Collocational Differences Between L1 and L2: Implications for EFL Learners and Teachers‪.‬

Introduction It has long been established that differences in the structures of first and second languages may produce interference problems for L2 learners, and the similarities between them will probably (but not always) contribute to facilitation of learning (Corder, 1981). Following World War II, when it was believed that the best teaching materials for foreign languages should draw on a careful comparison of a "scientific description of the language to be learned" with "a parallel description of the native language of the learner" (Fries, 1945, p. 9), and when the discipline of contrastive analysis "was considered as the panacea for language teaching problems" (Keshavarz, 1999, p. 1), many studies were conducted to investigate the differences between a native language and a target language, which was usually English (Yarmohammadi, 1965; Oller & Ziahosseiny, 1970; Buteau, 1970).