Investigating University Students’ Awareness of English Collocations in Oral and written Discourses

Abstract

This study aims at investigating the EFL students’ awareness of English collocations in oral and written discourses, for the purposes of measuring language fluency and accuracy. The study adopts the descriptive method, an oral and written collocation tests were used for data collection. The tests were designed and distributed to a number of (40) students from Sudan University of Science and Technology, College of Languages. Then the data were analyzed by using SPSS. The findings show that, Sudanese EFL learners at Sudan University of Science and Technology are not capable of identifying grammatical collocations, they are unaware of using collocations in their written discourses. The results also point out that EFL students’ speaking skill is not fluent and accurate due to the lack of collocation usage. Therefore, the researcher recommended that, English syllabus designers at University level must give a considerable attention to collocations and word combinations and focus on learning them in context for the purposes of acquiring a native like language. Finally, the researcher suggested that further studies are required to investigate the effective ways of teaching and learning formulaic language in general and collocations in particular to (EFL) learners. Moreover, experimental studies on the impact of English collocations on students’ productive language skills and Contrastive studies on collocations is a good area of studies to eliminate the difficulties encountered by language learners.