This study aims to investigate Kuwaiti EFL learners’ ability to comprehend and produce grammatical collocations in English. It also examines whether their English proficiency level and the type of grammatical collocation influence their comprehension and production of such collocations. The results show that the difference in performance between the advanced learners and intermediate learners was enough to differ statistically on both comprehension and production tests. Furthermore, the most frequent types of errors that may occur as well as some possible reasons for their occurrence have been identified. Noun + preposition and adjective + preposition were the most problematic types in comparison with other types in both groups. It has been suggested that L1 interference plays a central role in the comprehension and production of grammatical collocations by Kuwaiti EFL learners. Particularly, literal translation from Arabic has been found to be the main reason for grammatical collocation errors. The prepositions in Arabic do not usually correspond to their English counterparts e.g., at in angry at, which is literally translated to *angry from in Arabic. Finally, lack of knowledge of grammatical collocations is also an important reason behind such errors. It might be suggested that English language curricula taught in Kuwait do not pay enough attention to grammatical collocations. The study concludes with some pedagogical implications that may help teachers of English as a second/foreign language increase the awareness of grammatical collocations.
Keywords: Collocations, Error Analysis, Kuwaiti EFL learners, Kuwaiti Spoken Arabic, L1 interference, SLA, grammatical collocations
