Abstract:

This study aims to investigate the relationship between the receptive vocabulary size, and productive and receptive verb-noun collocational knowledge of Turkish EFL learners. The participants of this large-scale study were 326 high school students in their final year. Data were collected through Vocabulary Size Test (Nation & Beglar, 2007), a receptive verb-noun collocation test -COLLMATCH 3 (Gyllstad, 2007), and a productive verb-noun collocation test modelled on Gyllstad’s receptive verb-noun collocation test.  The results showed that the average vocabulary size of students included approximately 8.450 word families and this finding positively correlated with collocational knowledge of the students. Additionally, it was found that students’ receptive knowledge of verb-noun collocations was broader than their productive knowledge on the same type of collocations. In line with the results of the study some of the implications related to collocation knowledge and teaching are presented at the end of the paper. 

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