The relationship between receptive and productive knowledge of L2 English collocations

Abstract

This study investigated the gap between receptive and productive knowledge of second language (L2) collocations across different L2 proficiency levels and whether the two types of knowledge constitute distinct constructs or not. Four groups of adult learners of English (n = 205) and two groups of native speakers of English (n = 85) completed four written tasks: a sentence writing task, fill‐in‐the‐blank task, multiple‐choice task, and Yes/No acceptability judgment task. Each task addressed 64 academic English collocations, including verb–noun, adverb–adjective, adjective–noun, and adverb–verb collocations. Results showed that the gap between receptive and productive knowledge gradually decreased as learners’ L2 proficiency increased. Implicational scaling analysis showed an acquisition order of four different types of collocation knowledge and suggested that recall mastery of collocations should not be considered equivalent to productive mastery of collocations. Results from confirmatory factor analysis showed that receptive and productive knowledge of L2 collocations are two distinct constructs.