Discussion

The findings of the interviews conducted with teachers and students regarding vocabulary difficulties and teaching and learning techniques showed a clear mismatch between the learners’ needs and the teachers teaching agenda and teaching focus. Considering Nation’s (2001) taxonomy of word knowledge and the receptive/ productive distinction, the students in this context seem to be mainly struggling with the productive aspect of a word’s use, which was evident from their reported difficulty with vocabulary. In fact, this finding is consistent with the literature on vocabulary learning difficulties in the wider context of EFL. In most models of L2 vocabulary acquisition, receptive knowledge precedes the more complex productive knowledge and use of vocabulary (Laufer, 1998; Meara, 1996; Nation, 1990). A longitudinal study conducted by Laufer (1998) showed that learners’ L2 receptive vocabulary developed to a greater extent than their productive vocabulary. The difference in development between receptive and productive vocabulary has been attributed to the lack of production tasks that provides opportunities for using both known and new vocabulary. In the specific context of EFL in Saudi, Al-Jarf (2006) asserts that vocabulary learning and teaching constitutes a major problem for EFL learners and teachers. In her study, Al-Jarf reported that freshman students have difficulties in different aspects of vocabulary knowledge including associating, and using English words. This clearly indicates a struggle in the learners’ production of vocabulary meaning and use according to Nation’s taxonomy (see table 2.1).

Despite the students’ struggle with vocabulary production and use, most of the interviewed teachers did not report much (if anything) about changing their teaching approach to meet the learners’ needs. As indicated by the interview data, most of the teachers employed a grammar translation approach to teaching vocabulary. They mainly focussed on form-meaning links in teaching discrete words, while mostly neglecting other aspects of vocabulary knowledge, thus resulting in erroneous language use and production. Zimmerman (1997) affirms that the students’ failure in oral and written language usage has one of the worst impacts on the learners’ motivation. Despite the attempts made by a few teachers (only two in my research) to encourage vocabulary

17

production through discussion and communication, these attempts do not seem to be systematic in their objectives and do not seem to encourage profound, progressive and contextualized vocabulary production, let alone raising any collocational awareness or developing any autonomous vocabulary learning skills.

Many researchers (e.g. Henriksen, 1999;Lin, 2002; Liu, 2000) emphasise the importance of converting learners’ receptive vocabulary into productive vocabulary. Different suggestions have been made for attaining this shift. For example, in the longitudinal study of Danish learners’ acquisition of English adjectives, Haastrup and Henriksen (1998) attempted to trace the participants’ L2 vocabulary development along three lexical competence dimensions by collecting a range of receptive and productive performances. By comparing the results on the three dimensions,3 they hypothesised that depth of knowledge of a lexical item is important for precise understanding. They also suggested that rich meaning representation is an important factor for a word to become productive. Thus, they emphasise the strong interrelationships among the three vocabulary-learning continua with an emphasis on the importance of semantic network building. Moreover, Beheydt (1987, p. 57) points out that “the learner has not really semantized a new word until he knows its morphological, syntactic, and collocational profile as well as its meaning potential.”

Supporting Beheydt’s (1987) observations, Liu (2000) confirms that the more often students are taught English collocations, the more correctly they can make use of vocabulary. Lin (2002) came to the same conclusion while investigating the effects of collocation instruction on students’ English vocabulary developments. Lin (2002) found that students made progress in producing vocabulary after receiving explicit instruction on collocations. According to Cowie (1992), English collocations are important in receptive as well as productive language competence. A similar assertion was made by Nattinger (1988). Both researchers suggested that English collocations are useful not only for English comprehension but for English production as well.

Nattinger (1980) states that “language production consists of piecing together the ready- made units appropriate for particular situations, and that comprehension relies on knowing which of these patterns to predict in these situations” (p. 341). Moreover,

3 _{The partial–practice knowledge dimension, depth-of-knowledge dimension and receptive-productive} dimension.

18

Hussein (1990) states that “without the appropriate use of vocabulary, vocabulary learning is meaningless” (p. 129). According to Hussein, students should observe the restriction on the co-occurrence of words and items within a sentence and heed lexical restrictions. Brown (1974) pointed out that learning collocations enables learners to gradually recognise language chunks used by native speakers in speech and writing and to get a feel for using words in natural combinations with other words as well.

Despite this significance of collocations in converting receptive/ passive knowledge of vocabulary into productive/ active knowledge, the needs analysis data show that this construct of vocabulary knowledge has been neglected. The interviewed teachers did not indicate any emphasis on teaching collocations or raising collocational awareness. Hence, it is most likely that learners in this context, as in other EFL contexts, are lacking the required collocational competence for attaining native-like accuracy (Ellis, 1996) or near- native competency (McCarthy, 1990).

The approach to vocabulary learning used by the students who participated in the interviews mirrors the teachers’ focus in the sense that the students translate discrete words into their L1 and memorise the equivalent meanings. They also use verbal and written repetition to memorise words and their spellings. Although such strategies are reportedly helpful, Schmitt & Schmitt (1993) reported that they seem to fall at the ‘superficial’ end of the processing continuum, thus leading to shallow learning. They suggest that such strategies by themselves are unlikely to result in permanent learning. They state that “some 'deeper' processing is likely to be necessary to stabilize the knowledge and make it available for use in real time” (Schmitt & Schmitt, 1993 p: 32). This brings back the notion of use in Nation’s (2001) taxonomy of word knowledge, collocations in particular, which are indications of word semantization and depth of knowledge as discussed above.

According to Nattinger (1988), collocations can aid learners in committing these words to memory and defining the semantic area of a word (i.e. words with related meanings), and they can permit learners to know and to predict what kinds of words would be found together. He suggests several reasons for teaching lexical phrases. The most important reason is that teaching lexical phrases (collocations with pragmatic functions particularly) will lead to fluency in speaking and writing, primarily because they shift learners’

19

concentration from individual words to larger structures of discourse and to the social aspects of interaction.

To conclude, the current researcher proposes that the teaching and learning of collocations can establish a connection of form and meaning, and can provide a feasible recipe to facilitate another aspect of vocabulary knowledge, namely word use. In other words, as Nation (1990) states, “teaching vocabulary in collocations is in some ways a reaction against teaching words in lists and is an attempt to learn words in context while keeping the flexibility of list running” (p. 38). Other researchers (e.g. Fan, 2009; Farghal & Obiedat, 1995; Nattinger, 1988) stress that instead of teaching vocabulary as discrete lexical items, which could result in lexical incompetence, learners must be made aware of the necessity of learning collocations.

Taylor (1983) depicts the following reasons for learning words in collocations: (1) words which are naturally associated in text are more easily learnt than those that are not; (2) vocabulary is learned best in context; (3) context alone is insufficient without careful association. In a study by Özgül and Abdülkadir (2012), the researchers compared an experimental group (30 Turkish students), which was taught new words using collocation, to a control group (29 Turkish students) which was taught the same words using traditional techniques such as synonym, antonym, definition and mother-tongue translation. The results showed a significant increase in the experimental group’s learning and retention of the taught vocabulary items as indicated by their performance in a receptive test (fill-in-the-blanks) and a productive test (gap-filling). The researchers concluded that teaching vocabulary through collocations may enhance the receptive and productive retention of new vocabulary items in EFL classes.

The following section addresses the current researcher’s second motivation for examining the teaching and learning of collocations: EFL collocational knowledge.