Receptive Collocational Knowledge and English Proficiency among Yemeni Undergraduate Learners of English as a Foreign Language

In this study, we investigated receptive knowledge of four types of collocation and its relation to English proficiency among 80 Arabic-speaking, fourth-year English majors at Sana’a University. We asked the students to complete an 80-item collocation test and a locally adapted proficiency test concerning grammatical structure, reading, listening, and writing. Overall, they scored 35.75 out of 80 (44.69%). Verb-noun combinations received the highest score, and verb-adverb combinations received the lowest score on the entire collocation test. Overall collocational knowledge was strongly correlated with composite proficiency, r = .758, 95% confidence interval [.646, .838]. The relationship was large for structure (r = .726) and writing (r = .668), followed by reading (r = .512) and listening (r = .379). An analysis of the collected statistics showed that all 25 reported correlations were significant even with Holm adjustment. An analysis of the task-format sensitivity showed that the verb-noun advantage was maintained, but the two lowest-scoring types were ordered differently when rejection items were not included. These results are compared with recent work on receptive vs productive knowledge, collocation measurement and the association of phraseological knowledge with writing. The findings suggest focusing on collocations across language education and imply that subtype rankings largely depend on how knowledge is operationalized. The correlational design of this study and the available data do not allow us to make causal claims and test whether collocational knowledge is more than a general-purpose vocabulary to learn.