An acquisition study of italian collocations

Many studies have been carried out on second language acquisition, although they were mostly focusing on English acquisition. This bachelor dissertation “An acquisition study of Italian collocations” investigates the acquisition of Italian collocations by L1 Lithuanian learners. The main focus of the study is to examine the influence of Italian vocabulary size, the frequency of the constituent parts of the target collocations, type of the exercise, collocation congruency and other languages on the acquisition of the target collocations. The theoretical part of the present dissertation describes formulaic language in general, the concept of collocation, discusses vocabulary learning, vocabulary testing as well as collocation learning. The research part covers the acquisition study of Italian collocations, which was carried out in two Italian lessons at Vilnius University. 21 students who were divided into 2 groups participated in this research. There were 8 target collocations, taught using 2 different types of exercises. The results were analyzed using the descriptive statistics and the factors influencing the acquisition of Italian collocations were identified. The present study has shown that the main influencing factors are the Italian vocabulary knowledge and other languages, while the other factors do not have such a clear influence. However, this does not mean, that these are the only factors that affect Italian language acquisition. Although the study had several limitations, such as the number of participants, the number of target collocations, etc., it could be as a foundation for further studies. This particular dissertation could be useful both for the researchers interested in applied linguistics, second language acquisition or Italian language acquisition and for the Italian language teachers, seeking to improve students’ vocabulary acquisition