Words that go together well: developing test formats for measuring learner knowledge of English collocations

This paper describes the development of two test formats, COLLEX and COLLMATCH, measuring receptive recognition knowledge of English verb +NP collocations, and reports findings from pilots and initial test administrations involving Swedish upper-secondaryschool and university level learners. Administrations of the test formats produced highly reliable scores and the performance of native speakers provided evidence of test validity. The tests discriminated significantly between upper secondary school learners, university learners, and native speakers. Significant differences were however not observed throughout between advanced learner groups only one term apart in terms of level of formal instruction. A vocabulary size measure was found to correlate highly with scores on both tests, which seems to suggest that learners with large vocabularies have a better receptive command of verb + NP collocations than learners with smaller vocabularies.