Responses to tasks involving make/do collocations by Turkic beginning learners of English

Abstract

Although vocabulary acquisition plays an irreplaceable role among the aspects of the language teaching and learning process, it is a relatively neglected area of second language. Such an unjustifiable lack of attention on vocabulary acquisition is especially noticeable in the teaching and learning collocations. There is also little existing research in this field. For this study, collocations are habitual co-occurrence of individual linguistic items with the following distinct features: (a) linguistic predictability to a greater or lesser extent, and (b) relative fixedness and nonidiomaticity. This descriptive study focused on difficulties that students from a Turkic language background (Azeri and Turkish) encounter in comprehending collocations. This research work limited itself by investigating only make and dp collocations. A total of thirty-six beginning proficiency level Turkic (Azeri and Turkish) students from METU (Middle East Technical University) were given tasks intended to elicit data for studying the following research ques- t ions:

What collocations with the verbs dp and make do the beginning level proficiency learners of English with Turkic language background know? What collocations with the verbs make and dp are comprehended most frequently? What errors might be explained by native language transfer? The results suggested that the students had a high level of comprehension of V + N model which is usually expressed by to make somebody, to make something, to make somebody something, to make up something, to do something, etc.. The analysis of the data enabled me to describe those collocations that are comprehended with errors. The collocations that were comprehended with errors were mainly: Collocations that are used with preposition (e.g. You must do out your desk drawer. We shall make away with our enemies). 2. Collocations that are mainly used in colloquial speech (e.g. These shoes are done for). Collocations exemplified by a high level of restrictedness (e.g. They made up with the quarrel at last). At the last stage of the study the researcher attempted to analyze the errors that could be explained by the LI transfer. The evidence suggested that the interference errors made by the subjects were mainly the result of semantic structures of collocations.