The purpose of the study is two-fold: (a) to investigate L2 learners’ receptive and productive collocational knowledge concerning the learners’ lexical proficiency levels, and (b) to explore the degree of their productive collocational knowledge. A total of 358 Korean university students participated in this study and completed a Vocabulary Size Test, two receptive collocation tests, and one productive collocation test. The results revealed that there was significance among the scores of three collocation tests. It is also observed that receptive and productive collocational competence tends to increase as L2 learners’ vocabulary size develops. Regarding productive collocational knowledge gains, significant differences were found among collocation combinations but no interaction effect was found between combination types and vocabulary levels. The findings indicated that L2 learners need to be aware of the importance of learning collocational knowledge while teachers need to attempt to help them notice high-frequency collocations that regularly occur in various contexts.

This study examines the claim that vocabulary learning and retention are dependent on a task's involvement load (i.e., need, search, evaluation), as proposed by Hulstijn and Laufer (2001a). The study aims at comparing the effects of task types and task involvement load on vocabulary retention for Korean EFL university students. More specifically, this study was designed to test whether differential levels of task involvement loads lead to equally effective results to vocabulary retention when the total involvement index being equal. Three types of productive word-focused tasks (gap-filling using a dictionary, writing original sentences, and gap-filling through word transformation) were used to examine the interplay of involvement index and task types. The result indicated that there were significant main effects of task types, test types, and proficiency levels. The results also indicated that there were significant interaction effects of task types on the retention tests, proficiency levels on the retention tests, and task types×proficiency levels on the retentions. The pedagogical implications and further research directions are discussed.

The purpose of the study is to provide an analysis of lexical, syntactic, and cohesive features, which were utilized to distinguish written products of L2 writers in the individual writing task from those in the group writing one using Coh-Metrix. In addition, the study attempts to explore linguistic differences in their written outputs with regard to their L2 proficiency and the correlationships between receptive lexical knowledge and productive lexical knowledge. A total of 105 Korean university students participated in this study. Results show that L2 learners’ written outputs varied in several variables used in this analysis such as lexical diversity and word frequency. L2 learners in the individual task yielded more cohesive texts, and they were able to incorporate more difficult words into their written products. Meanwhile, learners in the group task produced longer texts with using more logical and temporal connectives. When proficiency level was considered, L2 learners at the advanced level did not produce more cohesive texts, but instead produced more syntactically complex texts. The scores of productive lexical knowledge in the individual task positively correlated with those of receptive lexical knowledge from two different vocabulary tests. Meanwhile, the scores of productive lexical knowledge in the group task did not yield the similar results. The results implied that Korean university learners in the individual task were more task-oriented and produced a better written output.