Hi Mohammad,

I assume that you are interested in evaluating the collocation knowledge of a specific group of learners that you teach rather than that of EFL learners generally. Many papers that are possibly relevant for your own research can be found just by googling test of collocation knowledge. However, to enable you to evaluate the relevance of these papers, you would first need to consider your answers to the following questions:

-What kind of collocations are you interested in? Grammatical collocations-such as verb + preposition, noun+preposition, verb and noun complementation patterns (e.g. verbs followed by that clause or by [object+ + to +infinitive)? Lexical collocations-e.g. verb +noun, adjective +noun, verb+adverb, adjective+ adverb etc? ; Do you wish to expand the definition of collocation to incorporate lexical phrases that perform specific discourse functions (see Nattinger and De Carrico for one possible classification of these)?

- Are you interested in learners' receptive knowledge of collocations-their ability to recognize them and process them- or their productive knowledge-their ability to use them?

- If you opt for productive knowledge of collocations, do you want to test this via discrete item testing in controlled exercises such as open clozes or multiple choice clozes or do you want to observe their actual use of collocations in more naturalistic writing and speaking tasks? The former approach is likely to be better for research reliability as, with the right design, it will produce a sufficient quantity of data and enable accurate quantitative comparisons to be made between learners. However, because it tests actual use, the latter provides a greater guarantee of research validity, that your answers are actually measuring what they set out to measure. You might want to consider combining the two approaches.

-Do you want to compare the learners collocational knowledge against that of native speakers or that of non-native speaker learners of a particular level or with a particular mother tongue? If the former, you could benchmark your learners performance against a reliable, corpus-based reference work on collocations; if no reference work gave you enough knowledge for any specific collocational area that you are researching, you could consider using a native-speaker corpus that allows collocation searches in your research. Sketch Engine would be a good platform for this. If the latter, you could compare them against a subgroup of learners inside a learner corpus.

_ Are you interested in examining learners collocational knowledge synchronically-their state of collocational knowledge at a particular point in time- or diachronically- the development of this knowledge over time?

Dear Chris Turner

Hi

Thanks for your prompt and full answer to my query. I am interested in the assessment of lexical collocations of Iranian college EFL learners. Also, I am interested in investigating the productive knowledge of collocations especially in writing skill. I have searched the Google and I have come up with no less than 100 sources on collocation but only a few have gone to rigorous assessment of collocation. Your answer was a great help to me and I deeply appreciate it.

You will excuse me for the unwanted grammatical error in my question which was due to haste.

Hi Mohammad,

I am not sure if it would be of help, but I saw a website the other they which had Collocation Exercises. I think these could be used for assessing advanced level language learners' knowledge of collocations.

http://www.better-english.com/strongcoll.htm

Good Luck with your research!