Exploring the Use of Collocation in the Writing of Foundation-Year Students at King Abdulaziz University

English Foreign Language (EFL) learners face many challenges in the process of learning and using the language in a native-like way. One of these difficulties is the written production of collocations, where they know two words but fail to connect them accurately. Even though there has been a continuously growing interest in investigating EFL learners’ written production of collocations, there has been little research carried out in the context of Arab EFL learners. This was especially the case when studying the different types of collocations investigated in this research project comparing two proficiency levels of learners, where collocation is not explicitly taught in this context. This research draws on a selection of 16 written samples produced by two levels of Saudi foundation-year students (pre-intermediate and intermediate) at King Abdulaziz University. The methodology follows three analytical methods to investigate learners’ written production of collocations: the manual extraction of candidate combinations; then, the corpus-based approach to identify collocations by using BNC citations and an association measurement; and finally, the phraseological approach to identify acceptable collocations by referring to native speaker informants. The results based on this analysis support the research findings that Saudi learners produce a high number of acceptable collocations, and without much difference between pre-intermediate and intermediate level learners. The findings have also identified the types of acceptable collocations and their level of fixedness and the less idiomatic combinations indicating possible similarities and differences between the two levels of Saudi learners’ productions. These findings contribute to EFL learners’ research on collocations and language learning process and pedagogy, with a limitation to this learners’ context. The study further contributes theoretically and methodologically to knowledge through the identification of collocations produced by learners using the association measurement, LogDice.