Assessment of collocation progression in second language learners’ writing at different levels of proficiency: A corpus- based study

Research on second language learners' collocation knowledge has looked into many areas such as investigating factors that affect collocation learning e.g. (Nguyen and Webb, 2016),which found that there was a close relationship between the participants’ knowledge of collocations and single-word items. Also types known by learners as in (Laufer and Waldman, 2011), or looked into group of learners use of collocations at a certain proficiency level e.g. (Siyanova-Chanturia, 2015). This study intends to contribute to the literature by investigating English language learners of different level of proficiency use of collocation and looks into their language development over time, for this purpose the study focused on finding out the types of collocations learners use, the degree of fixedness of extracted collocations, and the progress students have made across three different study years by using corpus analysis tools. The study took place at a Saudi Arabian University. A total of 807 samples were collected from 269 students for this study at three different times over the course of an academic year. All samples were transcribed and uploaded to an online corpus (Sketch Engine). Overall, verb-noun collocations are the most commonly used collocations in students' writing, accounting for 50% of total collocations. This is followed by adjectival-noun collocations, which account for 41.2% of all collocations. The number of collocations between nouns and noun phrases was the lowest, accounting for only 8% of all collocations. When examining the production of collocations according to the type of collocation and the year of study, it is evident that year one, year two, and year three produced more verb noun collocations than any other type of collocations (54.3%, 52.7%, and 44.7%, respectively). It is then followed by adjective-noun collocations (40%, 38.2.%, and 44.7%), respectively. Noun-noun collocations came last and scored only (5.7%, 9.1%, and 10.5) respectively. According to the results of the analysis of the four levels of fixedness among phases and years, in phase one year 1 most students noted that the adjective + noun collocations were low (n=11, 47.8%), followed by high (n=6, 26.1%) and medium (n=6, 26.1%). In terms of verb+noun collocations, the students tend to have a medium level (n=12, 52.2%). The average number of adjective + noun collocations found in year 2 was medium (15, 46.7%), low (n=10, 33.3%), and high (n=5, 16.7%). In terms of verb+noun collocations, the students showed a medium level (n=13, 56.6%). Also, most students in phase one of 3 years showed a medium level (n=9, 40.9%), then a low level (n=8, 36.4%) in adjective + noun collocations. With respect to verb+noun collocations, students tended to have a medium level (n=8, 47.1%), followed by a high level (n=6, 35.3%). In phase two, less than half of the students had a high level (n=3, 42.9%) in verb+noun in year 1. While in year 2, at the same phase, the levels of students were equally distributed between low, medium, and high (n=3, 33.3%) in noun + noun collocation. , and students tended to have a medium level (n=11, 61.1%) in verb + noun collocations. In 3 years. During phase 2, the student showed medium levels (n=12, 46.2%) in adjective + noun collocations. For phase three, students tended to have either a high level (n=4, 50%) or a medium level (n=4,50%) in verb + noun collocations. In year 1, it was found that verb + noun collocations were the most commonly used, and students tended to have a medium level of fixedness (n=11, 61.1%) in verb + noun collocations in year 2. Also, in phase three, year 3, it was found that students tended to have a medium level (n=7, 70%) in verb + noun collocation. The outcomes will attempt to fill a gap in the knowledge about the use of corpora to identify measures that would be useful to educators, and examiners to rate second language learners. Second language learners can produce acceptable collocations regardless of their proficiency level. Even though collocations are not explicitly taught in English classes, university students are able to produce acceptable collocations at three levels of fixedness