An investigation of collocational patterns in songs and their implications on Mattayomsuksa 2 students' collocational a wareness : a case study of Dongnoiwattaya school, Kalasin

The major purpose of the study is to reveal what types of collocation are mostly found in the popular songs under investigation. It is also to explore students’ awareness of collocation s in these songs. The subjects of this study comprised 20 Mattayomsuksa two students who took Fundamental English (E 22101) in the second semester of academic year 2008 at Dongnoiwittaya School, Kalasin province in the Northeast of Thailand. The sources of data were five songs from the textbook and the other five were from authentic songs (the participants’ request), 10 multiple-choice test items and 10 translation test items. Both of the tests consisted of five lexical collocations and the other five were grammatical ones. The obtained data were analyzed by using the mean and percentage.
The results revealed that there were more lexical collocation than the grammatical one in all ten songs. The mostly found types of lexical collocation were verb (meaning creation, activation) +noun/ pronoun/ prepositional phrase. Moreover, it was seen from the test results that all of the subjects could not pass the test and thus it can be concluded that the participants of this study at Dongnoiwittaya school were not well aware of English collocations. The major cause of these may be probably traced back to L1 interference and direct translation (negative transfer).