The Role of Teaching Lexical Collocations in Raising EFL Learners’ Speaking Fluency

Abstract

Collocations and its relations to learning English language have attracted the attention of linguists and scholars so far. This paper investigates the importance of teaching lexical collocations to improve EFL learners’ oral fluency. The hypothesis is that knowing collocations specifically lexical collocations and collocational usage in the right order would eventually improve their oral fluency and helps them speak as natural as native speakers of English language. The paper sheds light on the origins of collocations, its types, and patterns. It also clarifies the difference and relations of collocations with other phraseological combinations such as free combinations, idioms, phrasal verbs, proverbs and lexical bundles. Moreover, it focuses on the effect of lexical collocations on speaking skills, fluency, and accuracy. Besides, another part of the thesis contains describing the ways of teaching collocations and raising students’ awareness of collocations. Furthermore, it highlights the sources of making mistakes and the importance of how to rectify the mistakes or mis-collocations.