A study on the use of lexical collocations of Korean heritage learners: identifying the sources of errors

UnrestrictedThis paper reports on a descriptive study that analyzes high-intermediate Korean heritage learners' use of Korean 'Noun-Verb'lexical collocations, which was investigated through translation tasks. First, the KFL learners' productive and comprehensive knowledge of 'N-Vi' and 'N-Vt' collocations were investigated. Then, the study identified difficult types of collocations and the most difficult patterns of errors. Based on the result of data analysis, an attempt was made to identify the sources of errors.; The results of the tasks, finding almost 40% to be incorrect in the production task and 6.2% in the comprehension task, reveals that learners have considerable difficulties in the production of collocations and comparatively fewer difficulties in the comprehension of collocations. The study also found that learners have more difficulty in the use of 'N-Vt' collocations and 'verbs' are the most problematic element in dealing with lexical collocations, followed by 'nouns' and 'case markers'.; After analyzing learners' errors through data analysis and personal interviews, the study discovered the following three main sources of errors which pose considerable problems to learners: (1) Interlingual errors, (2) Intralingual errors, and (3) Extralingual errors. In addition to these findings, while interviewing KFL learners the researcher of the present study found that the learners are neither aware of the collocation phenomenon nor the importance in learning collocations.; Based on the result, the study clearly indicates that collocations should be taught explicitly as a critical part of second language vocabulary learning. In addition, the results suggest that the starting points of teaching collocations should be raising learners' levels of awareness about the collocation phenomenon, stressing on the importance of learning collocations to achieve native speaker like fluency and accuracy