This study investigated the Indonesian EFL learners’ use of grammatical collocations within the four types that involved prepositions: verb + preposition, noun + preposition, adjective + preposition, and preposition + noun. The study involved thirty-eight learners from the sixth semester with three different mastery levels—Elementary, Intermediate, and Upper Intermediate. Productive and receptive tests were conducted on two separate days to collect the data of their grammatical collocation use. A total of 1,520 grammatical collocations were gathered from the learners performance in the two tests.
The data were analyzed through a qualitative approach in an attempt to find the answer to (1) the extent of the presence of users’ variants in the grammatical collocations with prepositions of the Indonesian EFL learners, and (2) the extent of the presence of L1 transference on the Indonesian EFL learners’ use of grammatical collocations.
The data of the learners’ use of the grammatical collocations indicated that (1) the Indonesian EFL learners at UMKO freely altered the use of preposition with the node words in a way that abandons the conformity to the Inner Circle norm, and represents an English language practice of the current models such as ELF and EIL (2) learners keeps adapting English by incorporating all their local linguistic repertoires, mostly their Indonesian language, into English (3) the EFL learners’ use of grammatical collocations is characterized by users’ variants that occurred in all types of grammatical collocations
The result of this study came with two conclusions that (1) users’ variants in grammatical collocations are found to exist in all the types that involve preposition, where EFL learners alter preposition by making use of their L1 linguistic resources, and (2) L1 transference was ubiquitous in the users’ variants of grammatical collocations in all types, where only few variants were considered to be not incorporating L1 linguistic repertoire. |