Collocations: A neglected variable in EFL

The present paper addresses itself to the issue of collocations as an important, yet neglected, variable in EFL classes and/or materials. Two questionnaires: an English 'fill-in-the-blank' version and an Arabic translation version involving twenty two common collocations relating to core topics such as food, color, and weather, were administered to senior and junior English majors at Yarmouk University and language teachers of English, respectively. The results show that both groups are seriously deficient in collocations. Because of their deficiencies in this area, they heavily resorted to strategies of lexical simplification like synonymy, paraphrasing, avoidance and transfer. The paper argues many points. First, the highlighting of collocational aspects of lexical items is as important as teaching them individually. Thus the idiom principle should be given its due weight in EFL classes alongside the open choice principle, because it is all pervasive in English (Peters 1983; Sinclair 1987; and Newman 1988). Second, the flexible lexical and/or syntactic range of collocations as opposed to idioms, for instance; should not lower their importance; on the contrary, collocations should be treted on a par with, if not superiorly to, idioms. Finally, the paper calls for the constraining of the use of the open choice principle when constructing common collocations relating to core: topics by attracting L2 learners' attention to the fact that there are collocational divergences between L1 and L2.