American Journal of Interdisciplinary Research and Development ISSN Online: 2771-8948 Website: www.ajird.journalspark.org Volume 16, May, 2023 208 | P a g e THE ROLE OF COLLOCATIONS IN THE ENGLISH TEACHING AND LEARNING Amir Abushaev, International Islamic Academy of Uzbekistan, Senior teacher E-mail: zizerion@mail.ru ABSTRACT English collocations are a considerable part of the English language. Collocations are commonly used in English speech and writing and are considered an indispensable factor in the proficiency of the learners of English. Acquiring collocations is crucial, challenging, and problematic to non-native English speakers. Nevertheless, it is noticed that collocations are still underestimated in different EFL contexts, which may hinder English learners' fluency in speaking and writing. This article aims at reviewing the literature relating to the term collocations. First, the paper presents the definitions of the term collocations. Next, the paper reviews the studies in the field of collocations. Finally, the paper states some rationales for the inclusion of collocations in English teaching and learning. Keywords: collocations, EFL, contexts, fluency, inclusion, lexical collocation. Абстракт Английские словосочетания составляют значительную часть английского языка. Словосочетания широко используются в английской устной и письменной речи и считаются незаменимыми фактором, влияющим на уровень владения английским языком. Приобретение словосочетаний имеет решающее значение, сложным и проблематичным для тех, для кого английский язык не является родным. Тем не менее, замечается что словосочетания по-прежнему недооцениваются в различных контекстах EFL, что может мешать Беглость изучающих английский язык в устной и письменной речи. Данная статья направлена на рассмотрение литературы, посвященной термину словосочетания. Во-первых, в статье представлены определения термин словосочетания. Далее в статье проводится обзор исследований в области словосочетаний. Наконец, в статье приводятся некоторые обоснования включения словосочетаний в английский язык. Ключевые слова: словосочетания, английский язык, контексты, беглость, включение, лексическое словосочетание. American Journal of Interdisciplinary Research and Development ISSN Online: 2771-8948 Website: www.ajird.journalspark.org Volume 16, May, 2023 209 | P a g e Introduction It is undeniable that each language has its own natural order in which words appear or are put together in sentences or utterances. This is known as collocations in English. Collocations are easy and natural to native speakers but problematic to language learners. The reason for this problem is understandable. In Swan’s words, “Language of this kind is notoriously challenging for learners” (p.518). Admittedly, English learners spend years learning a vast stock of vocabulary and grammar rules, but still, their speech and writing do not belong to the so-called native-like selection. It has been observed that such collocations as "feel headache" or "feel stomachache", "drink some medicine"," a fast lunch"," problems happen", "She has yellow hair", "We are meeting many difficulties", " She smiled with me", " I very like music", "I often go to eat in a restaurant near my school" and so on are commonly used by Vietnamese learners. These would probably be understood, but they are not what would naturally be said in English. It is proved by Liu (1999), Hsu (2004), Tang (2004), Mahmoud (2005), Shitu (2015), Phoocharoensil (2011), Shih (2000) that deficiency in knowledge of collocations and the mother tongue interference mostly account for the errors in collocations. Since the advent of online corpora such as the British National Corpus or the Corpus of Contemporary English several decades ago, there has been an observable awakening of vocabulary research. Among the wide-ranging vocabulary-oriented research topics, collocations grasped closer attention of lexicographers, pedagogies, and researchers. According to Hoang (2021), language learning is up to the individual differences. Due to their perceived significance in the fluency and proficiency of English, many researchers have suggested that collocations should be the requisite aspect of English teaching. Good command of collocations enables learners not only to communicate effectively but also to achieve native-like fluency. However, the importance of collocation is not taken into consideration in many contexts. In Vietnam, most teaching materials in secondary and high schools focus on teaching grammar and words in isolation, not in collocation. This leads to collocation deficiency and hindrance in fluency. As a consequence, most students cannot use good English in speaking and writing. In the light of that, this article provides the theoretical basis of collocations and some empirical studies related to collocations. Hopefully, it will raise the perception of the significance of collocations among teachers and learners of English. LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1. Definition of Collocations The term "collocations" has a long history, and Firth first mentioned it in 1957 as ' a word by the company it keeps. On account of its perceived role in vocabulary mastery as well as in the learners' fluency in English, many linguists attempted to define this term from different perspectives. For example, Nation (1990) gave a morphological analysis of collocation based on its constituents in which 'col' means 'together'; '-loc-' means 'to place or put.' Meanwhile, Halliday and Hasan (1976) consider collocation as 'lexical cohesion,' which is the cohesive effect achieved by the selection of the vocabulary. This definition is different from the notions of other linguists. Celce- Murcia (2000) refers to collocation as" words come together or 'chunks that native speakers can access for American Journal of Interdisciplinary Research and Development ISSN Online: 2771-8948 Website: www.ajird.journalspark.org Volume 16, May, 2023 210 | P a g e comprehension or production'. Similarly, McCarthy (2008) defines collocations as 'pairs of words that occur regularly together, with a high degree of probability (p.5). Also, Colin et al. (2019) regard collocation as 'the way words combine in a language to produce natural-sounding speech and writing.' In conclusion, despite the fact that there are various elucidations of this notion, most scholars share the same view on the sense of collocations, which are natural co-occurrence of words. As such, the realm of collocations is the relationship between words or other co-words in a sentence, i.e., lexical collocation. 2.2. Collocation versus Colligation According to Firth (1957), colligation is 'the interrelation of grammatical categories in syntactical structure.' We can see that colligation concerns the grammatical patterns required by certain words or types of words while collocation focuses on lexical items. In other words, collocation is on a lexical level, while colligation is on a syntactic level. An obvious difference is elaborated in the following examples. 'I enjoy reading novels' or 'you can enjoy fresh fruits here' refers to colligation concerning the grammatical relationship between enjoy and a gerund or a noun. Meanwhile, sentences like 'I enjoy death' or 'I enjoy committing a crime' are grammatically correct but semantically incorrect as the verb 'enjoy' does not go with these nouns, which refer to bad things. 2.3. Collocations versus Idioms A distinction should be made to clarify the ambiguity between collocations and idioms. As denoted in the idioms dictionary, an idiom is a phrase, saying, or a group of words with a metaphorical (not literal) meaning. An idiom's symbolic sense is quite different from the literal meaning. In the same way, O'Dell (2008) denotes 'Idioms are groups of words in a fixed order that have a meaning that cannot be guessed by knowing the meaning of the individual words' (p.6). In brief, the words and word order of an idiom is fixed. We cannot usually change the order or replace one of the words with a synonym, whereas we can guess the collocation meaning by guessing its component words' meanings. 'It rained cats and dogs is an idiom while’, ‘It rained heavily' is a collocation. In this case, idioms can be regarded as fixed collocations, which is not discussed in this paper. 2.4. Classification of Collocations Collocations are classified according to many criteria. Considered the correlation between the semantic relation of the words or phrases in context, collocations are divided into strong collocations, fixed collocations, and weak collocations. In strong collocations, the words are very closely associated with each other. For instance, in the sentence 'she has auburn hair, the word auburn only collocates with words connected with hair. Fixed collocations are called idioms as mentioned above. Weak collocations consist of words that can collocate with other words. For example, broad can be used with a number of words like a broad avenue, a broad forehead, a broad smile, a broad hint, etc. (O’Dell and McCarthy 2008, p.12) Concerning the grammatical feature of collocations, collocations are commonly classified as follows: i) Adjectives and nouns, e.g., the key issue, a brief chat, mounting concern American Journal of Interdisciplinary Research and Development ISSN Online: 2771-8948 Website: www.ajird.journalspark.org Volume 16, May, 2023 211 | P a g e ii) Nouns and verbs, e.g., an opportunity arises, standards slip economy booms iii) Verbs and nouns, e.g., pose a problem, launch a product, withstand the impact iv) Nouns and nouns, e.g., a surge of anger, a sense of pride, a flock of birds, a school of fish vi) Verbs and expressions with prepositions, e.g., fill with sorrow, burst into tears, swell with pride vii) Verbs and adverbs, e.g., drive recklessly, fail miserably, whisper softly viii) Adverbs and adjectively, e.g., blissfully unaware, stunningly attractive, utterly ridiculous 2.5. An overview of studies on Collocations Given the growing recognition of collocations gained in recent years, there has been numerous research focusing on this issue, especially on the importance of collocations in improving four skills and the nature of errors in collocations. In the Chinese university setting, Lien (2003) and Hsu (2010) carried out two studies that involved 85 Taiwanese college students majoring in English. Before taking three immediate reading comprehension tests, including ten short essay questions, the students participated in three kinds of language practice: vocabulary learning, collocation use, and no instruction. The study's major findings brought to light that knowledge of collocations greatly contributed to reading comprehension as the subjects' performance boosted after receiving instruction in collocations, and the subjects showed their interest in the direct teaching of collocations. In a similar research background, Hsu and Chiu (2008) also reported positive effects of collocation competence on the speaking skills of college EFL learners in Taiwan. The study was conducted with 56 participants, who were English- significant students. The data collected from three tests asserted that mastery of collocations facilitates the subjects' speaking proficiency. Additionally, in a context in Iran, Shooshtari and Karami (2013) and many other researchers conducted many studies on this aspect, and then they confirmed that a good command of collocations is effective in the improvement of oral proficiency. Zhang (1993) probed into the correlativity between the excellent command of English collocations and college students' writing quality in another context in the United States. Based on the data analyzed, he concluded that knowledge of collocations is a source of proficiency in writing. Besides, the familiarity with collocations distinguishes between native and non-native as well as the good and poor writing. To further probe the effectiveness of collocation instruction over the development of the writing skill of Iranian EFL learners, Ghonsooli, Pishgaman, and Mahjoobi (2008) pointed out that the subjects achieved considerable improvement in the writing performance owing to collocation use. Also, in another study to examine the effects of explicit collocation instruction on EFL learners’ listening comprehension, Hsu (2005) claimed that the subjects’ performance in listening was the best after being instructed with collocations. Furthermore, the data collected in the questionnaire showed their preference for the collocation instruction. They also expressed their willingness to learn more about lexical collocations and their belief in the usefulness of knowledge of collocations in the progress of their skills. American Journal of Interdisciplinary Research and Development ISSN Online: 2771-8948 Website: www.ajird.journalspark.org Volume 16, May, 2023 212 | P a g e Besides, a variety of research was conducted to elaborate and explain the nature of errors in collocations of non-native English learners. For example, in an investigation into errors in English collocations made by Arabic learners of English; Mahmoud (2005) pointed out that mother tongue interference accounts for the errors in collocations. The learners tend to seek an equivalent expression in their mother tongue when they do not know the proper collocation in the target language. In the Nigeria context, to explore the collocation errors in Essay Writing of ESL college students in Nigeria, Shitu (2015) conducted an experiment involving 300 advanced students. His findings were worth spotlighting that the sources of students' collocation errors were the lack of collocation knowledge and native language influence. Similarly, other empirical research on errors in collocations conducted by scholars such as Phoocharoensil (2011), Shih (2000), Tang (2004), Liu (1999), Hsu (2004) gave results which were in accord with the findings obtained in the Arab and Nigeria settings. In Vietnam, there are also some noticeable studies on collocation teaching and learning. Nguyen carries out the first noteworthy study. She investigated the knowledge of English collocations of EFL Vietnamese learners. The results revealed that the participants were not familiar with the mastery of collocational knowledge; knew less than 50% of each type of collocations overall. The follow-up one was conducted by Lê (2017) to look into the perceptions of teachers about collocations and the approach to the treatment for collocations in high schools. The study results unveiled that the teachers' understanding in the field of lexical collocations is insufficient. Also, inadequate guidance on collocation is offered to students. In brief, collocations have confirmed their importance over time. Sound theories and strong empirical evidence now pledges the need to place them in the syllabus. CONCLUSION Collocations are an important aspect of language acquisition. Knowledge and the use of collocations contribute to the improvement of four skills. It is widely known that fluency depends greatly on collocations. Errors in collocations indicate that many students lack the knowledge of collocations, which impacts fluency. Therefore, collocations should be included in the syllabus of schools. As English teachers, we should find out the best ways to instruct students with collocations and provide sufficient practice to acquire collocations effectively. As fluency is the goal that language learners make an effort to achieve, collocations are considered a useful tool to reach that goal. Today, social media is highly recommended for language learners to learn vocabulary and collocation (Nguyen, 2021; Tran, 2021; Hoang & Le, 2021), especially during the Corona Virus pandemic. REFERENCES 1. Benson, M., Benson, E. and Ilson, R., 1986. The BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 2. Brown, H.D (2000). Principles of Language Learning and Teaching. Longman: Pearson Education. 3. Celce-Murcia, M. and Olshtain, E. (2000). Discourse and Context in Language Teaching. American Journal of Interdisciplinary Research and Development ISSN Online: 2771-8948 Website: www.ajird.journalspark.org Volume 16, May, 2023 213 | P a g e 4. Cambridge: CUP 5. Colin, Mclntosh, Ben Francis and Richard Poole (2019). Oxford Collocations Dictionary for 6. students of English. Oxford: OUP 7. Finch, G. (2000). Linguistic Terms and Concepts. London: Macmillan Press Ltd. 8. Firth, J.R. Papers in Linguistics (1975). Oxford: Oxford University Press. 9. Halliday, M. A. K., and Hasan, R., (1976). Cohesion in English. London: Longman. 10. Hang Nguyen Thi My (2016). Examining second language receptive knowledge of collocation 11. and factors that affect learning. Journals.sagepub.com. 12. Hoang, V. Q. (2021). The Differences of Individual Learners in Second Language Acquisition. International Journal of TESOL & Education, 1(1), 38–46. Retrieved from 13. http://i-jte.org/index.php/journal/article/view/6 14. Hoang, N. T., & Le, D. H. (2021). Vocational English Teachers’ Challenges on Shifting Towards 15. Virtual Classroom Teaching. Asia CALL Online Journal, 12(3), 58-73. Retrieved from 16. https://asiacall.info/acoj/index.php/journal/article/view/39 17. Huong Le Minh (2017). Thanh Hoa high school teachers’ perception of collocation and collocation teaching. Graduation paper. Vietnam National University, Hanoi 18. Hsu, J. Y., & Chiu, C. Y. (2008). Lexical collocations and their relation to speaking proficiency 19. of college EFL learners in Taiwan. Asian EFL Journal, 10(1), 181-204. 20. Liu C.P. (1999). An Analysis of Collocation Errors in EFL Writings. The Proceeding of the 21. English International Symposium on English Teaching. Taipei: Crane Publishing Co., Ltd. 22. Lewis M. (2000) Teaching collocation: Further development in the lexical approach.