To Collocate or not to Collocate: Exploring Verb-Noun Collocations of Turkish EFL Learners

A growing body of learner corpus research underscores the pivotal role of collocational competence in achieving advanced L2 proficiency. Verb–noun collocations have been identified as particularly challenging for L2 learners, largely due to their semantic opacity and combinatorial constraints. However, despite this importance and challenge, relatively little is known about how Turkish learners of English acquire and use verb–noun collocations across different proficiency levels. This study aims to investigate the production of verb-noun collocations by Turkish learners of English across three Common European Framework of Reference for Languages proficiency bands (A1-A2; B1-B2; C1-C2), focusing on their distribution, appropriateness, frequency in the British National Corpus. Also, collocational error types and patterns that persist across proficiency levels have also been examined. The analysis draws on data from the Cambridge Learner Corpus. Salient collocations were identified through frequency-based metrics (t-score and Mutual Information) and cross-referenced with the British National Corpus to assess native-likeness. In addition, collocational errors were manually annotated and classified by type. Findings suggest that Turkish learners of English as a foreign language often struggle with verb-noun collocations and produce incorrect collocations even at advanced level. The frequency of collocations decreases as the proficiency level increases, reflecting Turkish learners’ repetitive use of a limited set of verb–noun combinations at lower proficiency levels. In addition, learners mostly make verb-related (replacement, tense, form) and determiner errors that persist from A1 to C2 level. These results highlight the need for pedagogical interventions that explicitly target collocational development and underscore the value of learner corpus data in informing such approaches.