Collocational competence, the ability to use grammatical and lexical collocations accurately, is a crucial aspect of language proficiency, closely linked to natural and fluent language use. Despite its importance, non-native speakers often struggle with collocations, particularly in productive tasks such as writing. This study examines the frequency, types, and errors of collocations among B2-level English language students at the University of Zenica, as defined by the Common European Framework of Reference (2001). A corpus of 150 student essays (76,319 words) was compiled. Collocations were extracted, classified, and analysed based on Benson et al. (2010). The results indicate that lexical collocations (3.3%) were more frequent than grammatical collocations (2.68%), confirming the first hypothesis. However, grammatical collocations exhibited a higher error rate (6.53%) compared to lexical collocations (5.15%), supporting the second hypothesis. Error analysis revealed that negative L1 transfer was the main cause of grammatical collocation errors, while synonymy and analogy contributed significantly to lexical errors. The findings also indicated that students tend to rely on familiar collocations, showing limited experimentation with less common structures. The study has pedagogical implications, suggesting that contrastive analysis, exposure to authentic materials, and creative writing activities could enhance students’ collocational competence. Addressing L1 interference and verb-preposition collocations through targeted instruction could further improve accuracy. These insights contribute to a deeper understanding of collocational competence in EFL learning, offering practical strategies for improving teaching methods and student writing skills.

Keywords:

collocational competence, grammatical and lexical collocations, corpus linguistics, L1 interference, academic writing,

Article data in other languages: Croatian