The Relationship Between Controlled Productive Collocational Competence and L2 Proficiency

This paper assesses the extent to which L2 learners' controlled productive collocational knowledge increases with proficiency level, and the extent to which controlled produc-tive collocational knowledge of L2 learners changes across word frequency levels. A proficiency test and a collocation test modelled after Laufer & Nation (1999) were administered to English majors at the University of Burundi. The results of the study suggest that controlled productive collocational knowledge develops alongside L2 proficiency without significant gains at low levels. This empirically supports Laufer's (1998) observation that productive vocabulary growth is slow in the first years and gains momentum later and strengthens the established relationship between productive collocation knowledge and L2 proficiency (Gitsaki, 1999; Bonk, 2001). Moreover, the study highlights the crucial role played by frequency in knowing words (cf. Nation & Beglar, 2007).