A Thesis submitted in partial Fulfillment of the requirements for the award of the degree : " Licence en Langue et Littérature Anglaises"

RESERVE,

The present study atempted to measure controlled productive Knowledge of adjective-noun collocations among English majors at higher education.It first aimed at investigating the extent to which English majors at eduation.It first aimed at investigating the extent to which English majors at the University of Burundi master productive knowldge of adjective-noun collocations.Secondary,it aimed at testing whether or not the perfomance on adjective -noun collocations varies across class level.Thirdly,it aimed at examinine the role of word frenquency in mastering adjective -noun collocations .Fourthly,it aimed at investorying in mastering adjective-noun collocations.Fourthly,it aimed at inventorying the adjective-noun collocation errors made by English majors.Fifthly and lastly,it aimed at identifying the causes of adjective-noun collocation errors made by English majors at the University of Burundi.These aims were achieved by administering a test of adjective-noun collocation to two different classes (BAC2&BAC3 students) from the University of Burundi at not master adjective-noun collocations.This finding supports Irankeje's (2015) study on English majors and confirms other previous studies especially Nizonkiza et (2013) study can ESL students which point to poor perfomance on collocations amongboth EFL and ESL students en collocations (see also ganger.1998;Nesselhauf,2005,paquot,2008).This study extends this finding to a different type of collocation,adjective-noun collocation.Moreover,scores from both classes in this study show that BAC3 students outperform BAC2 students on adjectif-noun collocations,which confirms previous findings that collocations could predict overall proficiency (Nizonkiza,2011a,2011b,2012;Nizonkiza,2011a,2011b,2012;Nizonkiza& van de poel,2014),results of this study also show that collocations from more frequent word bands will be mastered better than those from infrequent ones (except at AWL in this work) with more errors occurring at more infrequent word bands,which confirms the role of words frequency in their mastery (Nation,2006).Furthermore,results show that the major causes of adjective-noun collocation errors made by English majors are caused by overgeneralization,french interference,Kirundi interference,invented non-English words and spelling mistakes.
Based on the results from this study,recommendations aimed to improve the teaching of English in Burundi are discussed;especially incorporating collocations in the syllabus seems to be warranted.