The study aimed at investigating the English collocational knowledge
of Jordanian graduate students and analyzing quantitatively and
qualitatively the collocational errors they made. The sample of the study
involved thirty M.A graduate students at
the Hashemite university in
Jordan. The researcher adapted a completion test that measured students’
knowledge of four types of lexical collocations: free combination,
restricted collocations, figurative idioms, and pure idioms. The results
showed that free combination created the least amount of difficulty,
whereas pure idioms were the most challenging. Additionally, students
had unsatisfactory performance on restricted and figurative idioms. In
general, the students' deviant answers demonstrated their insufficient
knowledge of English collocations. It is concluded that their errors can
mainly be attributed to negative first language transfer.
