VIETNAMESE EFL STUDENTS’ USE OF LEXICAL COLLOCATIONS IN OPINION ESSAYS

Abstract

This study investigated the use of lexical collocations and related collocational errors in opinion essays written by Vietnamese English as a foreign language (EFL) students. Each of the fifty second-year English majors at a Vietnamese university wrote an opinion essay as a class writing test in 60 minutes. The data was analyzed using AntConc (Anthony, 2021), a freeware corpus analysis tool. The results revealed that adjective-noun collocations were the most prevalent, whereas adverb-adjective and verb-adjective were the least common types. Omission of the morpheme -s in plural nouns and inappropriate word components of lexical collocations were common errors made by students. Besides, errors related to adjective-noun collocations were the most popular among all lexical collocation types. Pedagogical implications are discussed to assist students to enhance collocational use in writing.