Adjective + Noun Collocational Competence of L1 Thai Learners: A Comparative Study of a Regular Program and an English Program

The main purpose of the current research was to determine how Thai EFL students studying in the regular and English programs use adjective + noun collocations. The second purpose was to find out the relationship between school curricula and collocational competence of adjective + noun in three tests. The participants were 30 regular program students and another 30 English program students from a private secondary school in Bangkok, Thailand. The data collection instruments included the Gap-Filling Test (Test 1), the Collocation Selection Test (Test 2), and the Descriptive Written Task (Test 3). The main findings have shown that, in Test 1, the regular program participants (69.33%) scored higher than the English program participants (57.67%). According to the findings from Test 2, there was no significant difference between the curricula and the Collocation Selection Test. For Test 3, the regular program participants used more adjective + noun collocations (279 tokens) than did the English program ones (211 tokens). The pedagogical implications were also proposed to enhance learners’ collocational competence, especially adjective + noun collocations.


Introduction
Some English language teachers are likely to overemphasize the importance of grammatical structures instead of vocabulary in their lesson plans.According to Lewis (1993, p. 133), this might result from their strong confidence in teaching something that they know best, instead of things of which they are unsure.Nevertheless, though they incorporate vocabulary in lesson plans, only individual words are typically taught rather than collocations (Mallikamas & Pongpairoj, 2005, p. 14).It is a commonly held belief that vocabulary is far more important than grammar.According to Wilkin (1972, p. 111), it is said that "while without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed".Grammar, however, is acting as a bridge between lexis (Leech, Cruickshank, & Ivanic, 2001, p. 84;Lewis, 1993, vii).General knowledge of individual words is not regarded as sufficient to achieve native-like commands of English; consequently, the knowledge of collocation is of paramount importance to every English learner to produce a group of chunks that makes his/her language sound more natural (Bahns, 1993;Brashi, 1999;Brown, 1974;Carter & McCarthy, 1988;Fontenelle, 1994;Ganji, 2012;Hedge, 2000;Hill, 2000;Hsu & Chiu, 2008;Karoly, 2005;Klerk, 2006;Leech, Cruickshank & Ivanic, 2001;Lewis, 1993;Mallikamas & Pongpairoj, 2005;McCarthy, 1990;Wallace, 1982).
Despite their syntactic correctness, two or more words that co-occur might not sound natural to native speakers of English (Mallikamas & Pongpairoj, 2005, p. 7).For example, although strong rain and heavy rain are both syntactically correct, heavy is an appropriate collocate to be used with rain.Furthermore, according to Phoocharoensil (2011) and Thornbury (2002), even though two or more words are regarded as synonymous to one another, they cannot always be used interchangeably in all contexts.As a result, this renders collocations difficult and problematic for English language learners.

Definitions of Collocation
According to Palmer (1933), as cited in Nation (2001, p. 317), the concept of collocations was first invented as "a string of words that must or should be learned, or is best or most conveniently learnt as an integral whole or independent entity, rather than by the process of piecing together component parts".Later, Palmer (1968, p.180) also stated that "[t]he habitual collocations in which words under study appear are quite simply the mere word accompaniment, the other word-material in which they are most commonly or most characteristically embedded".However, it was Firth (1957, p.181), who made the concept of collocation become widely known and remarked that "collocations of a given word are statements of the habitual or customary places of that word".Despite the existence of collocations since the early twentieth century, their definition and classification are still widely varied (Fontenelle, 1994).A large number of noted scholars in the field have defined the concept of collocations and proposed its classifications in order to better comprehend what collocation really is.McCarthy (1990, p. 158) gave a broad definition of collocations as words that are likely to co-occur, for example blond likely to collocate with hair.One of well-known definitions is that "it is a marriage contract between words, and some words are more firmly married to each other than others" (ibid., p. 12).Moreover, Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992, p. 36) defined collocations as "strings of specific lexical items, such as rancid butter and curry flavor, that co-occur with a mutual expectancy greater than chance".
Despite wide definitions of collocations, scholars mostly defined a collocate and a node in a similar fashion.For example, a node was defined as "the word that is being studied", while a collocate was referred to "any word that occurs in the specified environment of a node" (Sinclair, 1991).When one word is a node, the other becomes a collocate and vice versa (Sinclair, Jones & Daley, 2004, p. 10).Nattinger and DeCarrio (1992, pp. 20-21) suggested that after both a node and a collocate are identified, their surrounding functional words should be ignored so that emphasis can be put on the collocation being studied.
Not only definitions but also classifications of collocations have been proposed.Gairns and Redman (1986) categorized collocations into four main groups: subject noun + verb, verb + object noun, adjective + noun, and adverb + past participle used adjectivally.Though they are simple and straightforward, those four categories might not best explain the entire concept of collocations.Accordingly, several eminent scholars subsequently emerged to provide more thorough classifications in order to better understand the concept.Hill (2000, p. 51) proposed seven categories: adjective + noun, noun + noun, verb + adjective + noun, verb + adverb, adverb + verb, adverb + adjective, and verb + preposition + noun.In addition, Hill (2000, p. 63) also suggested a broad classification, based on collocational strength: unique collocations, such as foot the bill, strong collocations, such as rancid butter, weak collocations, such as good boy, and medium-strength collocations, such as hold a conversation.

Relevant Past Studies
In prior research studies, a good number of researchers cast light on collocational competence of EFL learners and found that most English language learners in every proficiency level experienced collocational problems (Altenberg & Granger, 2001;Boonyasaquan, 2006;Brashi, 1999;Hsu, 2007;Hsu & Chiu, 2008;Jukneviciene, 2008;Lakshmi, 2012;Mallikamas & Pongpairoj, 2005;Nesselhauf, 2003;Phoocharoensil, 2013;Rahimi & Momeni, 2011;Shih, 2000;Ying, 2009;Yumanee & Phoocharoensil, 2013).However, differences in collocational competence of adjective + noun between regular and English programs are still left to explore, especially in Thai context.Therefore, in this present study, the primary emphasis was on discovering the discrepancy in adjective + noun collocational competence between the regular and English program grade 11 students who were studying English as a foreign language (EFL) at one private school in Bangkok, Thailand.
A series of studies revealed that learners faced difficulty with lexical collocations more than grammatical collocations (Boonyasaquan, 2006;Mallikamas & Pongpairoj, 2005;Phoocharoensil, 2013;Ying, 2009).For example, according to Phoocharoensil (2013), Thai high-proficiency participants at one of the well-know universities in Thailand produced lexical miscollocations of 51.72%, whereas their grammatical miscollocations were only 48.28%.Lexical collocations lexical collocations were even more problematic for low-proficiency participants with lexical miscollocations of 58.56%, and grammatical miscollocations of 41.44%.Similarly, Thai freshmen EFL participants from the oldest and most well-known university had the lowest scores on lexical collocations in the gap-filling task (Mallikamas & Pongpairoj, 2005, pp. 10-11).Additionally, the significant findings from Boonyasaquan (2006) revealed that Thai participants, majoring in English at a government prestigious university in Thailand, produced the most frequent errors on adjective + noun collocations.
In addition to past research, one of crucial factors that plays an important role in collocational competence of learners is exposure (Brashi, 2009;Cowie, 1998;McCarthy, 1990;Wallace, 1982, p. 92).Therefore, participants in the English program tend to outperform those in the regular program regarding collocational competence in the Gap-Filling Test (Test 1), the Collocation Selection Test (Test 2), and the Descriptive Written Task (Test 3).

Research Questions
The research questions in this study are as follows: 3.1 How do Thai EFL students studying in the regular and English programs use adjective + noun collocations?3.2 What is the relationship between school curricula and collocational competence of adjective + noun?

Hypotheses
As exposure is a key to students' collocational competence, and collocational competence depends on not only how long students are exposed to the target language, but also how frequently those collocations occur (McCarthy, 1990;Wallace, 1982, p. 92), two main research hypotheses of the current study can be proposed as follows: 4.1 Thai EFL students in the English program show a significantly higher level of adjective + noun collocational competence than those in the regular program.

Participants
Grade 11 Thai EFL learners in a regular program and an English program in private schools in Thailand are the total population of the current study.The participants in this study were 30 regular and 30 English program grade 11 students from a private secondary school in Bangkok, Thailand.A number of curriculum differences were highlighted.On the one hand, four English classes were offered weekly to the regular program students and taught by Thai teachers, including Grammar class for 1 period or 50 minutes, and the other three fundamental English classes for approximately 2.5 hours.Thus, the total number of hours that they were weekly exposed to English at school constituted around 3.3 hours.On the other hand, the English program participants had far more exposure to English and more opportunity to study with native speakers of English in most of the subjects (i.e.English, Mathematics, Social Studies, Computer, Grammar, Science, Chemistry, Physics and Biology).The total number of hours that they were exposed themselves to English with native speakers per week accounted for approximately 10 hours.

Sampling Procedures
The researcher obtained permission from the head of English department and English language teachers, teaching grade 11 students in both programs in order to collect data between January, 2014 and March, 2014.In order to seek qualified applicants, 30 grade 11 regular program participants and another 30 English program participants, the Oxford Proficiency Test (OPT), one of the most acceptable standard placement tests, was distributed to all grade 11 students in each program at the school.The highest scores of OPT included in the study were 40 in the regular program and 45 in the English program out of 60, whereas the lowest scores of OPT included in the study were 23 out of 60 in both programs.The average mean scores of OPT in the regular and English programs were 28.47 and 30.23 respectively.This was to ensure that the participants in both programs had relatively similar English proficiency level.All in all, the English program participants slightly outperformed the regular program participants in OPT.Those qualified participants were later asked to voluntarily do Test 1, Test 2, and Test 3 respectively.

Research Instruments
After the 60 qualified participants had been recruited, they were asked to perform the Gap-Filling Test (Test 1), the Collocation Selection Test (Test 2), and the Descriptive Written Task (Test 3) respectively.A simple concept of adjective + noun collocations had been explained to all participants before Test 1 was distributed in order to make it fair and impartial between both groups.All head nouns that were used in Test 1 and Test 2 were selected from the 1,000 most common written words, according to the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (2009), including ability, change, benefit, condition, customer, evidence, behavior, cause, difference, attitude, task, action, quality, competition, variety, food, argument, attention, demand and amount respectively.Appropriate and inappropriate adjective + noun collocations in Test 1, Test 2 and Test 3 could be determined by these two dictionaries: the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (2009) and the Oxford Collocations Dictionary for students of English (2009), and two corpora: the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the British National Corpus (BNC).Collocations used must not only appear in one of the aforementioned dictionaries or corpora, but also fit the given contexts in order to be regarded as appropriate.Spelling mistakes of adjective + noun collocations were acceptable.
The Gap-Filling Test (Test 1) contained 20 items, all of which measured the knowledge of adjective + noun collocations, and took approximately 30 minutes during their normal English class.Each item in Test 1 was written in a full sentence with a blank (Appendix A).The Collocation Selection Test (Test 2) was immediately carried out after all Test 1 papers had been collected and also took approximately 30 minutes.Like Test 1, Test 2 shared the same contexts, meaning that kinds and numbers of adjectives used to collocate with nodes were the same.In each item, four possible collocates or adjectives were provided with three appropriate and one unlikely collocation.The participants were informed that more than one collocate could be selected in Test 2. The Gap-Filling Test (Test 1) must precede the Collocation Selection Test (Test 2) since this could prevent the participants from using collocations found in Test 2 to fill in the blanks in Test 1.On the following week, the Descriptive Written Task (Test 3) was administered to the same groups of the participants.They were asked to write a 150-word descriptive paragraph of 'The appearance and personality of my best friend' during their normal English class within 50 minutes (Appendix C).All participants were informed that both their grammatical errors and misspellings would be ignored in order to allow them to produce language that could truly reflect their collocational competence of adjective + noun.After all of the three tests had fully been completed, demographic questionnaires were distributed to all the participants to gather such background information as their exposure to English and the number of hours that they studied English weekly (Appendix D).
In an attempt to ensure that all four tests, i.e. the Oxford Proficiency Test (OPT), Test 1, Test 2, and Test 3, were suitable for grade 11 students, and the time given was appropriate, a pilot study was previously conducted on five Thai EFL learners in grade 11 at the school.Furthermore, instructions of all tests should not cause any misunderstanding or confusion to participants during the data collocation stage.Afterwards, some slight adjustments had subsequently been made before the updated versions of the tests were distributed to all 60 participants.2).The total number of collocations selected was varied as the participants were informed that they could choose more than one answer.The total number of appropriate adjective + noun collocations in Test 2 was 1800 tokens, while that of inappropriate collocations was 600 tokens.In conclusion, the total appropriate adjective + noun collocations in the regular and English programs accounted for 908 tokens (50.44%) and 984 tokens (54.67%) respectively.In contrast, the regular program participants (275 tokens or 45.83%) chose more inappropriate collocations than did the English program participants (243 tokens or 40.5%).Regarding Table 3, the total number of appropriate adjective + noun collocations used in the regular and English programs was 279 tokens (98.94%) and 211 tokens (98.60%) respectively.This simply means that the regular program participants produced more correct adjective + noun collocations than did the English program participants.There were only 3 incorrect collocations found in both programs.

The correlation between the curricula and the collocational competence of adjective + noun in Test 1
Table 4.The correlations between the curricula and the Gap-Filling Test (Test 1)

Correlations
CURRICULA TEST 1
From Table 4, the p-value (.01) is less than the significance level (.05), meaning that Ho has been rejected.Therefore, there was a relationship between school curricula and the collocational competence of adjective + noun in the Gap-Filling Test.Since the correlation shows a negative sign (-.332), this means there was an inverse relationship between the curricula and the Gap-Filling Test scores.Consequently, the higher performing group could be expected when students were in the regular program.

The Correlation between the Curricula and the Collocational Competence of Adjective + Noun in Test 2
Table 5.The correlations between the curricula and the Collocation Selection Test (Test2)

CURRICULA
TEST 2

Pearson Correlation
.213 1 Sig.(2-tailed) .102N 60 60 Unlike Table 4, the p-value (.102) in Table 5 is greater than the significance level (.05), suggesting that Ho has not been rejected.Consequently, there was no correlation between the school curricula and the collocational competence of adjective + noun in the Collocation Selection Test (Test 2).Put differently, no matter which programs they were in, their collocational competence of adjective + noun was the same.

The Correlation between the Curricula and the Collocational Competence of Adjective + Noun in Test 3
Table 6.The correlations between the curricula and the Descriptive Written Task (Test 3)
As could be seen in Table 6,) is less than the significance level (.05), resulting in the rejection of the Ho.Consequently, there was a relationship between the curricula and the collocational competence of adjective + noun in the Descriptive Written Task (Test 3).Similarly to Test 1, a negative sign (-.368) indicated an inverse relationship.That is to say, the regular program participants outperformed the English program participants in terms of the collocational competence of adjective + noun in the Descriptive Written Task (Test 3).

Discussion
The two hypotheses were formulated since differences of collocational competence between the regular and English program participants could be expected.Specifically, due to massive exposure that the English program students normally received in various subjects in school with native speakers of English, they were more likely to accurately use adjective + noun collocations than the regular program students.Nevertheless, from the analysis shown earlier, the hypothesis needed to be rejected.The main findings contradicted some previous notions that extensive listening and reading in different types of texts are likely for learners to broaden learners' collocational size (Brashi, 2009, p.29;Obilisteanu, 2009).The work of Cowie (1998) indicated that collocation is useful, especially for EFL learners who have limited exposure to the target language.Specifically, students who are in a regular program with limited exposure to the target language should learn words in chunks to produce language naturally and fluently.Collocations can later be retrieved quickly once required.The work of Hashemi, Azizinezhad and Dravishi (2011) indicated that speaking and writing proficiency would also be developed since the primary emphasis is on larger units.Nevertheless, receptive vocabulary size might not necessarily equal productive one, and the rate of moving receptive vocabulary to productive one is not consistent (Celce-Murcia & Olshtain, 2000, p. 76;Nation, 2001, p. 371).Karoly (2005, p. 63) made clear that although awareness of collocations can be promoted by developing receptive skills, English language learners also need an ample opportunity to practice using collocations in natural settings.As Nation (2001, p. 371) stated, when word frequency is rather low, the gap between receptive and productive vocabulary becomes increasingly wider.Accordingly, receptive and productive skills should be picked up and complement each other so as to promote collocational competence.Once learners' collocational competence is enhanced, their overall language competence tends to increase as well (Brown, 1974;Klerk, 2006).The justifications for the phenomenon that the regular program participants performed better than the English program participants in terms of adjective + noun collocations were also suggested.This could be explained by the fact that the opportunity of producing the language through speaking and writing might be limited in the classroom despite a massive exposure to English.Although their collocational competence of adjective + noun was slightly higher than 50%, especially in Test 1 and Test 2, a continuous improvement in collocational competence is still required in order for them to produce the language naturally and native-like.

Pedagogical Implications
Though many previous research studies emphasized the great importance of incorporating collocations in teachers' lesson plans, collocation has not yet been received adequate attention in the classroom.Pedagogical implications were still proposed for English language teachers to increase learners' collocational competence.
First, it is unlikely that collocations are taught without awareness of teachers themselves (Nation, 2001;Lewis, 2000;Lewis & Hill, 1992;McCarthy, 1990;O'Keeffe, McCarthy & Carter, 2007); that is, teachers should first realize the significance of teaching collocations.Second, benefits of learning collocations should be explicitly provided to learners.Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992, p. 114) suggested that thanks to collocation, grammatical errors and unnatural language can be reduced since learners are advised to learn vocabulary as chunks.Third, such activities as information-gap, problem-solving and role-plays can be used to introduce the concept of collocation.Next, not only meanings of new words but also their collocates should be introduced (Lewis, 2000, p. 12;Nation, 2001, p. 336).For example, apart from a meaning of ability, its collocates (e.g.exceptional, extraordinary, great and outstanding) should also be provided.This is effective learning for learners to both increase new vocabulary repertoires and strengthen existing vocabulary (Lewis, 2000;Lewis & Hill, 1992;Nation, 2001, p. 395).The fifth pedagogical implication is that the most frequent collocations should be introduced first due to a limited number of hours in the classroom (Hinkel, 2009;Nation, 2001;McCarthy, 1990;Sinclair & Renouf, 1988).It is also suggested that lexical collocations should be put more emphasis than grammatical collocations since, according to the past research (e.g.Boonyasaquan, 2006;Hsu, 2007;Mallikamas & Pongpairoj, 2005;Phoocharoensil, 2013;Ying, 2009), learners made more lexical collocations than grammatical ones.Last but not least, according to Woolard (2000, pp. 40-41), to become autonomous learners, students should be taught how to make use of corpora; in addition, commercial dictionaries also enable learners to become independent from their teachers.

Conclusion
This research was primarily conducted to 1) investigate how Thai EFL students studying in the regular and English programs use adjective + noun collocations 2) determine if there is a relationship between school curricula and collocational competence with adjective + noun.It revealed that the English program participants did not perform better in terms of adjective + noun collocations than did the regular program participants.Therefore, it is useful to further closely investigate the curricula in order to improve students' competence using adjective + noun collocations.Moreover, miscollocations can also be used to find out strategies the participants employed to cope with unknown collocations.

Table 1 .
The appropriate and inappropriate adjective + noun collocations in both programs in Test 1

Table 1
Moreover, the regular program participants also made smaller inappropriate collocations (31%) than did the English program participants (42%).
, it can be seen that the highest number of appropriate adjective + noun collocations in the regular and English program participants was on item 16 (93%) and item 5 (87%) respectively.On the other hand, questions that had the highest inappropriate adjective + noun collocations were on Item 20 (63%) in the regular program, and on Item 2 and 20 (67%) in the English program.All in all, the regular program participants with 416 correct adjective + noun collocations (58%).

Table 2 .
The appropriate and inappropriate adjective + noun collocations in both programs in Test 2

Table 2
drew a close comparison of the appropriate and inappropriate adjective + noun collocations between the regular and English program participants in the Collocation Selection Test (Test

Table 3 .
The appropriate and inappropriate adjective + noun collocations in both programs in Test 3 Mr. David has been our…………..customer since 2000.It seems he prefers our conveniently-located small store to a big department store in the city.………….. evidence shows that men are more likely to have heart attacks than women.Researchers found a number of ………….. differences in the way boys and girls learn.Mr. Alex has just been promoted because he has a very ………….. attitude towards work.Trying to bring up a small daughter on your own is no ………….. task.The restaurant uses only ………….. quality of ingredients to meet rich, fussy customers' needs.Thanks to the increasing population in the UK, there is a ………….. demand for pasta.