Jordanian EFL Students Use of English Color Terms in Collocations

Abstract

The present study addresses a significant but neglected aspect of vocabulary teaching in general and teaching collocations, in particular, which is color term collocations. A significant number of idioms involve use color terms such as blue blood, black death, red tape, black sheep, and yellow press that are significant to study in the context of foreign language teaching. This study dealt with teaching color term collocations that are essence of language teaching/learning and translation. A multiple-choice test was used as the main instrument of this study. The sample of the study consisted of 94 Jordanian EFL students. Results obtained from the study showed that students’ performance in the test was weak. Moreover, the statements that had the black color terms were the most successfully addressed ones while the least correctly tackled ones were those related to the yellow color term. The data also showed that neither the students' gender nor their academic degree level had significantly affected their performance in the test. The study also revealed that the teaching of this component of vocabulary teaching was much neglected, which could be due to students’ insufficient knowledge regarding this respect in learning English as a foreign language.