Shin,
D., Chon, Y., Lee, S., & Park, M. (2017). Developing an English collocation
proficiency test. Multimedia-Assisted Language Learning, 20(2),
59-83.
As
a part of lexical knowledge, the present study attempted to develop an English
collocation proficiency test to measure the size of second language learners'
collocation knowledge. The existing collocation tests, such as DET (Eyckmans,
Boers, & Demecheleer, 2004), CONTRIX (Revier, 2009), and COLLEX/COLLMATCH
(Gyllstad, 2009), were developed as achievement tests or could only test some specific
types of collocations (e.g. Verb + Noun collocations). To address this
deficiency, a new Collocation Size Test (CST) was developed using the recently
constructed General Service Collocations (GSC) (Shin, Chon, Lee, & Park,
2017) which was first extracted from the large-scale Corpus of Contemporary
American English (COCA) and then refined by comparing 8 representative
reference corpora, such as Freiburg-Brown Corpus, Freiburg-LOB Corpus, and
Australian Corpus of English. The test of so-called GSC CST is based on the
first 10 levels of GSC with 10 items at each level. Five of the items measured
meaning recognition while the others assessed the learners' ability to
recognize the correct form of collocations. Each item could be considered as
representing knowledge of 50 collocations within the collocation band. In the
validation process of GSC CST, the test showed a reliability of .91.