LEXICAL COLLOCATIONS: ONE WAY TO MAKE PASSIVE VOCABULARY ACTIVE

The collocational competence of college students was surveyed through a monolingual completion test conducted at National Tsing Hua University. As expected, most informants had difficulty choosing the correct combination of two (or more) lexical items. Even after informants were allowed to seek help from any dictionaries, the test results of ‘takehome ’ were still discouraging. The evaluation of collocations in current learners’ dictionaries reveals that the number of ‘verb + noun ’ collocational type in general-purpose dictionaries is scanty and many are unsuitably placed with verb entries rather than noun entries. In order to transform ESL learners ’ passive vocabulary into active, specialized user-friendly collocational dictionaries for encoding functions would be helpful and the teaching of lexical collocations is absolutely necessary