INVESTIGATING DIFFICULTIES ENCOUNTER EFL IRAQI SECONDARY SCHOOL LEARNERS IN VERB-NOUN COLLOCATIONS

Abstract

Collocations are considered as one of the essential lexical components in the EFL teaching and learning process. This paper intends to explore the verb-noun difficulties and sources of difficulties among Iraqi EFL secondary school students. Two qualitative research methods, classroom observation, and focus group interviews were employed in the study. The study adapted the semantic difficulties (error types) by (James 1998: 151-155) to analyze data. Thematic analysis was used to gather and analyze data. The results showed that these learners faced many difficulties in their oral production of using verb-noun collocations. This paper presents some pedagogical suggestions to enhance learners' collocational word net building. Investigating lexical errors of verb-noun collocations are considered to be beneficial since they can be used to identify problems, then to come up with some pedagogical recommendations that can help teachers and students.