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Words that go together well: developing test formats for measuring learner knowledge of English collocations

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Author

Summary, in English

This paper describes the development of two test formats, COLLEX and COLLMATCH,

measuring receptive recognition knowledge of English verb +NP collocations, and reports

findings from pilots and initial test administrations involving Swedish upper-secondaryschool

and university level learners. Administrations of the test formats produced highly

reliable scores and the performance of native speakers provided evidence of test validity. The

tests discriminated significantly between upper secondary school learners, university learners,

and native speakers. Significant differences were however not observed throughout between

advanced learner groups only one term apart in terms of level of formal instruction. A

vocabulary size measure was found to correlate highly with scores on both tests, which seems

to suggest that learners with large vocabularies have a better receptive command of verb + NP

collocations than learners with smaller vocabularies.

Department/s

Publishing year

2005

Language

English

Publication/Series

The Department of English in Lund: Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 5

Document type

Working paper

Topic

  • Languages and Literature

Keywords

  • Language testing Applied linguistics Collocation test format English EFL

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1650-691X