems to be more difficult and challenging, for precision in word use is a must in written contexts (Tran, T. H., 2012), where one has more time to think about and polish their language use. Also, according to Nesselhauf (2003), students of high levels of English competence, in particular, are more likely to make errors in (lexical) collocations, for they tend to apply a larger and usually more complex amount of vocabulary to their language production. It seems that the students can quite well manage very common combinations like do exercise, make a cake, etc. but they often experience difficulty in most other collocations, such as *meet a problem, *wide knowledge, (instead of have/face a problem, vast knowledge respectively) and the like. These errors result in not only the students‟ level of proficiency but also their mastery of the language. Even though many researchers have conducted studies investigating the use of collocations among EFL learners, little research has been undertaken into the teaching of (lexical) collocations in a writing course to English majors. In other words, instructors‟ classroom teaching practices as well as students‟ learning of the issue have not been explored. Even in the context of EFL in Vietnam, only two studies on collocations have been found: one experimental study on the effects of collocation instruction on students‟ writing scores, the other on the teaching of ESL conversations through collocations. This was identified as the research gap, alongside the current situation, that drove the researcher to conduct the present study to examine the teaching of lexical collocations in AW at EF, USSH. 1.2 AIM OF THE STUDY The fact remains that there are many errors in collocations, especially those in lexical collocations, found among EF students‟ English writings. This addresses a question as to why they have made such errors in their writing products. In order to have a comprehensive and detailed look into the phenomenon and its possible 5 causes, the current study was conducted. The study was carried out in AW because this is among the courses that require students to frequently produce written work and involve students with a degree of high competence in English. Together with the aforesaid research gap identified in the field, there is a need that the study should be conducted, given the theoretical underpinnings as well as the contemporary pedagogical practice. To put it differently, the aim of the study was to explore the teaching of lexical collocations in the course of AW taken by English sophomores at EF, USSH. This aim could only be fulfilled by investigating the teaching practices and learning situation of lexical collocations in the course. 1.3 THE RESEARCH QUESTIONS Despite its increasingly significant role in these decades, collocation has hardly been integrated into language teaching, especially in writing courses. There is scarcely any extensive research into collocations, especially lexical collocations at EF, USSH. Also, as above mentioned, there can only be found few studies conducted on the teaching of collocations in writing courses for English majors. Endorsed by the accumulated teaching experiences in previous writing courses, the researcher believed that the teaching of lexical collocations in AW would be not only practical but necessary and beneficial to students as well. It helps build the massive amounts of language input among learners, from which they can turn into intake to achieve fluency in communication (Lewis, 2000a). The two aforementioned issues led the researcher to generate the following research questions in order to accomplish the earlier stated aim: (1) What are the current teaching practices of lexical collocations in AW? (2) What is the current situation of the learning of lexical collocations in AW? 6 1.4 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY With such an aim fulfilled by answering such a research question, the study gained significance in some following aspects. Firstly, the study, to some extent, had theoretical values. The study provided a thorough review of literature on theoretical issues as well as pedagogical justifications of collocations and collocations teaching in language skills classrooms. Also, the research uncovered the fact about the practical teaching of lexical collocations in AW at EF, USSH. Furthermore, its findings revealed the AW students‟ knowledge of collocation and the lexical collocational errors they made in AW final test papers. Secondly, the study made some contributions to the teaching of AW. The findings, specifically, presented some recommendations for both the teaching and learning of lexical collocations in AW so as to help students avoid committing errors in lexical collocations. Also, grounded on the pivotal role of collocation itself, the teaching of collocation should be promoted in other language skills courses. 1.5 TERMINOLOGY The key terms used in the present study will be discussed in this part for the sake of clarity throughout the study. The study was conducted with a central focus on lexical collocations, one of the cores of LA. According to Richards and Schmidt (2002), LA is “an approach to language teaching that is based on the view that the basic building blocks of teaching and learning are words and lexical phrases, rather than grammar, functions or other units of organization” (p. 304), or simply a “lexis-based approach to language teaching”, as Richards and Rodgers (2001) named it (p. 138). Collocation, then, is referred to as “a combination of words in a language, that happens very often and more frequently than would happen by chance” by Oxford Advanced Learners‟ Dictionary (a further and more detailed explanation of the term will be presented in the next chapter, the review of related literature). 7 In addition to those major terms, there were also scattered a number of other technical terms used in the study as follows: - Delexicalized words: words that still carry some definite meaning even out of context (Lewis, 2000a) - Corpus: a collection of (both spoken and written) texts (Lewis, 2000a) - Concordancer: “software that searches for words of phrases in a corpus and displays the selected item or items in a list together with their surrounding context” (Richards & Schmidt, 2002, p. 104) 1.6 SCOPE OF THE STUDY The study was confined to exploring the practical teaching of lexical collocations in AW, which ran in the second semester of academic year 2012-2013 at EF, USSH. It focused on exploring the teaching practices of lexical collocations in the course of AW and qualitatively analyzing the lexical collocational errors made by the students. The sampling strategy, as well as the specific research site, resulted in the weak generalizability of the study. Due to the nature of the research and sampling strategy, and based on the findings of the study, generalizations and recommendations were made to the teaching and learning in AW and other language skill courses at EF, USSH. The study findings would be seen as qualitative descriptions of the existing situation, and therefore would provide theoretical and practical background and tentative suggestions for further research. 1.7 ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY This study report comprises five separate chapters. Chapter 1 provides the introduction with background information of the study. Chapter 2 presents a review of relevant and previous literature on collocations and collocations in EFL. A detailed review of theoretical issues on collocations, in terms of definition and categorization, is provided. Then the background of the important role of collocations, collocations in relation with vocabulary and writing, 8