Title : A Study on the relationship between the Vocabulary size and the (Verb+ Noun) collocation Knowledge in Business English for the Third Year Students of All Specializations at Co-operative University, Thanlyin.

Keywords : Language Learner, collocation knowledge

Authors : Saw Hla Win

Publication Date : 2018-12-01

Description : This Study was carried out to investigate Third Year student’s collocation abilities. As
collocations are a necessary one for language learners, especially for a foreign language.
Every language has its own distinct features and language learners can avoid wrong use of
those features. If a language learner does not know the collocations of a language well, he or
she will not be able to write a perfect business letter or an email. The wrong lexical choice
may cause a mismatch, distorted message, the use of non-existent word or phrase and
collocation dissonance. In order to discover how well Third Year students’ knowledge of
collocations, 100 subjects were requested to participate this study. A matching form test and a
multiple choice form test were administered to them. This study indicated that students have
a low mastery of collocations and it was discovered that students were not digested enough
their early lessons and also they were not familiar with a lot of vocabularies. Particularly they
had much less knowledge of collocations. It is expected that this paper helps the learners to
get a high mastery of collocations in English.
This paper aims to investigate the relationship between the receptive vocabulary size
and receptive verb-noun collocation knowledge of the third year students for all
specializations at the Co-operative University, Thanlyin. This paper also investigates the
students’ productive knowledge of collocations in writing business emails. A total of 260
third year students from all specializations participated in answering questions. Two
instruments are used for data collection. They are the vocabulary size test designed by Nation
(2001), a multiple-choice test and a matching type test of English collocations. There are 15
(verb + noun) collocations used for this study. Descriptive statistics with two kinds of tests
are employed.