Croatian EFL learners’ collocational competence: Congruent and incongruent collocations

Abstract

The paper describes Croatian EFL learners’ collocational competence with regard to congruent and incongruent collocations. Congruent collocations are those which express the same meaning in both languages with similar lexical components, whereby a direct translation from L1 into L2 produces an appropriate collocation. On the other hand, incongruent collocations use different lexical components in the two languages to express the same meaning and a direct translation from L1 into L2 most likely produces an error. Based on this difference between the two types of collocations, the hypothesis is that participants would be more successful in producing congruent as opposed to incongruent collocations due to a positive crosslinguistic influence. To test the hypothesis, 175 Croatian high school students at different year levels (ages 15-18) were tested by using a 22-item task in which they were asked to translate collocations from L1 Croatian into L2 English. The results show that students were more successful in producing congruent than incongruent collocations, and their collocational competence grew with year level and the number of foreign languages spoken.