A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Licence en Langue et Littérature Anglaises.

Résumé,

The present study intends to measure productive knowledge of collocations among English majors at the University of Burundi. It is made up of four aims. First, it investigates the extent to which English majors at the University of Burundi know collocations. Second, it tests which of the two types of productive knowledge of collocations causes more problems to Bac 2 English majors. Third, it examines the role of word frequency in mastering collocations.

Last, it inventorises the colocation erros made by Bac2 English majors at the University of Burundi across word frequency bands. In order to achive the above aims, two tests were used. Both tests measured verb + noun English collocations for the reasons explained in Nizonkiza (2011b, 2012). The concerned population consists of students selected from the University of Burundi, exactly from the Department of English Language and Literature in their second year, referred to as Bac2 2012-2013 Academic Year. Results for the above aims show that Bac2 English majors at the University of Burundi still do not know collocations.

This finding confirms previous studies especially Nizonkiza et al.'s (2013) findings on ESL students. Scores from both tests indicate also that collocations where only a sentential context was provided were found to be more difficult than collocations where both sentential context and first two letters were provided.

This study also shows that collocations from more frequent word bands will be mastered better than those from infrequent ones. These findings confirm previous studies which concluded that frequency plays an important role in the sense that the more frequent words are the nes which are better known. 5Gyllstad, 2007, 2009 , Nation & Beglar, 2007 , Nizonkiza, 2011 a,2011b,2012). In this study, many errors are found at varying degrees, these findings support previous researchers who found out that collocations are difficult for L2 learners (Granger, 1998 ; Paquot, 2008, Nesselhauf, 2005).