THE “WELFARE” OF ENGLISH COLLOCATIONS AT THE HANDS OF MACEDONIAN STUDENTS OF ENGLISH

The lexicon of the English language abounds with collocations. Collocations are, in fact, essential for both oral and written discourse as they make discourse sound natural, native-like, colorful, versatile and easy to understand. While native speakers of English experience almost no problems with collocations, non-native speakers majoring in English, very frequently struggle hard to develop native-like or near native-like collocational competence. This particular study investigates how Macedonian students majoring in English deal with English collocations. In fact, the study aims at determining whether students face less collocation-related difficulties as their studies advance. Also, the study makes an attempt to disclose whether Macedonian students of English are more adept at producing English collocations or at understanding the meaning of specific English collocations. Finally, the accent is put on the two different types of collocations - congruent and incongruent collocations, in order to ascertain which if these two types of collocations is handled better by the students. For the purposes of the study, a questionnaire with 40 sentences, 20 in Macedonian and 20 in English, was distributed among 40 English majors at the Faculty of Education in Bitola