Abstract

Collocational competence is widely recognized as a critical component of second language proficiency, yet it remains a persistent hurdle for EFL learners. This study investigates the relationship between receptive and productive knowledge of English lexical collocations among Thai EFL learners. The participants were 122 third-year English major students at a public university located in the northern part of Thailand. The research instruments consisted of two corpus-based tests designed based on the Oxford 3000™ list and the British National Corpus (BNC): (1) a Receptive Collocational Knowledge Test (70 items) and (2) a Productive Collocational Knowledge Test (50 items). The findings revealed a significant disparity between the two types of knowledge; students achieved a mean score of 68.70% on the receptive test, compared to only 48.21% on the productive test. However, a strong, positive correlation (r = .870, p < .01) was found, indicating that receptive knowledge serves as a foundational scaffold for production. The analysis further identifies a systematic reliance on L1 semantic structures and synonymy interference as primary causes of the productive gap. These results signify that passive recognition does not automatically translate into active usage, highlighting an urgent need for explicit pedagogical shifts from isolated vocabulary drills to context-based collocational instruction. Such interventions are essential for bridging the divide between understanding and natural language production in EFL contexts.

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