DEVELOPING EFL CREATIVE WRITING WITH THE HELP OF COLLOCATIONS AN ENGLISH NEWSPAPERS CORPUS PERSPECTIVE

Over the past few decades, there has been a considerable shift in learning English as a foreign language, from single lexical items to phraseology. Studies on collocations have recently come out as one of the core areas in EFL context. As a result, it is also one of the problematic areas for EFL learners. Mishandling of collocation obstruct the free use of the target language. EFL creative writing has always been a challenging task for the learners. Their creativity in the target language is often hampered due to dearth of inappropriate handling of lexical combinations. According to Cooze (2006), EFL learners commit a lot of errors like the misuse of vocabulary, lexical choices, translation, rules of grammar etc. Significant in this regard are the errors that result due to being unfamiliar with the lexical collocations that help in building creative writing of the EFL learners. The purpose of the undertaken study is to build up the creative writing of L2 learners through collocations, retrieved from English newspapers. In this regard, a corpus of Pakistani English has been compiled from the leading newspapers to retrieve various combinations of English collocations as the actual usage of words in a real setting can give us the exact description of collocated words. Such awareness into language learning is useful and provides information in a critical situation in language use for successful handing of materials for creative writing.