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Višnja Pavičić Takač

University of Osijek, Croatia

 

Mihaela Tabak

University of Zagreb, Croatia

 

Abstract

This paper addresses the challenge of assessing collocational competence in the context of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), where targeting specific learner needs, including those pertaining to their lexical knowledge, is particularly pronounced. The test of collocational knowledge used in this study (cf. Ding et al., 2024) integrates two main strands of L2 collocation research: corpus-based analyses of learner language (Nesselhauf, 2005) and test-based investigations of receptive and productive collocation knowledge (Revier, 2009). Given the specific focus on traffic and transport, a specialized corpus (10,542 words) was compiled from ESP textbooks and online sources for transport-related studies. TermoStat (Drouin, 2003) was used to extract domain-specific terms based on specificity and frequency relative to a general-language corpus. Collocations were identified via Sketch Engine, and distractors were drawn from the British National Corpus using mutual information scores. The final test included three tasks: (1) a COLLEX-based receptive task (Gyllstad, 2007), (2) a CONTRIX-inspired task (Revier, 2009) measuring full collocational knowledge, and (3) a translation task assessing productive recall (Bahns & Eldaw, 1993; Gitsaki, 1999). Scoring accounted for both lexical and grammatical accuracy. The assessment of test quality centred on a selection of psychometric parameters, namely reliability, discrimination power, and difficulty indices. The methodological complexity of testing collocational knowledge, which considers frequency, syntactic structure, and semantic association (Makinina, 2018; Szudarski & Conklin, 2014), is discussed. By combining corpus-based item selection with structured task design, this study offers a transparent model for assessing ESP collocational competence, addressing both benefits and pitfalls for test developers.

 

Keywords

Collocational competence, English for specific purposes (ESP), collocation testing