Abstract:

A category within lexical transfer, collocation transfer is a significant phenomenon within language production which may have negative effects on writing quality when demonstrated in the form of negative transfer. However, studies on collocation transfer in the texts written by writers of English as a Foreign Language appear to be somewhat limited. In this respect, this study aimed to reveal if the frequently used lexical collocations by undergraduate learners of English with a Turkish L1 background in their written production demonstrated negative collocation transfer. To this end, a corpus of 160 literary analysis essays written by 2nd year undergraduate students of an English Language Teaching (ELT) department in Turkey were investigated to trace negative collocation transfer from Turkish to English. The Detection, Explanation, Evaluation model was used for the analysis of the collocations. The findings indicated that around a quarter of the collocations used by the writers in their texts were negatively transferred from Turkish. The results highlighted the importance of teaching collocations in EFL contexts.

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