Abstract:
Words do not co-occur in organized way and in fact lexical patterns are different. This difference in the lexical patterning causes potential problems in speaking. The purpose of the present study is to probe to what extent the use of lexical collocations affects the pre-intermediate EFL students’ oral ability. So from the purpose the main question of the study was driven as: To what extent does the use of lexical collocations affect the pre-intermediate EFL students’ oral ability? . To achieve this aim, 40 pre-intermediate students of SNCL, were chosen and their English proficiency was confirmed by a placement test used in SNCL/SELTI and accordingly they were assigned into two groups. Both groups took the same test before and after the treatment of a period of 70 hours teaching, two hours for each session during which the experimental group has been exposed to different types of collocations to measure their knowledge of collocation patterning. They also participated in a speaking task to assess their use of lexical collocations and overall oral ability. After analyzing the test, the results revealed that lexical collocation had a positive effect on the learners speaking ability and a moderate effect on their use of lexical collocations.This suggests that receiving instruction on the use of lexical collocation patterning can be effective in the enhancement of EFL students' language skills, specifically, their oral ability.
