An investigation of collocational knowledge of higher vocational certificate level (HVCL) students at Surin technical college, Surin

The purpose of this study was to investigate English collocational knowledge of Higher Vocational Certificate Level (HVCL) students at Surin Technical College, Surin province. The subjects of this study were 20 good language ability students and 20 poor language ability ones. They were studying in the second semester of the academic year 2006. The research tool was multiple-choice test which contained 30 items. Each item had 3 distracters (choices). The test was basically divided into 2 groups: 15 items were lexical collocation and the rest was grammatical one. The obtained data was analyzed by using the mean and percentage. The results indicated that a small number (10 %) of subjects could pass the test. The mean scores of the good and poor language ability subjects were 12.45 and 9.90 respectively. This indicated that the HVCL students at Surin Technical College were not yet well aware of English collocations.