Learnability of Various Patterns of Lexical Collocations by Iranian Upper-intermediate Learners of English

To investigate the effect of different patterns of lexical collocations on the recognition and production of Iranian upper-intermediate learners of English, 34 participants at Imam Khomeini International University (IKIU) in Qazvin were presented with receptive and productive tests of English collocations. To compare the participantsʹ recognition of various patterns of lexical collocations, a one-way ANOVA procedure was used. Results indicated that the participants performed relatively better on ʹadjective + nounʹ and ʹnoun + nounʹ patterns of lexical collocations, although the differences among the scores of the participants on the different patterns were not statistically significant. Another one-way ANOVA procedure was used to compare the participantsʹ production of the same patterns. Analysis showed that of the seven patterns of lexical collocations investigated, the participantsʹ performance on the ʹnoun + verbʹ pattern was significantly poorer than the other patterns.