Investigating Lexical Collocational Errors in Students’Writing Compositions: The Case of First Year Students of English at Mouloud Mammeri University of Tizi Ouzou.

Abstract

This study aims at investigating if first year students of English at MMUTO make lexical collocational errors while writing. Then,it tries to identify the different types of lexical collocational errors that the students commit while writing in order to figure out the extent to which they can put words together properly. To reach the aims of the present work ,eighty (80) exam copies of the writing module of the academic year 2015-2016 were selected randomly from the population of first year students to be analyzed. Thus, Error Analysis analytical framework is used to identify the different errors in the students’ writing compositions, relying on the theory of Michael Lewis (2000) dealing with the classification of lexical collocations. The outcomes of the investigation show that the students can not put lexical collocational items together in a correct way which result in their making of errors. The most common lexical collocational errors among students are noun+verb and verb+noun pattern . These results confirm the suggested hypotheses of the study and maintains that students’ lack of collocational knowledge prevent them from producing correct lexical collocations.Thus, One could notice easily their erroneous and unnatural language while reading their writing productions. Even if they use some strategies to cover this lack like; language transfer, synonymy strategy and repetition and overgeneralization.