Lexical Collocations as a Building Block in Teaching ESP

The awareness of the importance of lexical collocations for vocabulary learning has increased over the last two decades. It is no longer enough to acquire the meaning of the word, but also its collocational span. Researches have shown that collocations usually represent a problem for non-native speakers because of the interference from their mother tongue. Therefore, emphasis needs to be put on developing collocational competence. The aim of this paper is to investigate the level of collocational competence of non-native users of Business English. First-year students at the University of Split, Faculty of Economics were given a gap fill exercise to assess their collocational competence. The purpose of the study is to clarify the aspects of lexical collocations that require a special approach in teaching business language.