Collocational Competence among Polish Students of Croatian as a Foreign Language

Abstract:Collocations in the Croatian language have been described in detail (Blagus Bartolec 2014). However, research on collocational competence in Croatian as a first or foreign language is still sparse. Previously, only the factors that influence the collocational competence of Croatian native speakers (NSs) were investigated, showing that NSs have the best knowledge of collocations with high frequency and associative strength (Ordulj and Cvikić 2017). The most extensive research on collocational acquisition in Croatian as a foreign language (CFL) in heterogeneous groups was done by Ordulj (2017). This research showed that participants with lower proficiency had very poor collocational competence, while participants with higher proficiency showed an equal knowledge of noun collocations in the nominative case and in oblique cases. This paper aims to deepen previous findings and to examine productive knowledge of noun collocations based on their frequency, associative strength, morphological features, and the proficiency level of Polish students of Croatian. Collocations used in this research were collected from essays written by students of Croatian at B1 and B2 CEFR (2005) proficiency levels. The hrWaC corpus was used to count the frequency of collocations, and the associative strength of collocational constituents was assessed by native speakers of Croatian. The respondent sample comprised 27 students of Croatian in Krakow, Poland, who were divided into two proficiency level groups: lower (2nd and 3rd year of studies) and higher (4th and 5th year of studies). The influence of morphological features on collocational knowledge was tested with two fill-in-the-blank tasks containing collocations in the nominative and oblique cases. The analysis of productive tasks showed that morphological features do not influence collocational knowledge at the lower or higher proficiency level. In both cases participants produced the best results in tasks with collocations of high frequency.