The Role of Congruency in Collocation Acquisition: A Case Study of Vietnamese Students Learning English Adjective + Noun Collocations

Collocational competence is of critical importance to EFL learners’ language proficiency. Due limited research on L1 influence L2 development receptive and productive knowledge adjective + noun collocations, especially in the context Vietnam, this study an attempt address these gaps by investigating whether Vietnamese learners could recognize use congruent English collocations more accurately than incongruent ones. Data were collected from 72 English-major undergraduates a university who completed three collocational tests: Receptive Knowledge Test, Productive paragraph-writing test. Results showed that, contrast transfer theory, posed considerably problems for students identifying well-formed lexical combinations using them writing. These findings highlight explicitly teaching classrooms.