The Future of Education

Collocational competence is highly important to second language proficiency. However, there has been little research about the problems learners of English face when using collocations.

This study explores collocation use by L1 and L2 undergraduate students in project proposals, produced in English, across three disciplines: Linguistics, International Economics and International Affairs. For research purposes, we are involved in building a subcorpus of students' project proposals within Russian Error-Annotated Learner English Corpus (REALEC) where cases of collocation over- and underuse or misuse are classified and analyzed. We investigate the actual performance of native- and non-native speakers in a specific writing task, extracting collocations on the basis of t-score and mutual information value.

Pearson Academic Collocation List provides a research tool for making a comparison of L1 and L2 collocation use which is described and measured through frequency, range, variety and accuracy parameters. Conclusions are drawn concerning the influence of the mother tongue and discourse effects on second language collocation use. The findings of the contrastive study can be applied to compiling genre-specific and discourse-specific lists of collocations required for the development of students' collocational competence in academic writing.