The relationship between Iranian EFL learner's collocational knowledge and their writing fluency

Abstract

This study aims to explore writing fluency with the aim of investigating how it is related to learners‟ collocational knowledge. For this purpose, a group of 57 Persian learners of English in a language institute in Kazeroun (West of Fars) participated in weekly guided writing activities in the class on different topics. Using a words-per-minute (WPM) procedure, the researcher was able to gain scores for the learners‟ writing fluency. In addition, the students were given a test of collocation consisting of both lexical and grammatical collocation. Pearson correlation coefficient was used in order to determine the relationship between learners‟ knowledge of collocations and writing fluency. The results of the Pearson correlation analysis showed that there was a significant relationship between students‟ knowledge of collocation and writing scores but there was no significant relationship between collocation and writing fluency. The results of the correlations between language proficiency, collocation scores, writing scores and writing fluency showed that there is a meaningful relationship between general proficiency and the students‟ writing and collocation scores but no significant relationship was observed between proficiency scores and writing fluency. One reason may be that the participants of this study were in lower intermediate level as is indicated by the mean of the proficiency test (17.8421 of 50) which is negatively skewed, showing that these students whose grade in the language institute was intermediate had a performance below their level. Another reason may be due to the way that writing fluency was calculated in this study. WPM is a totally quantitative way of measuring writing fluency, while today more emphasis is put on qualitative methods due to lexical and grammatical collocations. Meanwhile, the significant correlation between general writing scores and collocation knowledge may indicate that collocation competence could have a significant effect of a skill like writing but not on its components including writing fluency. Further research using more qualitative methods are needed to test these hypotheses.