Collocational problems amongst ESL learners: a corpus-based study

Collocation has often been considered a problematic area for ESL learners: a verb is wrongly associated with a noun, or a noun is arbitrarily matched with an adjective. One reason for such errors is that the realisation of collocational appropriateness is very often a matter of intuition. It is therefore not surprising that learners, even at advanced level, encounter great difficulty in this area as collocational appropriateness may be acquired only through years of experience of using, and exposure to, the language