Difficulties in mastering and using English for specific purposes

In the last two decades there has been a growing awareness of the importance of acquisition of lexical collocations in learning a foreign language. Collocational competence is evident in using combination of words that appear together on the syntagmatic level and thereby enter into various semantic relations. By their collocational competence native speakers recognize collocation, while non-native users must learn them. It is not enough to acquire only the meaning of the word but also its collocational span. Collocation is a big problem for non-native users due to the influence of their mother tongue. This research deals with verb collocations in English language of medical profession, the most common mistakes, perceptions of students about the way they usually acquire collocations and whether the mistakes appear more frequently at receptive or productive level.